Citi may still have circa 15,000 jobs to trim but the flow is not entirely unidirectional. The bank may be cutting non-revenue generators, but it’s still hiring traders.
In the US, Citi’s latest trading hire comes from hedge fund Brevan Howard. Yun Zhou, a former macro portfolio manager at Brevan Howard has reappeared as Citi as New York-based MD in rates options trading.
Zhou wasn’t at Brevan for long. He joined in October 2022 and left again in May 2024. It’s not clear whether he was a victim of Brevan Howard’s recent job cuts, which mostly affected the macro systematic team and Brevan’s own support staff.
Before Brevan Howard, Zhou spent 14 years at Morgan Stanley, where he was latterly head of the rates gamma desk in New York.
Zhou’s return to banking from a hedge fund comes as some of those who’ve left for multistrategy funds in recent years have a change of heart. Barclays recently rehired Ben Hutson, one of its own traders who’d left for hedge fund Garda Capital Partners. In some cases, headhunters say single manager hedge funds are now seen as preferable employers to multistrategy funds.
Citi declined to comment on Zhou’s return. It’s understood that he’s the second recent fund hire into the US rates team.
Citi has also been adding to its London European Government Bond trading team, adding Michele Beretta from Deutsche Bank and Fiachra Harnett, Morgan Stanley’s head of Sovereigns, Supranationals and Agencies (SSA) trading in London.
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