Citadel's most senior equities recruiter in London left, but it's ok
If you work in Citadel's London equities team, you will know Drew Gillanders. You will also know Eleanor Sharkey. Sharkey, who has been Citadel's head of business development for international equities since 2022, probably hired you. She will not be hiring anyone else to Citadel's equities team. She has quit.
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Citadel isn't commenting on Sharkey's whereabouts and nor is Sharkey herself. It's thought that she might soon reappear at a rival fund. Sharkey has been replaced by Freya Maynard, a former Morgan Stanley prime brokerage associate who joined Citadel in 2023.
As we have reported previously, business developers in hedge funds are a big deal. They are not standard recruiters, but recruiters charged with managing the flow of portfolio managers who deploy a fund's capital. They must therefore be cognisant both of the portfolio manager talent available the market and of the firm's appetite to deploy capital to different strategies.
Sharkey is not the only recent departure from Citadel's business developer rack. Business Insider reported in November that Laura Sterner also left as head of business development in the global equities business. Sterner only worked at the fund for two months and joined to replace Alex Topkins, the head of business development for global equities, who left in April and reappeared at Soros.
Citadel has also made business development hires. Five new external recruits joined in US fundamental equities in the past two months. Sapna Vir joins from Verition as head of business development for global credit and convertibles, starting in December.
It's post bonus season in hedge funds. Coupled with a difficult March, this is expected to result in high levels of portfolio manager exits, making business developers across the market more important than ever.
People who left Citadel in 2024 and are coming off non-competes are surfacing elsewhere. Burak Guner, a quant partner has gone to Millennium. Christopher Panek, the head of volatility at Citadel global quantitative strategies, is trying his luck at Two Sigma.
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