Brevan Howard is moving people to Geneva. We know this because the hedge fund’s recently filed annual return revealed a longish list of Swiss émigrés, while the number of registered employees working for Brevan Howard in London is forever dwindling.
The latest Geneva migrant is David Ellis, a youthful Brevan hire from 2011.
Ellis is notable for having attended Imperial College. Imperial is the alma mater of Brevan Howard founder Alan Howard and the school from which the fund derives most of its graduate hires. He’s also notable for having spent seven years working in London as a self-employed maths tutor.
Ellis’s tutoring was seemingly to help pay his way through his maths PhD at Imperial. So-called ‘super tutors’ in London can earn hundreds of pounds an hour. Quantitative traders at Brevan Howard can earn more. In the year ending March 2013 (the latest for which figures are available), London-based partners at Brevan Howard earned an average of £1.3m each. Ellis isn’t a partner yet, but the fact that the fund has been willing to move him to Geneva, in what is proving to be a very difficult year, suggests he may yet become a Brevan partner in future.
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