Millennium strikes again, poaching a star equities trader from JPMorgan amid feverish demand for volatility strategies

• Millennium has poached another star volatility trader from the sell side.
• Borzu Masoudi, head of macro equity volatility at JPMorgan, resigned to join the hedge fund, sources told Insider.
• Buy-side demand for volatility traders has been intense, but JPMorgan had seen fewer defections than peers.

Millennium has struck again, raiding another sell-side desk to acquire a new portfolio manager for its growing volatility-trading business.

The target this time was JPMorgan, one of the industry’s best derivatives trading outfits and a firm that until recently had been shielded from the buy-side poaching war that afflicted rivals.

Borzu Masoudi, head of equity macro derivatives at JPMorgan, has resigned to join Millennium, according to sources familiar with the matter.

A Millennium spokesman declined to comment. A spokeswoman for JPMorgan also declined to comment.

Masoudi joined JPMorgan three years ago from Goldman Sachs, where he was a key trader on a team that reaped $200 million from “Volmageddon,” when the VIX suddenly spiked to record levels in February 2018.

Masoudi was promoted to managing director last summer, on the heels of stellar performance from JPMorgan’s equity-derivatives franchise. Before the end of March 2020, as the Covid-19 outbreak roiled markets, the firm had produced $1.5 billion in equity derivatives revenues — around what the entire equities unit produced in the first quarter a year earlier, Bloomberg reported.

The flow volatility team — which trades products like the VIX and derivatives linked to ETFs — brought in $700 million in the first half of 2020, almost triple its performance for all of 2019.

For most of this year JPMorgan had largely avoided the senior defections that afflicted some of its peers. Spencer Cross left this spring to run US index volatility at Bank of America, and more recently the firm parted ways with Ishan Malik, an ED who traded the VIX.

Bank volatility desks raked in hordes of cash industry wide amid the market shocks from the pandemic, and that has contributed to a frenzied hiring market in 2021 as hedge funds fight over the top performers.

Millennium previously hired Benjamin Texier from Citigroup and Michael Hosana from Barclays.

Millennium started ramping up its equity volatility presence four years ago — around the time Pete Santoro and Bobby Jain, two derivatives veterans, joined senior management — amid a broader diversification effort, and it’s become a core strategy within its equity arbitrage group, according to sources familiar with the matter. Izzy Englander’s $49 billion fund grew to 265 investment teams in 2020 — the most in its history — amid a flurry of new hires.

This story is developing.