Over the summer, The TRADE has been gathering nominations to compile a list of the 40 individuals under the age of 40 that are most likely to enjoy notable career advancement in the coming years.
The list of 40 was drawn up following extensive market research with industry leaders on the sell-side and buy-side and verified with interviews with employers and individuals to evaluate their credentials.
To qualify for consideration, individuals had to be aged under 40 years of age as at 31 December 2015 and be working in a trading function at an asset manager, wealth manager, stockbroker, technology group, or life company.
Consideration was given to each individual’s day-to-day role in the business, career progression to date and involvement in industry initiatives.
Further credit was awarded for commendable extra-curricular activities such as examples of volunteer or mentoring work or for academic success in a professional examination scheme.
All those who made the list must be based in Europe, although they can trade assets globally.
After a lengthy judging process, our panel considered the following 40 people to be worthy of recognition.
Name: Daniel
Hughes
Job title: Dealing
and Trade Support manager
Company: Ascentric
Royal London-owned Ascentric appointed dealing manager Daniel Hughes from KCG at the start of the year at a time when it was embarking on a campaign centred on best execution.
Hughes has gathered a vast amount of experience during his career to date, having worked at an array of culturally different organisations.
Prior to joining Ascentric, he had been at Knight Equity Markets (now KCG), for a little under three and a half years, working as director of European Equity Trading. Before that he spent three years at Louis Capital Markets as an equity trader.
Between 2001 and 2004, he worked at ING Financial Markets, with responsibility of risk facilitation and trading in French, Italian and Dutch convertible bonds and as manager of UK and European equity trading before that.
Hughes has been keen to pass on his experience to the next generation of traders, having trained junior staff at Ascentric through facilitating greater links with the Royal London group.
Name: Michel
Vannier
Job title: Equities
Trader
Company: Allianz
Global Investors
Multi-lingual Michel Vannier has been with Allianz Global Investors for around eight years, joining from Axa Investment Managers in 2007.
He was originally based in the Paris office, where he spent five years as a multi-asset dealer, handling equities, bonds, forex and derivatives trades.
During his time in Paris he spent four months working in Germany to assist with the migration of the equities dealing desk before permanently making the switch to Frankfurt in March 2013.
Having left Université Paris Dauphine in 1998, he joined BNP Paribas as an accounts manager reporting on daily settlements of French equities and bonds. After two and half years he joined the trading team, trading equities and derivatives before leaving to joining Axa Investment Managers in 2006.
Vannier speaks French, German and English.
Name: Jean
Sayegh
Job title: Director
and senior portfolio manager
Company: Lyxor
Asset Management
Jean Sayegh has spent almost a decade at Lyxor Asset Management and heads up the team managing EUR10 billion worth of liquidity buffers.
Sayegh’s clients at Lyxor include mainly large banks from France, along with some other smaller banks in Europe and more recently gained his first customer from England.
Managing liquidity buffers for these banks, Sayegh – who speaks four languages - uses a range of derivatives instruments including interest rate swaps and futures contracts.
Sayegh’s role sees him operate as a fund manager but also as a trader, and says his clients use him for more than just trading.
“Our clients talk to us for our views, both classic economic views and our take on regulatory issues,” he says.
“Smaller banks will use us because they don’t have the internal team to manage liquidity buffers.”
Sayegh began his career at Societe Generale Asset Management as a money market portfolio manager for almost four years, where he gained valuable experience on the firm’s trading desk.
In February 2006 he moved to Lyxor as an equity and fixed income portfolio manager, overseeing physically replicated equity and fixed income index funds and ETFs.
Now as a senior portfolio manager Sayegh uses active smart beta technics and is the principal portfolio manager of Liability Driven Investments portfolio managed by Lyxor.
Name: Kristian
West
Job title: Global
head of equity trading
Company: JP
Morgan Asset Management
Some of the rising stars on this year’s list have already achieved what others will aspire to in the entirety of their careers.
JP Morgan Asset Management’s Kristian West is a well-known figure on The Street and at 39 years of age he is one of the youngest global heads at a major asset management group.
He started his career in 1999 at trading business Spear, Leeds & Kellogg which was acquired a year later by Goldman Sachs. From there he moved to Barclays Capital in 2004 before joining JP Morgan AM as head of EMEA equities in 2008.
Despite his modest persona, West has become an increasingly important figure within JP Morgan AM.
The past 18 months has seen him overseeing one of the most ambitious projects in the company’s recent history, to bring a global operating model to trading across the asset manager.
With regional differences in operational behaviour, West has built a strong team of experts in Asia, the US and Europe to ensure the new globalisation drive is a success. This has also been key to building the company’s new bespoke Order Management System.
His work has not gone unnoticed and subsequently led to Kristian being one of the most heavily nominated in this year’s scheme.
Name: Tim
Meggs
Job title: Head
of trading
Company: Fulcrum
Asset Management
His team handles the trading flow for Fulcrum’s strategies and focuses on crunching execution data to improve performance.
At Fulcrum, Meggs also acts as a strategy manager for the multi-asset volatility fund; this involves strategy implementation and evolution along with quantitative research.
The strategy is systematic, and therefore doesn’t require the traditional portfolio manager role, however Meggs’ role is to oversee and assume responsibility for the strategy.
Armed with years of derivatives and quantitative trading experience, Meggs also has a Certificate in Quantitative Finance to go with his Master of Philosophy degree from the University of Oxford.
Meggs has leaned on his years of experience in derivatives trading which tracks back to 2004, where he was an equity exotics derivatives trader at CIBC World Markets.
From there he became an executive director, yet still involved in quantitative cross-asset derivatives trading. His duties shifted to trading and positioning a large cross-asset exotic options book at the investment bank. He also focused on a range of derivatives, trading equities, commodities, rates and FX.