Amaranth Not The Only One Getting Screwed By Amaranth

Author:
Bess Levin
Updated:
Jan 14, 2019
Original:
Feb 7, 2007

While Citadel and JP Morgan may have benefited greatly from their cannibalization of that "multi-strategy" hedge fund up in Greenwich, some others aren’t fairing so well. Ivy Asset Management, having lost a report $1 billion in redemptions as a result of its Amaranth investments, will not be giving out any bonuses this year.
The absconded cash, pony rides and gumball machines, in conjunction with an exec-level shake-up (former CIO Adam Geiger left in December, replaced by Peter Noris, of Northstar Financial Services) and a difficulties raising assets have purportedly encouraged some employees to look for jobs at other funds, a source told HFMWeek. We hear Tom Hudson is currently looking for some new deck-swabbers and plant-waterers.

Ivy employees lose out on bonuses [HFMWeek reg required]

Are your pants getting a little tight? Have you become convinced mirrors have a personal vendetta against you? Are you too distracted by the rolls spilling over your pants to trade? Do you find yourself veering off course in your letters to investors to talk about your love handles? Is it only a matter of time before you lose your firm billions and/or take down the entire market because your fingers are so big they span four keys each on the keyboard? Do you want to do something about it but are repulsed by the idea of healthy eating and exercise and also know yourself well enough to realize that there is no way you're going to be able to stay strong if everyone around you is eating delicious fried food at lunch and sooner or later you, a usually pretty mild-mannered guy, will be leaping across a row of Bloomberg terminals and threatening to kill a coworker (and meaning it) unless he hands over Ho Ho now? Then round up your tubbiest colleagues and tell them they're in for a real treat. Eric Helms, who founded the four-year-old Cooler Cleanse company with the actress Salma Hayek, says office cleansers now make up 30 percent of his business, and in the last year he has hired three customer-service employees just to handle the details of them. He said there has been a “huge increase in popularity” of cleansing with co-workers in the last year, which he credits to juice diets being more mainstream. “Everyone knows someone who’s done one, and they realize they’re a lot easier to do with colleagues during the workweek,” he said. “People want to indulge” — not sip celery — “on weekends.” Recent six-juice-a-day-dieters include employees at Merrill Lynch and the Carlyle Group, she said. In May, Citigroup began offering BluePrintCleanse in some of its Manhattan cafeterias, a spokeswoman said...About two-thirds of cleanse clients over all are women, but corporate cleanses “commonly skew toward men, especially traders, investment bankers and lawyers,” said Jina Wye, director of sales and marketing for BluePrintCleanse, founded in 2007 by two former Hudson Hotel bartenders looking to swap their poisons. (Mr. Helms said 90 percent of his male customers are part of groups.) Ms. Wye said: “These Type-A men have an all-or-none perspective. If they’re going to commit, they do it whole hog.” Most popular among male en masse cleansers: the Excavation cleanse, described on the Web site as “the most intense.” And if you want to really crank things up a notch, consider gauging interest in a group colonic to top things off. Cleansing From Cubicle To Cubicle [NYT] Related: I’m afraid I might tell her to buy a gun and just shoot me before the fat and the cellulite strike again.

Amaranth

News

Back in October, a former Citadel employee, Yihao “Ben” Pu, was arrested and charged with "stealing trade secrets" from Ken Griffin (by "copying company data onto a removable storage device," and then attempting to sell it to Teza Technologies AKA the firm a bunch of ex-Citadel guys tried to join in 2009 before being sued for doing so by Griffin, as well as the the shop a former Goldman programmer, Sergey Aleynikov, went to jail for after giving it proprietary GS code). Now, because apparently people just can't help themselves, KG has been forced to levy another allegation of theft against some former employees who he believes took a piece of his property when they left for high-frequency trading firm Jump Trading. Does Griffin have actual evidence that they swindled him? No, not exactly. But he's got a hunch, and that hunch is based on the fact that since 2005, when people from Citadel's "tactical trading group" started leaving for Jump, "some of the strategies" employed by the TTG "have become less profitable" and are "behaving in a way consistent with their having been copied by rivals." So what KG would like a court to do is force Jump to turn over "personnel documents, strategy and trading records, and source code," which will prove him right and the Citadel defectors to be the plunderers he knows they are. Evidence in hand, Griffin will then sue Jump and everyone named Ken Griffin will go home happy. The only issue that needs to be worked out is Jump Trading's cooperation, which so far is proving difficult to obtain. In fact, the firm is being downright unhelpful and not only that? Its legal team has accused Griffy-boy of being the thief, or at least trying to be. That's right: the way JT sees it, Citadel's new profitable algorithm development system is a two-step process that goes something like this: Step 1: Steal successful algorithms from rival firm. Step 2: Use them. In its response filing, Jump said that Citadel had no evidence that the algorithms had become less profitable because of any of Jump's actions. It said that any of the hundreds of other algorithmic trading firms could be at fault. "The petition is nothing more than a transparent attempt by Citadel to obtain a competitive advantage by gaining access to Jump's proprietary and confidential trading strategies," Jump's motion said. Your move, KG. Citadel Accuses Jump Employees Of Stealing Secrets [Reuters]

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Let's Get One Thing Straight: Ken Griffin Only Accuses People Of Attempting to Gain A Competitive Advantage By Gaining Access To Proprietary Trading Strategies-- He Does Not Get Accused!