Hedge fund Balyasny hired Credit Suisse's ex-head of APAC ECM syndicate, but now he's gone
Hedge fund Balyasny Asset Management (BAM) spends a lot of money hiring people. Financial News puts its hiring budget at $350m-$500m a year. BAM may not have spent much hiring Adrian Lee from Credit Suisse in 2024, though, which is just as well as Lee has now moved on.
Lee, who didn't respond to a request to comment for this article, has left BAM for Hudson Bay Capital Management according to his LinkedIn profile. Lee was head of Asia equity capital markets (ECM) at Balyasny and he'll be doing the same thing at Hudson Bay.
Lee was only at BAM two years. His Credit Suisse career was marked by greater longevity and endured for 11 years, at the end of which he was the co-head of APAC ECM syndicate. He left there in 2023 and was elevated to BAM's big job one year later.
Why did he leave again so soon? Neither BAM nor Lee responded to a request to comment. BAM is often gentler than other funds when it comes to risk limits so it may have been a gentle exit.
Lee will be based at Hudson Bay in Hong Kong. Bloomberg reported last year that the $20bn fund was expanding in the city and had hired various people from Segantii, including Jack Truong to lead business development. Lee appears to be one of Truong's first major hires in the region.
ECM professionals in hedge funds invest in IPOs and in follow-on deals and then attempt to make money by selling-on the stock that comes their way. The business can be challenging as hedge funds are often perceived as undesirable early investors and banks don't always want to sell to them. It can also be controversial: two years ago, Morgan Stanley's equity syndicate desk paid a $249m fine following claims that its head of ECM syndicate was offering preferential block trades to a hedge fund. That head of ECM syndicate at Morgan Stanley was subsequently vindicated of wrongdoing and won a court case for his $5.4m deferred bonus.
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