Alphabet Hires Scott Saiers of UBS for Head Trader Position
Alphabet Management LLC, the New York-based hedge fund that uses options to bet on the volatility of stocks and other assets, hired Scott Saiers as head trader.
Saiers, who is the younger brother of Alphabet Chief Investment Officer Nelson Saiers, was previously employed by UBS AG (UBSN) as a managing director, heading the U.S. equity linked trading desk. Prior to that he spent five years on the Zurich- based firm’s equity proprietary desk and worked as a market maker on its derivatives desk. The 34-year-old trader received his bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Virginia before joining the North American operations of UBS, where he worked for 11 years.
“He’ll be the main guy to oversee the execution of my strategy,” Nelson Saiers, who joined Alphabet from Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) in July 2010, said in a phone interview yesterday. “Because all traders report to me now, it was imperative to have a right-hand man with strong managerial skills and who had traded different assets.”
Christiaan Brakman, a spokesman for UBS in New York, declined to comment.
Alphabet, which has $650 million under management and 32 employees, gained 2.6 percent last year amid record stock market price swings, according to a letter to investors obtained by Bloomberg News, compared with an average loss of 8.3 percent for equity hedge funds, according to Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research Inc. The firm returned 4 percent in January when hedge funds added 3.8 percent.
Cuts at UBS
UBS has cut jobs as stricter capital requirements and Europe’s sovereign debt crisis hurt revenue. Switzerland’s biggest lender told investors in November that it’s evaluating options for the proprietary stock-trading business as it scales back on risk-taking. It may move those operations to its asset- management division, Chief Financial Officer Tom Naratil said earlier this month. In the U.S., the so-called Volcker Rule is set to ban banks from engaging in proprietary trading.
Alphabet, which was started by Jason Adler in October 2007 with $11 million, uses derivatives including exchange-traded options to bet that volatility levels for stocks and other assets worldwide are too high or low in relation to each other.
To contact the reporters on this story: Nikolaj Gammeltoft in New York at ngammeltoft@bloomberg.net; Jeff Kearns in New York at jkearns3@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Nick Baker at nbaker7@bloomberg.net
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