Weinstein's Saba Capital bulks up hedge fund talent with hire from Millennium

By Svea Herbst-Bayliss

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Hedge fund manager Boaz Weinstein, best known for his winning bet against the JPMorgan Chase trader known as the London Whale, is hiring two senior partners as his firm, Saba Capital Management, plans to expand into quantitative credit trading.

New York-based Saba, which invests $6 billion on behalf of clients and has been trying to shake up the closed-end fund industry, will reunite with Jeremy Benkiewicz, a co-founder of the firm, early next year, people familiar with the matter said on Monday. Saba is also making Kieran Goodwin, who has been advising the firm, a partner to lead Saba's move into quantitative credit trading, said the people, who are prohibited from discussing personnel decisions publicly.

Benkiewicz will rejoin the firm in February. He had worked with Weinstein for nearly two decades at Deutsche Bank and at Saba and is an expert in credit trading, cross-asset relative value and convertible arbitrage trading.

Benkiewicz worked most recently as a portfolio manager at hedge fund Millennium Management for five years. Neither he nor Millennium responded immediately to requests for comment.

Goodwin previously worked at King Street where he was a partner, a member of the investment committee and was the head of trading. He could not be reached for comment.

Later this year Saba will launch a predominantly systematic trading strategy called Saba LT that aims to identify credit dislocations and seeks to gain a foothold in the accelerating electronification of corporate bond trading.

To lay the groundwork for the expansion, Saba previously hired quant traders Robert Rappleye and David Buckman from hedge fund Jane Street. They are both partners at Saba.

Competition among hedge funds for talent is fierce with top portfolio managers and traders commanding eye-popping pay packages as firms try to woo more pension funds, endowments and other investors with promises of capturing some of the market's upside but ensuring smaller losses on the way down.

Weinstein, who won a stock picking contest in high school by beating out thousands of other students, most recently waged a battle to shake up the UK investment trust industry to push for better returns and has reached agreements with a handful of closed-end funds.

In 2012, Weinstein gained fame for spotting unusual trading patterns in the credit market by a JPMorgan trader called the London Whale that saddled the bank with some $6 billion in losses.

(Editing by Leslie Adler)