New York-based credit and equity asset manager BlueMountain Capital Management has hired Scott Lessing as head of corporate research and Derek Smith as a senior portfolio manager.
New York-based credit and equity asset manager BlueMountain Capital Management has hired Scott Lessing as head of corporate research and Derek Smith as a senior portfolio manager. Lessing will take responsibility for company-specific and strategic market research across the firm, while Smith will focus on fundamental trading strategies.
‘Fundamental research has always been a cornerstone of our investment approach,’ says Andrew Feldstein, BlueMountain’s chief executive and chief investment officer.
‘Scott has proven throughout his career that he has the strategic vision and business acumen to drive our research to an even higher level of integration and impact across the entire organisation. Derek is someone I’ve known and respected for many years. The experience, intellect, and integrity that he brings to BlueMountain will deliver outstanding returns to our investors.’
Lessing was most recently chief operating officer of Citi Global Wealth Management Investments, the alternative investments, investment advisory products, mutual funds, annuities and insurance unit of Citi’s wealth management division, having previously been chief operating officer for Citi’s equity and corporate bond research division.
Earlier he spent nearly a decade at McKinsey, becoming a principal and a co-leader of the North American wholesale financial institutions group. While at McKinsey, Lessing worked with several members of the current BlueMountain management team, including president and co-founder Stephen Siderow, chief operating officer Samuel Cole, chief financial officer David Rubenstein and head of global business development Noam Leslau. He began his career at the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell.
Smith joins BlueMountain from Deutsche Bank, where he was a managing director for global credit trading, managing the investment grade and high-yield credit cash and derivatives desks in the US and Europe.
He previously spent 15 years at Goldman Sachs working in various aspects of the fixed income, derivatives and credit markets. As a managing director, Derek managed the US government options desk as well as the investment grade credit cash and derivative desks, and worked with Alan Gerstein and Bryce Markus, now two of BlueMountain’s senior portfolio managers.
BlueMountain has more than USD5bn in assets under management in its hedge funds, and manages three collaterised loan obligations and one collateralised synthetic obligation with an additional USD1.4bn in assets. BlueMountain recently sold a minority equity interest to the publicly-traded Affiliated Managers Group.
BlueMountain specialises in relative value strategies in the corporate loan, bond, credit and equity derivatives markets and offers a diverse range of products that draw on its credit and equity derivatives expertise including correlation, intra-credit, inter-credit, index arbitrage, credit/equity and equity volatility strategies.
The firm identifies investment strategies using a combination of fundamental research and quantitative and technical analysis. Led by its founders, chief executive Andrew Feldstein and Siderow, BlueMountain has a team of more than 100 professionals and has offices in New York City and London.
