Christoph Hock joined Union Investment in April 2014 with over 20 years of experience and wasted no time in changing the culture of the trading desk.
His aim was to integrate the German asset manager’s trading teams under one multi-asset desk and get the trading desk and portfolio managers working closer together.
Hock said that by combining the equities and derivatives desk with the fixed income and FX teams, the consolidated multi-asset trading desk would enable Union to “stay ahead in today’s constantly evolving trading world”.
He described it as “‘One team, one dream” noting that, regardless of whether you are on the buy- or sell-side it is an extremely difficult task to bring those two segments together.
He added: “This was one of my first initiatives to make sure these two units worked in unison as we moved forward.”
Hock used his two decades of industry experience to full effect. His journey began in the early nineties where he focused solely on cash equities trading at Dresdner Kleinwort Benson.
From there he landed the role of head of European basket trading at JP Morgan, before running the proprietary equity derivatives trading desk in January 2002.
After seven years at JP Morgan, Hock moved into the world of hedge funds, remaining there between 2004 and 2010, before joining Barclays’ Frankfurt branch as director and head of equity execution sales.
In April 2014, he joined German fund firm, Union Investment to run the equity and derivatives trading desk. Union has a total of €224 billion assets under management and has over four million clients.
At the end of 2015, Hock won the ‘Trader of the Year, Long-only’ award at the Leaders In Trading awards.