Outsourced trading solutions firm, Tourmaline Partners, has hired three new seasoned financial markets executives as managing directors to help strengthen its global trading capabilities, The TRADE can reveal.
With the additions of Simon Bradley, James Williams and James Kirk the firm is set to continue its expansion across Europe. The three incoming professionals are London-based and hold long track records of success and leadership across global equities trading.
Speaking to The TRADE, Aaron Hantman, chief executive and partner at Tourmaline, said: “All three hires are meeting a growing demand in Europe in general. It could be said that Europe was slow to adopt our version of supplemental trading. Today, that’s not the case. It’s built up a lot of momentum in the last three years which we think will continue.
“The focus is on growing the team in a well-suited manner to maintain the delivery service and quality that we want as a firm.”
Bradley will be responsible for building out Tourmaline’s equity derivatives franchise across Europe, The TRADE understands, and is set to leverage his wealth of derivates expertise gleaned over 30 years in the market as part of this new role. He will specifically focus on value-added idea generation, price discovery, and trade execution.
Bradley was most recently a partner at Mariana Capital and prior to that was head of CSC equity options at GFI Group. He has also previously held positions at Citi, Fimat, and MF Global (as Europe head of equity derivatives).
Hantman told The TRADE: “Simon brings deep listed derivatives trading expertise into Europe, which is a product that we have not focused on so far, however we’ve seen more demand in that space across clients that are trading in the region and we think it’s time to offer that on our platform. Simon has both the experience and the expertise in this product class.”
Bradley joins two other recently announced appointments: James Kirk, formerly co-head of trading (EMEA) at Liquidnet and James Williams, formerly an institutional sales trader at BTIG.
In his new role, Williams will be responsible for covering clients on global cash equities execution, building on his two decades of experience in the area. Hantman highlighted Williams’ expertise in institutional equity sales trading specifically, asserting that this knowledge “will be critical to growing Tourmaline’s global trading capabilities.”
Most recently, Williams spent 14 years as an institutional European equity sales trader at BTIG, working across Europe and the US for various hedge funds and institutions. He has also previously worked for Goldman Sachs.
In July, The TRADE reported that James Kirk had joined the business as managing director, following an eight-year stint at Liquidnet, most recently as co-head of EMEA trading.
Read more – Liquidnet’s co-head of EMEA trading departs
At the time his departure was announced, Kirk said that he was hugely motivated to move onto this new challenge.
Speaking to The TRADE, Hantman said: “We’ve always been impressed by James and felt like he would be extremely additive to our team, specifically in an equity position which is traditional for us. He’s an excellent addition to our experienced team […] someone who knows the client base that’s trading within Europe and what their needs are.”
Kirk is set to oversee and enhance Tourmaline’s services in support of asset managers globally as part of his new role, leveraging his experience running programme and electronic/high-touch hybrid trading desks. Prior to this move, he worked in various execution specialist roles at ConvergEx Group and BTIG.
Tourmaline has around 350 institutional clients, which includes hedge funds and asset managers of all sizes and provides tailor-made trading solutions and best-execution expertise.
“I think what’s very unique about Tourmaline is that we pioneered this version of supplemental trading where we’re working with clients that do have traders. Sometimes it’s a single trader, other times it can be a whole team of global sophisticated traders as well and today the business is pretty evenly split in those type of solutions,” said Hantman.