2020-11-18 By Bei Hu
Bloomberg
Mark Drabkin will join by the end of this year to lead a new Asia credit team that seeks to profit from broad economic trends, according to an internal memo seen by Bloomberg News.
Shyam Parameswaran will start in coming months as a foreign exchange portfolio manager, according the memo, whose contents were confirmed by Chief Operating Officer Matthew Cannon.
Modular was spun out of Millennium in January and focuses on Asian fixed-income and currency markets. Chief Investment Officer Jimmy Lim worked at Bluecrest Capital Management and JPMorgan Chase & Co. before joining Millennium.
The new hires will boost the firm’s portfolio managers to 11, in addition to Lim. The majority are country specialists who trade across asset classes, tapping into market dynamics specific to their geographies. There are also asset class specialists like Drabkin and Parameswaran. Cannon declined to comment on the performance of its hedge fund, which targets stable returns with low volatility.
Modular’s fund has stopped taking in new money and may re-open next year, as it builds up the capacity to manage more capital.
Drabkin spent more than two decades running credit-trading teams at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in Tokyo, Hong Kong and New York, according to the memo. Earlier this year he left hedge fund BFAM Partners (Hong Kong), and before that worked at HPS Investment Partners.
Parameswaran has invested in currencies for 17 years, and most recently specialized in emerging-markets macro trading at Barclays Plc. in Singapore. He earlier headed emerging-market trading for Asia Pacific outside Greater China at HSBC Holdings Plc.
Modular last month recruited Wai Ho Leong from Adam Levinson’s Graticule Asset Management as a managing director on its research team, according to the memo.