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We were able to hire on both
the equity and fixed income
sides, which gave me the
opportunity to diversify my
desk in terms of both a gender
and skill set perspective. We
were able to bring in people
with skills that we didn’t have
here before.
Bringing new talent to the desk has also created
opportunities for RLAM and its trading processes.
Gibson details how one new hire with significant ex-
perience of equity algo trading has been handed a re-
mit to assess the firm’s options in algorithmic trading
and what is available in the market, while another hire
came from a firm which had a high level of segregation
between high- and low-touch trading.
“Using her background and expertise we were able
to introduce low-touch trading to RLAM for the first
time ever,” she says. “We are still at the conservative
stage, it has been tried and tested, and we will roll this
out across all asset types.”
Segregating job roles was also one of the biggest
tasks facing Gibson in the creation of RLAM’s new-
look desk, particularly when trying to foster a culture
of valuing individual skills and ownership of each role
within the team, something that can be a challenge in
what she describes as a “very flat structure”.
That segregation primarily refers to the roles of the
traders and portfolio managers, which Gibson points
out was already in effect before she joined the firm,
but was still a relatively new feature and one that had
not been rolled out across asset classes. Gibson says
that this has now been extended across the desk’s
multiple asset operations and that although one would
expect there to be “bumps in the road”, RLAM en-
countered very few of these obstacles: “That is really
a testament to the traders, but also to the portfolio
managers in their ability to trust
their trades with the people on the
desk,” she says.
Changing relationships
The relationships between buy-
side traders and portfolio manag-
ers has been a shifting dynamic
through increasing use of technolo-
gies on trading desks and changing
market structures, and RLAM is
no different from any of its peers
in this respect. Gibson believes her
own traders and portfolio manag-
ers are particularly close on the
high-touch channels – although
there is of course dialogue for
less liquid-type assets – however,
she sees the low-touch side as the
opposite.
“I actually see there probably
being more and more distance be-
tween the portfolio managers and
cash flow management, small trade
allocations and small futures,” she
explains. “ I see portfolio managers
being very separated from that,
mainly because they don’t need
to be close to it and, ultimately, I
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