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speaking to a counterparty and taking them short $ 5 millionworth of risk , and then calling another counterparty because you know they ’ ll short you the same security , and then doing that again and again , and everyone is trying to cover the same stock – you ’ ll get a pretty bad reputation quite quickly in terms of how you engage with risk provision and balance sheet . It goes back to partnerships . If someone has shown you something , or you ’ ve sold them some risk , allow them to get out of that . Understand the market . I learned very quickly how to get a good feel for how our traders did good business , and that is something that has continued throughout my career .”
Poole started off by helping his fund managers set up program trades and found those discussions with the PMs notably helpful in terms of understanding portfolio construction : “ What it is fund managers look at , why they look at it , what they expect from us , and how we can deliver it in terms of value .”
Jupiter also used to have quite a significant private client business , and Poole did much of the trading for that , ranging from very large stocks to AIM-listed micro caps , which was a good way to learn the ropes of pre-Mifid 1 market structure .
“ Liquidity was probably more abundant , but in those spaces you really had to understand who was doing what , and why they might be positioned like that . I spent a lot of time on the phone , to be honest , really getting a feel for the market , and that stood me in good stead for the next step in my career progression .”
Credit crunch But then the financial crisis hit .
Program trades dropped off , because people weren ’ t trading risk . Private clients weren ’ t trading as much , because there wasn ’ t as much to trade with , and an opportunity came up on the fixed income side , just as the firm was starting to make inroads into the credit space .
“ I thought about it for all of five seconds ,” he says . “ It was great to add another string to my bow – at that time Jupiter were really starting to
“ When it comes to trading , you listen in , you learn how it goes , and you learn the etiquette . That ’ s the key thing about a place like Jupiter – it ’ s all about the etiquette .” push the fixed income product , so it was exciting to be on that journey . I was basically given a book about yields and convertible Greeks and told to go on holiday for a couple of weeks and learn it , and when I came back I was good to go . It ’ s a great way to learn . There ’ s nothing wrong with being dropped in the deep end , as long as you have the right support network .”
Initially there was just Poole and one other guy in the fixed income division – so the learning curve was steep . “ I did take it upon myself to adopt more of a leadership role ,” he admits . “ Just because I could see that the industry was changing . Fixed income is always undergoing change . But at the time we were still doing things very manually , very slowly . That was fine , but we were only trading a small number of bonds .”
Bull run The uptick really came with the arrival of Ariel Bezalel in 1998 , who became a fixed income fund manager in 2000 and who kickstarted Jupiter ’ s credit success . Heading up the global flexible bond strategy , he manages the Jupiter Strategic Bond Fund - which has returned 110.67 % since its launch in 2008 - alongside the Dynamic Bond Fund , with AUM totalling £ 10 billion .
“ The fund grew very quickly , the strategy was very successful , and before you knew it , we ’ d reached a few billion and we needed to onboard the likes of Tradeweb , Market Axess , Liquidnet , and look at different ways of executing , of accessing the market in a more efficient manner ,” explains Poole . “ This is a crucial point that I ’ ll come back to again and
16 // TheTRADE // Q4 2022