Schonfeld's macro team has been on a growth tear, despite the departure of most of the starting team

Schonfeld Strategic Advisors’ macro unit won’t stop growing, even though early-day hires have left the $23 billion firm.

The group — which invests across asset classes based on where it thinks global interest rates, inflation, and other economic trends are headed — has more than doubled its investment head count since last year, to nearly 150 investment staffers, a person close to the fund told Business Insider. It is run by co-heads Colin Lancaster and Mitesh Parikh and macro COO Omar Faruqui.

Schonfeld’s macro unit now runs close to a fifth of what the firm is putting out into various markets day in and day out, the person close to the firm said, and has added 15 new PMs in 2026. Those hires include a pair of Dubai-based Point72 traders, Prejesh Patel and Pierre-Anthony Bodin, and 25-year JPMorgan veteran Wentao Mu. Kevin McDonald, Balyasny’s former deputy COO for the fund’s fixed income and macro division, is also joining as the unit’s co-COO.

This recent growth has coincided with more and more members of the firm’s day-one macro team leaving. It’s an example of how the edge of Schonfeld and other multistrategy funds — the investing behemoths that have come to define the hedge fund industry with their scale, ambitions, and growth — comes from their structure, not their personnel.

While no fund wants to lose talented people, a strong multistrategy firm should be able to weather departures and market volatility with strong risk systems and operational excellence.

Schonfeld’s macro unit trading in early 2022 with billions in leveraged capital and less than a dozen money managers. Nearly all of those early PMs have filtered out of the $23 billion firm, with former Goldman Sachs managing director Francesco Cafagna the lone exception.

Recent early-day hires that have left include:

Marwan Moubachir, the unit’s former head of risk, who is joining Dymon Asia
Amu Latif, the onetime global head of macro trading
Manas Baveja, a PM who is also joining Dymon Asia as the Singapore-based firm’s head of macro
Ryan McCort, the unit’s top recruiter, who joined rival Brevan Howard last fall

Inside Schonfeld’s macro expansion

Despite the changing nameplates, the unit has grown and expanded.

Following a near-existential moment in late 2023, when the firm was close to merging with larger rival Millennium, Schonfeld has grown its asset base and teams considerably, in part thanks to strong returns, including 2024’s near-20% gain, which led the way among peers.

Macro has been a significant part of the firm’s resurgence. The unit now has 45 trading pods, the person close to the manager said. For a sense of scale, the firm’s investment staff is larger than Rokos Capital’s, a macro hedge fund with roughly the same amount of capital as Schonfeld. Rokos has fewer than 100 investment team members, according to regulatory filings, though the London-based firm concentrates a significant portion of its assets in the portfolio of its billionaire founder, Chris Rokos.

Schonfeld’s macro unit has made money in 84% of the months it has traded and has produced a Sharpe ratio — a metric used to measure an investment’s return relative to the risk required to generate it — of over 3. Typically, a Sharpe above 1.5 is considered very good for a multistrategy firm.

The macro unit’s returns are not broken out from the firm’s flagship Partners fund, which is up 6.8% on the year after a 0.2% gain in August.

While there’s been talent turnover in the still-young unit, including some who worked with Lancaster and Parikh at their former firm, Matador Investment Partners, Schonfeld’s leaders believe the firm is an outlier in an industry where employee churn is a feature, not a bug. The person close to the firm told Business Insider that firmwide PM turnover is just 2% annually.