A bunch of hedge fund managers featured in ‘The Big Short’ are among the casualties of Citadel’s most recent cuts

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Several portfolio managers have been cut by Citadel or resigned from the firm after the $29 billion hedge fund closed its Aptigon stock-picking unit last week.
Two of the portfolio managers that were let go were Vincent Daniels and A. Porter Collins, who were featured characters in the Oscar-nominated movie "The Big Short" for their work at the then-Morgan Stanley owned hedge fund FrontPoint Partners.

Citadel’s most recent cuts including two hedge fund managers whose past performance nearly won an Academy Award.

Vincent Daniel and A. Porter Collins, who were featured as characters in the Michael Lewis-inspired movie "The Big Short," were cut as part of Citadel’s closure of its Aptigon stock-picking unit last week, sources tell Business Insider. They were portrayed respectively by actors Jeremy Strong and Hamish Linklater in the 2015 film about the collapse of the US housing bubble.

Daniel and Collins, who were working for the Morgan Stanley-owned hedge fund FrontPoint Partners in the run-up to the financial crisis, joined Citadel in mid-2017 after the pair had founded the hedge fund SeaWolf Capital, which reportedly closed in May 2017. Collins also represented the US in the Olympics as a rower in the 1996 and 2000 summer Olympics.

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Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty ImagesOther portfolio managers set to leave the firm due to the Aptigon closure include John Meloy, an energy portfolio manager that joined from Balyasny, and Mike Berkley, who was Aptigon’s sole consumer portfolio manager, and Michael Janis. Sources say Berkley resigned the day before the Aptigon closure was announced, while Meloy and Janis were a part of the cuts.

The portfolio managers mentioned did not respond to requests for comment. Citadel declined to comment.

The three remaining equity teams at Citadel — Global Equities, Surveyor, and Ashler — have each received at least one former Aptigon team so far, sources said. There were less than a dozen PMs in the unit after Aptigon cut headcount by more than a third roughly a year ago, firing 40 investment professionals, sources said.

Citadel also lost one of its top stock-pickers from its Surveyor unit this year, Jack Woodruff, who is starting his own fund that Griffin will invest in. The fund was able to retain longtime PM Nilsson Kocher, promoting him after he had accepted an offer from rival Chicago manager Balyasny.

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