As hedge fund Walleye Capital ejects PMs, a reminder of the "toxic" interview
First it was a bad time for macro portfolio managers. Then it was a bad time for credit portfolio managers. Now the times have come for equities portfolio managers. Especially those at Walleye Capital, which has reportedly made a 5.9% loss in October.
Bloomberg reported today that Walleye is returning some of its $17bn of capital to investors. Quoting a letter to investors from Walleye CEO Will England, Business Insider says the firm has cut Anil Gondi, the head of its equity long short business, along with a substantial portion of its long short team.
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Walleye didn't respond to a request to comment for this article. Business Insider says the firm plans to continue trading stocks but that internal teams will now report to England himself. England reportedly wrote that: "Over the past few years, we invested considerable effort in improving the internal business, including bringing in new leadership. Those efforts did not produce the results we expected, and the opportunity cost and resources consumed have been too high relative to the return."
England, who is now aged approximately 41, joined Walleye as a quant in 2013 and transformed the firm - which was previously an options market maker - into a multistrategy hedge fund. In September 2023, when Walleye had only $5bn in AUM, England gave a frank interview to Colossus in which he said that portfolio management jobs can be "toxic."
"The job of being a PM, whether you're quantitative or fundamental, is psychologically extremely toxic because you're going to be wrong basically just as much as you're going to be right. You're going to get kicked in the face a lot, and you're going to be someone who's the smartest person that they've known their entire life, and then they're just going to get beat up all the time."
Today is one such toxic day.
Promisingly, perhaps, England also told Colossus that he tries to be fair to portfolio managers during drawdowns. “If you’re in a tough spot, you want to have a fair conversation about it as opposed to just essentially being fired by some 23-year-old because in the spreadsheet, the cell goes from green to red,” he opined.
It's not clear whether England has had a lot of these conversations of late. Walleye refocused on equities sales and trading after cutting credit teams in 2025 and global macro teams in 2024. It hired Tom D'Angelis, the former head of equities business development at Citadel in 2023, and hired new equities portfolio managers, including 38-year-old Anil Gondi himself, who came from Balyasny in July 2025. Maybe DeAngelis needs to find some new people now?
"It's been a very unfortunate October for them," observes one former Walleye PM. "It's a shame they weren't more diversified."
Re: Walleye https://t.co/2htF1pJxXd
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