Manu Bakshi, a managing director at WorldQuant focused on recruiting, is leaving the Millennium-connected manager after nearly eight years, sources tell Business Insider.Bakshi will start his own venture, a source familiar with the situation told Business Insider.WorldQuant's recruiting efforts have changed the way many hedge funds think about sourcing quant talent. Founder Igor Tulchinsky has pushed to find people in parts of the world that have not traditionally been a hedge-fund hotbed.Click here for more BI Prime stories.WorldQuant is losing a longtime recruiter, sources tell Business Insider, as managing director Manu Bakshi is set to leave the firm soon.Bakshi, who was with Igor Tulchinsky's firm for nearly eight years, is planning to start his own firm, sources tell Business Insider. Prior to working for WorldQuant, Bakshi was London-based recruiter Harvey Nash, according to his LinkedIn.Bakshi did not respond to requests for comment, while a spokesman for WorldQuant declined to comment.WorldQuant has a global recruiting team, and has changed the way many hedge funds think about finding talent, especially quant talent. Tulchinsky, who founded WorldQuant in 2007 while he was a portfolio manager for Izzy Englander's Millennium, is from Belarus and has offices in 18 different countries. The firm's website states that the firm has more than 750 people.The firm also hosts a platform known as the WorldQuant Accelerator that allows for quants anywhere to submit their strategy with the hopes of using WorldQuant's infrastructure so the investors can focus on their algorithms and not running a business.The goal, Tulchinsky said in an interview with Bloomberg in 2018, is to take any "intuition" out of investing."The more models you have and the better the models are, the less you need to rely on intuition. Today at WorldQuant, we have millions of alpha signals, so we don't need to use intuition very much. That's the goal," he said in the Bloomberg interview.The firm still runs billions for Millennium along with capital that Tulchinsky's firm has raised for a separate fund.While quant funds have exploded in both number of managers and assets, a collapse in momentum stocks earlier this year had many concerned that performance would be underwhelming for the year. To ease concerns about potential impact on bonus payments, WorldQuant sent a company-wide email in September guaranteeing employees at 75% of last year's bonus.SEE ALSO:WorldQuant's Igor Tulchinsky just guaranteed his team 75% of last year's performance bonus to soothe nerves as quant funds get slammedSEE ALSO:Hedge funds are getting swamped by alternative data. Some want to fast-track how they buy it and focus back on trades.SEE ALSO:Izzy Englander just landed a quant team that was managing hundreds of millions for billionaire Michael PlattJoin the conversation about this storyNOW WATCH: WeWork went from a $47 billion valuation to a failed IPO. Here's how the company makes money.
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