Millennium-backed fund bolsters fixed-income team with BofA hire

Ilana Kaufman is reported to have been hired as a portfolio manager.

The Millennium Management-backed hedge fund run by senior trader Diego Megia has hired Ilana Kaufman from Bank of America Corp. as a portfolio manager, according to people familiar with the matter.

Kaufman will join Taula Capital’s fixed-income team in April, according to one of the people, who asked not to be named discussing personnel. She previously worked in dollar swaps sales and trading at Bank of America for nearly three years and before that was at JPMorgan Chase & Co., according to her LinkedIn profile.

Megia is on track to kick off his own hedge fund with as much as $5 billion, becoming one of the largest startups in recent years, Bloomberg News reported in January. Megia is getting $3 billion from Izzy Englander’s Millennium, and the rest from external investors, Bloomberg reported at the time. The money manager specializes in relative value rates trading.

Such spinoffs have become an increasingly popular way for several multistrategy hedge funds — which deploy several teams of traders across various strategies — to fan out investments as their assets soar. More than half of such funds allocate to outside traders or to those with ambitions to start their own firms, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has estimated.

Separately, Noah Craig, a director on a Bank of America team that traded treasuries, has left to join DRW Holdings as a portfolio manager in the fixed-income relative value group, according to people familiar with the matter. Kaufman and Craig will both be working for clients of Bank of America, one of the people said.

Representatives for Millennium, Taula Capital, DRW and Bank of America declined to comment. Kaufman didn’t respond to a messages on LinkedIn. Craig declined to comment.