Morgan Stanley Rates Trading Head Leaves Amid Strategic Shift

Morgan Stanley’s (MS.N) former global head of rates trading, Edward Glenn Hadden, said he has left the bank to pursue another opportunity after a change in strategic direction.

In an interview on Monday, Hadden said he decided to leave after Morgan Stanley’s management changed plans for the business, and after his former boss, Ken de Regt, left in May.

“The firm basically decided to adopt a different strategy in its rates business,” Hadden said in an interview. “So, for me, I am very proud of the strategic course that I adopted and the resulting accomplishments that that strategy generated.”

Hadden said he achieved “significant” profitability and market-share gains, and helped build a “culture of success” on the trading desk. He declined to say where he is heading.

Hadden joined Morgan Stanley from Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) in 2011, charged with bulking up the Wall Street bank’s market share in trading Treasury bonds and interest-rate derivatives. But the job increasingly became one of cost-cutting and automation, as regulators formed new rules for capital requirements and trading.

In June, Morgan Stanley Chief Executive James Gorman outlined aggressive targets for rates trading, identifying it as a low-return business that needed improvement.

Earlier this year, CME Group Inc (CME.O) fined Hadden $80,000 and suspended him from trading CME-listed products for 10 days after determining that some of his 2008 trades were not performed according to exchange rules. Goldman, where he worked at the time, was also fined $875,000 for failure to supervise.

Reuters reported that Hadden had also been subject to an internal inquiry at Goldman and put on paid leave for about a year over a separate matter before joining Morgan Stanley.

Hadden’s lawyer, James Benjamin, has said his client acted properly.

At Morgan Stanley, Hadden be will replaced by Mitchell Nadel and Jakob Horder, a source familiar with the matter said. Morgan Stanley announced their new roles in an internal memo.

Nadel joined Morgan Stanley in 2010 from Bank of America Corp (BAC.N) and spent a few years overseeing fixed-income trading in Japan before moving to New York. Horder has been in the firm’s capital-markets businesses for over 10 years, and is based out of London.

Source : Reuters