Nick Waltner, managing director and head of equity financial products at Bank of America in Tokyo, has quit and plans to set up a hedge fund in the U.S. "It's time to move on," noted Waltner, after working in Japan for nine years. He will head back to Seattle to start up a quantitative relative value strategy fund, dubbed Kulshan Asset Management, by next fall. Kulshan is the native American name for Mount Baker, a well-known mountain outside of Seattle. "We'll start small and first establish a track record," he noted.
Waltner joined BofA in May of 2000 from Nikko Salomon Smith Barney (DW, 5/1/00), to set up the firm's equity derivatives operation in Tokyo. At BofA he reported to Jonathan Sandelman, managing director and global head of equity financial products at BofA in New York, who did not return calls. The move follows a number of stream of departures from BofA's equity derivatives group.
