Seneca Capital Management has made six new senior hires to its fixed-income team and will make further additions over the next few weeks, according to Gail Seneca, the firm's ceo and cio. The hires come as four more senior members of the team resigned, bringing to seven the total number of resignations the group has seen in recent weeks.
The most senior of the new hires isAlbert Gutierrez, former head investment-grade portfolio manager at American General who was let go when that firm was acquired by AIG Global Investment Corp. (BW, 11/11). He will be the firm's cio of fixed-income--a new position, which is more senior than any previously held by a fixed-income official at the firm. Seneca says she hired Gutierrez because she was unhappy with the recent performance of the firm's fixed-income products, most of which had inferior returns versus their Lehman Brothers benchmark indices. "I made a decision to strengthen the group in the face of more challenging markets," she says, noting that the officials who left may have been unhappy after learning a new cio would be brought in to lead the group.
The latest resignations include Charlie Dicke, senior corporate and high-yield portfolio manager, Umesh Patel, a high-grade portfolio manager, Maya Sarda, a senior high-yield analyst and Joe Morgan, an analyst covering asset-backed and mortgage-backed securities. Dicke did not return calls, and the others could not be reached. Three other senior members of the team also resigned recently (BW, 4/1).
Additional hires reporting to Gutierrez are David Stuehr, formerly a partner in high-yield portfolio management and research at Standish, Ayer & Wood, and Greg Croll, former high-yield portfolio manager and head of global trading operations at ING Financial Markets. Andy Chao, who was a mortgage-backed security and convertible bond portfolio manager at ING Pilgrim Investment Management in Scottsdale, Ariz. for the last nine years of his 14 year career in fixed income, and Brad Kane, former high-yield portfolio manager at GSC Partners in New York have also joined the group. Seneca declined to name the fifth new hire, an analyst.