Deutsche Bank's Pande to Depart for Hedge Fund

(August 28, 2012) — Vinay Pande, the chief investment advisor of Deutsche Bank, is set to leave for Brevan Howard Asset Management, a $36.7 billion hedge fund.

Pande served as chief investment advisor of Deutsche Bank since 2006, based in London and New York.

“He hasn’t done exceptionally well this year, with performance being flat. Given cost-cutting at the bank, I’m not surprised by his departure,” a Deutsche employee, who agreed to comment on anonymity, told aiCIO, adding that London-based Brevan Howard, a global alternative asset manager, is a Deutsche Bank client.

The firm, founded in 2002, has also grown to be the second-biggest hedge fund firm in Europe.

Pande was unavailable for comment by the time of publication. Sigalit Grego, a spokeswoman for Deutsche Bank, declined to comment.

Pande worked for more than two decades as a trader, running a macro strategies fund for hedge fund Caxton Associates between 2003 and 2006 before joining Deutsche. He obtained his MBA in finance from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

In January 2008, Pande told the Wall Street Journal that the outlook for US financial markets is either “outstanding or awful,” with little chance of something in between. He also said that there would be a 60% to 70% probability of “outstanding” returns over the next three to five years. He noted that the reason for his optimistic expectations were largely due to growth in emerging markets.

Pande’s expectations in January 2008 surely proved to be overly optimistic. He did correctly predict at the time that the outlook was “bimodal,” a term meaning the likeliest outcomes are banded around two opposite extremes as opposed to in the middle.