Den Hartog new MD at Deep Blue
Deep Blue Capital hired Wim den Hartog as new Managing Director. Den Hartog previously worked for Goldman Sachs Clearing and was briefly co-head of IMC Chicago. In his last job he was replaced by Osi Lilian, who returned after a sabbatical. Den Hartog’s move to Deep Blue is an horizontal career change at best. But then again, the trading business has seen better days.
Robin de Vilder
The founder of Deep Blue is the well known mathematician Robin de Vilder. He’s also being associate professor at the University of Amsterdam, but he’s quite notorious in the Netherlands for some other issues. In short, in 1987 at the age of 26 he swindled ten million guilders from investors. He was convicted to two years in prison, which he finally served in 1995 after doing his phd in mathematics. Given the status and wealth of De Vilder’s family, his father as chairman of the chamber of commerce in Amsterdam and the involvement of media tycoons (the victims) – the matter stirred a lot of attention.
Quantitative Approach
Deep Blue hires mostly mathematicians and has a very quantitive approach to trading. With their own models they are said to be finally earning a good profit last year. Company is located in the same building als Flow Traders, and Flow used to have a stake in the company. When Summit Capital bought their stake in Flow, the ties between Deep Blue and Flow were cut.
Head of HR department is Fiona de Vilder, and they are hiring new chess players. She’s also famous herself, for having been a candidate for state secretary in the government, in 2002 for the LPF.
Update
Small correction. Den Hartog wasn’t replaced by Osi Lilian in IMC Chicago. Mr Lillian has already been working there since October 2012, as Global head of Business Planning & Analysis – to be more specific.
Second, while some people in the comments joke about mr Lilian’s past incident with the Dutch tax authorities – IMC wishes to say they are complying with all tax rules including those by the IRS. That is good.
first,
back to small town backyard for hartog, he must be the office coo biz dev mkt str god knows
Replaced by a failed CFO? I don’t think so. Osi is irrelevant in Chi and also Wim knew he wouldn’t succeed in IMC politics and make the big bux
The current head in Chi is weak must be frustrating to Wim to see a clown placed over him
Who is the current head in Chi?
Trading software in ADA? That’s strange, you don’t see this everyday.
why would it be frustrating to Wim, wasnt he the weak hand surviving in gs for that long, you win some, you lose some
what’s the background to this trading software in ada?
http://people.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk.craeynest/ada-belgium/jobs/130930-deepbluecapital.html
‘ is an horizontal career change at best’
Not intending to take a jab at anyone, but this business lets you make more money than any other profession. A few good years and you are already at the top of the Maslow’s hierarchal needs. The desire of going up up and up is an illusion at best.
I be reading it wrong but at that point making more and more is less of a priority than actually doing good work, working with a small group of smart people and not being surrounded by snakes in a corporation.
lol, it’s less to do with ‘doing good work’ and more to do with your balanced personal life and having comfortable work environment, cut-throat office politics and meaningless work marathon is turn-off even for the ones starting out
Osi is still the man for Wiet and Rob. Just had to step down as CFO of IMC because of his personal tax fraud.
what did irs get him for?
how much is google ad service paying jack for the ad space?
jack is doing an excellent job by updating us on all news in the financial markets, some ads money is well deserved
from the question below how did you reach the conclusion of commentator implying that ad money is not well deserved
‘how much is google ad service paying jack for the ad space?’
are we not getting too sensitive now?
No-one comes here for the articles – it’s just the anonymous comments that people are interested in. Jack could post absolute drivel or nothing at all and people would still come for the comment drama.
dutch tax authorities got Osi. The irs has not gotten him yet. although imc pays for his rent of over $10k/month. this is not reported as income to OSI. so maybe the irs will get him for tax fraud here too. so he will then move to sydney.
One correction Jack. Wim left (or was booted from IMC). He joined then Object + on Max Euweplein. Now this. Next what
really, no-one comes here for the articles? you can’t think of any possible exceptions?
how did belastingdienst get osi?
what is Object + on Max Euweplein?
who cares what wim does next?
jack would take home tops 1k a month in ad revenue. nothing, squat.
why hire chess players , mathematicians as traders. get the smartest it nerds. let’s make the ‘traders’ obsolete.
because trading happens in a 4-dimensional real world and IT nerds operate in an n-dimension silicon world?
define ‘traders’?
Define 4-dimensions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime
Trading happens in spacetime with a system written in Ada !?
You learn many new things on this board.
how did you end up putting ada and spacetime together? that def be a new thing to learn from you
He must be a trader – they like to talk shit about things they don’t understand.
define ‘a trader’
trader (n): overpaid individual with highly inflated ego
Trader: please allow me to make tenuous claims on pnl on the shoulders of lesser paid and more skilled persons at your company
if you think they are overpaid with high ego, why not become one and stop with all the jealousy talk? you can then in turn, make your own tenuous claims on pnl on shoulders of lesser paid and similar skilled former colleagues at your company
It’s not just non-traders that agree with 6.22am’s definition of a trader.
a successful trader would never have an ego, leave alone an inflated size at that, ego is what gets you killed in the market, you clearly haven’t risked a dime of your personal cash? if nothing else, open a small punting account, put on some positions and experience it before you go on judging a profession and skill form outside
as for overpaid, again, nobody is in this business for charity, if management find you a credible replacement, they would hire your cheap ass in a hearbeat and pocket the difference to themselves. there are ofcourse examples of overpaid incumbents, but that’s issue of corporate governance and not just limited to a trading position, there are overpaid management and ceos, lazy boards just across any industry
den hartog – what a joke
adds no value to no business
what value to business do you yourself add?
good point, most of the complaining traders do a monkey job clicking on GUIs. Many of these monkeys became rich by doing this… and now they think they generated value to the business and they they have “trading skill”. In reality they were just lucky. Ever wandered why these rich senior heads of trading after leaving a company are not able to generate any PL anymore?
Word is, the court case between tibra and optiver is settled now.
How much did Optiver pay tibra to avoid being ordered to pay their lawyer costs? 😉
Isn’t it more likely Optiver are taking what they can before Tibra go under ? Look at the rate of markets they are dropping out of…
you can be more specific when you call ’em ‘complaining traders’, like addressing them ‘execution trader’, ‘risk monitoring trader’ etc
btw you don’t have to show your frustration by calling them ‘monkey’, give them some credit, if it was such a monkey job, management wouldn’t be that that stupid to pay them premium
as for generating pnl, punting company’s money vs your own cash require ‘slightly’ different frame of mind, if you can’t make the transition, then you are not alone in that
of course Optiver are taking what they can before Tibra go under, hasn’t this been already discussed before?
where was it discussed ?
Discussed in the infinium post
http://www.amsterdamtrader.com/2014/01/infinium-sued-by-former-employees.html#comment-19078
Can the person(s) who say tibra go under please explain how they reach this conclusion? As far as I know, they have over 100mln in equity, no debts (info from annual report), so how can they go bust?
Because costs outstrip profit? They’re supposedly slightly profitable at the moment, but they only got there by losing three quarters of their staff and pulling out of trading all products but the ones generating highest revenue. Remains to be seen if they still have the resources to cope with the ever-changing markets.
Also, does anyone have any actual details, leaks, or specifics about this rumoured settlement with Optiver? The only things that have been posted here are unsubstantiated rumours and speculation. That could well be HR departments trying to boost public image of the companies in question.
tibra doesn’t have to go bankrupt, so long as they go in liquidation?
the first rumour on this site and the initial conclusion to that is here
http://www.amsterdamtrader.com/2013/12/its-a-small-world-after-all.html#comment-19067
how on earth is hr trying to boost public image through this kind of rumour and which company’s hr dep do you reckon it is, lol
Could be Tibra HR trying to suggest that there’s one less risk factor in your decision to take a job there.
less risk factor that industry’s leading company optiver is taking money-out-of-court from you because they think you are going to liquidate soon anyways?
Come on, who knows the details of settlement between tibra and optiver? are there non disclosure clauses?
If there is a settlement they might want to tell the court about it. The hearing still starting on 10th March. Until then its just a rumor.
https://www.comcourts.gov.au/file/Federal/P/NSD681/2009/actions
haha, this portal just lost all its credibility, all over again
The matter spilled out of Australia to UK and NL too ?
http://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/#ljn/BW3264
tibra legal entity in respective UK and and NL is a competitor individually to respective Optiver local legal entity and thus they go after each of them? did they go after tibra usa or tibra usa already shut down without paying?
Tibra chicago still running.
did optiver go after anybody over there?
Highly doubt. Not much technology required for the pits of CBOE. Besides there are more established firms in the US to poach from ?
“The matter spilled out of Australia to UK and NL too ?”
No. These are non-compete cases against Alco.
define alco?
Pieren is the Dutch word for worms
what’s the background to this ‘pieren’
is this the IT guy at source capital?
http://itaygross.com/
according to the web site he is very talented
why, just because they have the same name?
As is now well known, Tibra Europe “recruited” half a dozen or so Optiver employees in 2007-08 in full knowledge of their non-competes and gave them aliases to work under for the year in question.
This was operation Pieren:
pieren
Plural form of pier
Verb[edit]pieren (past singular pierde, past participle gepierd)
(transitive) To trick, outsmart
An unpaid non-compete for a year is not enforceable anyways. But giving employees from a direct competitor aliases is a lawsuit waiting to happen.
What was the nature of this alias ?
Email IDs, payrolls, Eurex/Euronext trader keys ?
why is alias a lawsuit and who is going to file the lawsuit, optiver or exchange?
has optiver ever won a non-compete compliance case?
Everybody knows that Optiver’s non-compete clauses are not enforcable WHATSOEVER under Dutch law.
so how do they go about enforcing it?
If the non-competes are not enforceable, then the alleged ‘work under alias trading operation’ should have happened in the first place.
They could have just moved to the competitor and worked there.
any legal precedence rather than just common sense?
Even if non-compete can’t be enforced against former Optiver employee choosing to work at Tibra, non-solicitation against one former Optiver employee “encouraging” other Optiver employees to join them at Tibra could well be enforced.
how would you prove solicitation?
The irony is that the key people who carried out this solicitation, and most of those who were solicited, have moved on to a third firm.
but the liability, if valid, can still be imposed, doesn’t matter that you go live in whole other continent?
Indeed they can be hunted to the last mole hole and sued to the last penny using every clause in the book. The motivation sure is there.
so why do we keep hearing ‘everybody knows that Optiver’s non-compete clauses are not enforcable WHATSOEVER under Dutch law’
They are enforceable. Optiver went to the dutch court over non-compete multiple times and they won a couple.
Names and enforcement details or it didn’t happen!
it’s hard to believe this anecdote of enforcement unless particulars are given. Also either it’s enforced or not, you can’t enforce it on two poor souls and leave the rest everybody untouched, law is same for everybody you know. So try again.
Every’s person case who was involved was unique, so you can’t summarize the outcomes.
Dutch’s court resolutions are public from what I know, so google and translate it.
If it’s public, give us a link.
how is it unique for each person if they are all signing the same non-compete clause?
It’s little hard to google something possibly non-existing, would you like to help?
because although the legalese may be the same from one contract to the next, the relevance varies depending on several factors, not least of which are the seniority and privy knowledge of the person leaving, and the company which they are going to. These will be different with each case, hence likely multiple outcomes (if indeed the original post is true, I’m inclined to agree with details or didn’t happen).
True to the trending sentiment above, the case with the link above is the only one that went to NL supreme court given the seniority of the individual involved, privy knowledge of trading methodologies and the company which was subsequently formed in UK with that proprietary knowledge.
Even the outcome of this case was ‘dismissed’ ?
so you think court is going to uphold the non-compete for senior guy but would let off the hook a junior guy, that doesn’t sound like a law at all, at point of seniority do you draw this line and why would a lawyer agree to this artificial line of seniority?
the outcome in google translate is ‘Litigation; Art. 337 paragraph 2 Civil Procedure. Ancillary claim on the basis of Art. Rv 843a; exclusion. Intermediate appeal, no reason to take exception.’ This is dated 18 months ago, any dutch readers want to help?
why doesn’t optiver get over itself and scrap this stupid non-compete, what great state secret are they hiding in vanilla market making, the days of pits are over, it’s electronic knowledge democracy now, thought they were ahead of the curve in transforming to 21st century
‘Head of HR department is Fiona de Vilder, and they are hiring new chess players’
how did you reach the conclusion of chess players?
‘so you think court is going to uphold the non-compete for senior guy but would let off the hook a junior guy.’
No. The plaintiff will not waste time in suing the junior guys, its the senior guy who really has potential to become a competitor and solicit juniors they will go after.
‘at point of seniority do you draw this line ?’
Tough one to answer the line of seniority. My bet would be the guys who are programmers and are spearheading the important desks.
‘and why would a lawyer agree to this artificial line of seniority’
Lawyers bread and butter is to represent the case.
‘scrap this stupid non-compete, what great state secret are they hiding in vanilla market making’
It is a deterrent for competitors to poach. Being the only firm in the past two years which has not laid off full time employees, they must be doing something that competitors do not know of.
Intellectual property issues, bans on leveraging existing relationships, and non-solicitation are all things you can have enforced. The thing that people are arguing is unenforceable is the blanket ban on working for any competitor for some period of time after leaving. It’s my understanding that although unenforceable these things act as a kind of “gentlemen’s agreement” e.g. the investment banks will agree to uphold each other’s non-competes even if a court wouldn’t do anything about it.
so you saying plaintiff would not go after junior guys for purely cost-benefit reasons otherwise they could easily bankrupt the junior guy from litigation/damages and teach the existing a lesson to not forget in a hurry for betraying their employer?
As for doing something that competitors do not know of, it’s obvious to anyone, excepting you possibly, that the firm works based on team effort, their bonuses are totally democratic and no sycophancy, well maybe a bit, but it’s not one person super-effort and poaching anyone singular is not going to move the needle unless you open the mind that you adopt this common sense policies across your firm and ingrain it in the culture, competitors know this but for reasons of human failings, never match up, it’s for the same reason you can shout out all your secrets to open world and nobody would have the humility to listen to your clever ideas, some IT muppet was claiming traders to have big egos and for obvious reason he would think that self-ego is the way to go
IANAL, but I’m dutch.
Reading the law on this point will not help, it’s all about the current customs, and even those customs shift over time.
The current situation is best described by this: a non-compete ban cannot be used to restrict the employee’s career “too much”.
And yes, that “too much” is vague. A few court rulings and the current customs will dictate what ‘too much’ means in practice.
The general understanding is that the more specific the ban is, the less restrictive therefore the more enforcable. In the end, it becomes a judgement whose interests are harmed more: the employee’s or the employer’s. That’s why each case is unique: the details are important.
I don’t think a programmer can switch to a trading competitor: there is enough work outside trading for programmers, so a ban specific to trading wouldn’t restrict his career too much. OTOH, a generic ban aimed at all programming work would be unenforcable, so it’s in the employer’s interest to restrict the wording of the ban.
That’s why it is often said that a “blanket ban is unenforceable.” But nobody will have a blanket ban in her contract nowadays!
The longer the ban, the more unenforceable it will be. One year is reasonable and common; Five years would be unenforceable for most employees.
In practice, the non-compete is used as a starting point for negotiations. Refusing to negotiate will make a weaker case.
The end result of those negotiations frequently is that the former employer (e.g. an agency) is paid some fee by the new employer (the agency’s customer). Without the leverage of the non-compete the former employer would have received nothing.
This tendency to settle the matter out of court explains why actual court cases might be hard to find: there aren’t that many.
Somehow it seems to work in practice.
Once again, I Am Not A Lawyer.
if you are not a lawyer, why are you placing arguements in front of the court, a cheap aussie guy tried did this trick with his mum, of course the cheap dutch guy gets inspired
and what’s with IANAL, OTOH abbreviations?
BRW reports Optiver and Tibra settled for over $10 mln
http://www.brw.com.au/p/entrepreneurs/tibra_young_rich_listers_set_to_aXmwMDcJUzXSHqE2aHtLCL
12:45am nailed it down. There are too many specifics in each case that go much more beyond junior vs senior guy.
As for the court cases, use google.nl to find the court or ask a local lawyer to do the extractions.
IANAL = I Am Not A Lawyer
OTOH = On The Other Hand
you can google up those stupid abbreviations genius, the question was use of not so-common lingo when communicating with people from other side of globe
new optiver ceo closing the case on a dying company makes obvious sense, how much was optiver and tibra’s legal bill respective, any recourse on that?
as for the court cases, no english speaker is going to waste time on google.nl or pay a local lawyer to do the extraction
can you be little less helpful possibly?
But if Tibra did indeed give aliases to ex Optiver staff under non-compete does Optiver have recourse against Tibra themselves?
If Tibra is settling it would suggest that the amount they keep paying lawyers is a significant expense in the scheme of things now.
settlement is not one way street my friend
‘But if Tibra did indeed give aliases to ex Optiver staff under non-compete does Optiver have recourse against Tibra themselves?’
All posts here are purely based on conjecture and hearsay without any evidence.
The Discovery time to hunt down the alias story (If it indeed is true) would stretchhhhhhhhh..
it would def be surprising if a company undertakes a blatant breaking of rules with alias story, they must have used a loophole while not breaking the rule strictly