Bilal Hafeez is the Founder and CEO of Macro Hive. He was Global Head of International Fixed Income Strategy at Nomura between 2016 and 2019 and held various senior roles at Deutsche Bank between 2002 and 2015 including Head of Multi-Asset Research, Advisor to the CEO, Head of Asia Research in Singapore and Global Head of Foreign Exchange Research. Bilal started his career at JP Morgan in 1998 and was rated #1 market strategist by Euromoney and Institutional Investor between 2004 and 2013. He pioneered FX investment and smart beta benchmarks and was an Honorary Visiting Professor of Finance at Cass Business School. He studied Economics at St Johns College, Cambridge and has seven cats, four chickens, a beehive and one dog.
Andrew Simon Chief Operating Officer
Andrew has 25 years in finance on both the buy and sell side. He co-founded Eschaton Opportunities Fund, a $100 million+ hedge fund focused on global thematic value investing. Earlier, he led JP Morgan’s institutional sales business across foreign exchange and emerging markets for Europe. He spearheaded initiatives around tail risk hedging and cross asset structuring. Before this, he ran Lehman’s global derivative sales business, managed the European currency option trading and derivative research business at Deutsche Bank, and started at Cooper Neff/BNP. He credits them for his amazing foundation in finance. Andrew lives in London with his wife Valeria and son Alexander. He loves to ski and dreams of beating Rodger Federer on the tennis court.
Simon Quijano-Evans Senior Emerging Markets Strategist, Emerging Markets
Simon has over 28 years of experience in emerging markets as an economist and strategist, focussing on the intersection of macroeconomics, geopolitics and financial markets. He has worked extensively on the asset management side, including at Legal & General, Gemcorp and Gramercy. Prior to that, Simon led EM research teams at ING, Commerzbank, Credit Agricole Cheuvreux and UniCredit and worked at IIASA as an economist analyzing the macroeconomic effects of natural disasters. Simon holds a Doctorate Degree in Economics from the University of Vienna and has co-authored and edited a book on the Turkish economy.
Dominique Dwor-Frecaut Chief US Economist
Dominique Dwor-Frecaut is a macro strategist based in Los Angeles. She has been producing alpha generating trade ideas in FX and rates in EM and G10 at established and startup macro hedge funds in the US since 2011, including at Bridgewater. She has also produced in depth analysis of central banks policies and procedures drawing on her experience at the New York Fed, the IMF and the World Bank as well as on the buy and sell side. Before moving to the US she covered Asian and global EMs at Barclays capital, ABN AMRO and RBS from Singapore. She holds a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics.
Antonio Del Favero Head of US Rates Strategy
Antonio is Head of US Rates Strategy at Macro Hive, focusing on the US economy and rates markets and G5 FX. Formerly, he worked at macro hedge funds, including Tudor, Maniyar Capital and Brevan Howard. He holds a Master in Finance from the ETH/University of Zurich and a Master in Economics from Bocconi University.
Sam van de Schootbrugge Quantitative Analyst
Sam is a former UK government economist and researcher at the IFS. He spent nine years studying economics at top academic institutions, including the University of Cambridge, and guest lectures in quantitative methods. At Macro Hive, he leads on developing economic forecasting models, integrating ML methods with traditional econometric analysis. In a past life, Sam represented Great Britain at a European and World level in swimming.
Benjamin Ford Strategist
Benjamin Ford is a Researcher at Macro Hive. Benjamin studied BSc Financial Mathematics at Cardiff University and MSc Finance at Cass Business School, his dissertations were on the tails of GARCH volatility models, and foreign exchange investment strategies during crises, respectively. He has previously worked as a Summer Research Student at Cardiff University School of Mathematics where he designed the risk pricing model for their £600 million campus developments.
Viresh Kanabar Strategist Analyst
Viresh Kanabar is an investment strategist with 8+ years of experience, notably contributing to portfolio construction and risk management at CCLA Investment Management, a £12 billion fund. Viresh was also a voting member of the Investment Committee and ran the private asset valuation process. Before his role at CCLA, Viresh made significant contributions during his three-year tenure as a Consultant at Deloitte, where he was a part of the largest P&C merger in 2016.
Neel Mehta Sales
Neel Mehta spent 27 years at differing sell side institutions, focusing on Cross Asset Volatility and Correlation. Having started in FX Options market making
and ultimately migrating to roles in structuring and sales, he most recently worked at Schonfeld’s DMFI Macro Fund in an FX and Commodity Volatility focused trading team.
Iain Wadie Senior Software Engineer, Macro Hive
Iain Wadie is a Senior Software Engineer at Macro Hive. He has a M.Eng. and Ph.D. from University of Bristol and a MIF from London Business School, as well becoming a Chartered Engineer through his work on European Union funded projects. He brings together extensive experience of software development, systems integration, and associated process re-engineering, with automation, first with physical robots in manufacturing then with small and large systems integration projects at Accenture, running an operations team at Barclays in Group Finance and a consulting practice at Oracle. Having built his first neural network in the ‘90s he is pleased to have returned to the AI space more recently with Intelligent Automation vendors and fintechs, applying RPA and AI to those process tasks which have until recently been beyond the reach of computers.
