The hedge fund trading prodigy with a parrot farm in Surrey, and his advice

Hamza Lemssouguer loves parrots. Arini Capital Management, the fundamental credit hedge fund he founded two years ago aged 32, is named after South American parrots with long tails.

Get Morning Coffee ☕ in your inbox. Sign up here.

Lemssouguer doesn't live in the Americas, though. Arini is based in London's Mayfair. However, he also has a farm in Surrey to the south west of the City. There, he breeds parrots. 

Speaking to students this week, Lemssouguer said parrots are his passion. He bred them as a child and stopped when he went to École Polytechnique in Paris to study maths in 2011. During the pandemic, he and his wife reflected that life is short and decided to do something different. "We bought a farm and we started the operation of breeding endangered species of parrot," he explained. "Now we have over 100 endangered species..." 

Lemssouguer doesn't sell his parrots. "The idea is that we try to grow the numbers and hopefully participate in reintroduction efforts in the wildlife further down the road," he told the students. This could be a 20 year endeavour. In the meantime, he said there's no parrots going around the Arini offices.

Lemssouguer began his career trading not parrots but high yield debt. During a six year period at Credit Suisse, he went from being an intern to one of the Swiss bank's most profitable traders. When he left in 2020 his desk had allegedly generated $220m in pnl. 

Lemssouguer said trading credit is more interesting than trading equities because of the financial and legal complexity. "You know you take two exact same businesses in two different countries you might have two different outcomes based on the jurisdiction," he reflected. Credit tends to attract negative people who focus on legal structures and stability of cash flows, he added. Equities attracts positive people who believe in growth stories. 

Lemssouguer says his brother helped him apply for his first job in finance by pointing out that his CV of a "few lines" probably wasn't good enough. When you start out in finance, he says you have to work hard as this mostly what you have to offer. You also need to learn how to parse huge amounts of information and to filter out what's necessary and what's not: "When I had my first day at a Bloomberg terminal 12 years ago, I had a headache and had to take paracetamol halfway through the day because of the amount of information."  

Arini made gains of 7% through to July. Last year, it paid its 67 employees an average of $1.3m. Hamza himself is known for making large directional bets that can generate large returns, or large losses. Speaking to the students, he said that this is an interesting time to work in credit: it takes a while for rate rises to move through the system. Companies typically have fixed rate instruments, said Hamza. As companies refinance at higher interest rates, money is diverted to repaying debt. The cycle is long, and it's only just begun.

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, WhatsApp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. Signal also available.

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libellous (in which case it won’t.)

Photo by Andrew Pons on Unsplash