The head of Cubist's centralized high-speed trading unit is out after less than a year

• The exec leading Cubist's centralized high-frequency trading unit is leaving the firm.
• Vibhav Bukkapatanam joined last year as the head of a new high-frequency trading initiative.

Cubist Systematic Strategies has been investing tens of millions into a centralized trading operation. One of its marquee hires, the lead of its high-frequency trading initiative, is now leaving the firm, according to people familiar with the matter.

Vibhav Bukkapatanam joined Cubist, the systematic trading division of multimanager hedge fund Point72, last year as head of high frequency but is leaving after less than a year on the job, according to people familiar with the matter, who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the company's internal affairs.

A Cubist representative declined to comment. Bukkapatanam did not respond to requests for comment.

Bukkapatanam was a key hire and involved in recruiting other senior personnel for Cubist's central trading group, the people said. He has a background in FX futures, working at Radix, 3Red, and most recently Citadel Securities, where he was a quant researcher in high-speed, machine-learning-driven trading strategies, according to his LinkedIn and personal website. While he only officially joined Cubist last year, he was recruited in 2021 and was subject to a two-year noncompete clause.

While Cubist — and Point72 — are known for deploying capital to independent PMs and investing teams, President Denis Dancanet has in recent years been building out an internal, centralized unit to trade across a variety of strategies, from HFT-style market making to crypto. He has spent tens of millions luring personnel from top-tier firms, including Citadel, Jump Trading, Squarepoint, and Tower Research.

It's not uncommon for multistrategy hedge funds to have centralized teams or center books, which potentially offer higher-margin returns as they typically don't employ the "eat-what-you-kill" payouts given to individual portfolio managers. These efforts can create tension with individual pods, which may view such efforts as competition for resources.

While center books usually aggregate data and signals from a fund's broader trades, Cubist's central team is more like a traditional quant-trading fund within the firm, coming "up with its own strategies and trades independently from the other pods and the rest of the firm," according to a 2023 blog post from Dancanet, who joined the firm in 2020.

"The difference compared to the pod model is that it's much more collaborative and there's open communication between the various teams across strategies."