Ex-FrontPoint director returns to sell-side in Hong Kong

Tom Monaco has joined Mizuho Securities in Hong Kong to carry out equity research into Asian financial and bank stocks.

The former hedge fund manager left FrontPoint in New York and has now returned to Asia, where he worked for several years in the late 1990s.

At FrontPoint he worked on the FrontPoint Financial Services Fund from 2007, which won AsianInvestor’s long/short fund of the year title in 2009 for its achievement of being up in 2008, which all will recall was a horrible year for financial stocks.

At that fund he worked alongside renowned portfolio manager and financial stocks guru Steve Eisman. The hedge fund has been haemorrhaging staff recently, including Eisman himself, which likely heralds the end of the Financial Services Fund. Its entire healthcare team were dismissed at the end of 2010.

Monaco is rejoining the sell-side. Before FrontPoint he had spells as a stock analyst specialising in banks at a number of firms in Hong Kong, Tokyo and New York, including Bear Stearns and Keefe Bruyette & Woods. He also worked at the Federal Reserve. At Mizuho he will report to Chris Calderwood.

Mizuho has been building its business throughout Asia, and although it recently pulled out of the prime broking market after only a brief spell, letting go a number of staff, it has made an impact in the alternatives sector via its purchase of Eurekahedge.

There is still two-way traffic between hedge funds and banks. AsianInvestor reported recently that Ashutosh Sinha had wound up his hedge fund Amoeba Capital in Singapore and returned to Morgan Stanley.