A Hedge Fund Manager Says SAC ‘Taint’ Is Manageable

Dmitry Balyasny is one hedge fund owner who isn’t afraid of hiring traders from SAC Capital Advisors as long as they were far away from the “messiness” that engulfed the firm during the federal government’s crackdown on insider trading.

“There were people there who did the wrong things and it seems to have been an aggressive culture,” Mr. Balyasny said in a conference call last month with investors in his fund, Balyasny Asset Management. “Quite a number of people are completely clean and had no contact with the messiness that was going on.”

The messiness that Mr. Balyasny referred to was SAC’s guilty plea in November to securities fraud and the insider trading guilty pleas and convictions of eight people who once worked for the firm. To date, Mr. Balyasny’s firm has hired three traders who previously worked in SAC’s office in London, which was shuttered late last year.

In the aftermath of the SAC guilty plea, there have been a lot of whispers in the $2.4 trillion hedge fund industry about an “SAC taint,” which would prevent the firm’s traders and analysts from getting another job. But so far, the taint has not emerged as a real problem, with hedge funds like Mr. Balyasny’s firm as well as BlueCrest Capital Management and Moore Capital Management all hiring people who used to work for SAC.

To be sure, not as many people have left SAC, the firm founded by Steven A. Cohen, as had been anticipated. When the firm pleaded guilty to securities fraud last year, Mr. Cohen said it would transform itself into a family office that would mange mainly some $9 billion of his personal fortune. There was an expectation that SAC, which at one point last year employed 1,000 people, would shed hundreds of jobs. But while the firm has slimmed down and let go of more than two dozen marketing employees, SAC continues to employ about 850 people.

In a letter to employees on Tuesday, Mr. Cohen did not give any indications of further plans to trim jobs at the firm he founded in 1992 with $15 million. By April, the SAC name will disappear and the Connecticut-based firm will operate as a family office under a new name, which has not yet been announced.

Mr. Balyasny, in a recording of his investor call, said he would not be concerned about hiring other people from SAC if they were looking for jobs and could help his fund make money. “We hired several people from there last year and may hire some more from there this year,” he said.

Mr. Balyasny said his hedge fund had a “very thorough vetting and compliance process” for new hires, particularly for traders and analysts coming from SAC. He said that Balyasny’s general counsel personally meets with any job applicant coming from SAC and that the prospective employees are interviewed more than a dozen times before a job offer is made.

But Mr. Balyasny said any future hiring from SAC would be done selectively. He said the firm most likely would avoid hiring anyone who traded technology or health care stocks at SAC because those were the sectors where the authorities found evidence of “improprieties.”

In the call, Mr. Balyasny mostly discussed his firm’s performance in 2013 and where he anticipates the firm making money this year.

If Mr. Balyasny’s view on SAC is not a minority one in the hedge fund industry, that probably bodes well down the road for Mr. Cohen’s other employees who are looking for new jobs.