On the heels of a 5.9% loss in October, $17 billion Walleye Capital is making a change.
The firm has cut its head of equity long-short, Anil Gondi, according to a letter to investors, seen by Business Insider.
Following its worst month since March 2020, the firm is taking a hard look at “every aspect” of the firm, the fund’s CEO and chief investment officer, Will England, wrote.
“With that in mind, we are simplifying our internal equity long/short business,” he said. “This decision includes parting ways with our long/short leadership and a substantial portion of our internal long/short investment teams.”
The firm declined to comment. Gondi didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Gondi joined Walleye in July 2025. Before that, he was a longtime stock-picking portfolio manager at Balyasny Asset Management and founded his own firm, 6elm Capital, according to his LinkedIn profile.
This is the second significant personnel departure this year for Walleye’s stock-picking unit. The group’s COO, Matt Giannini, left in September to return to Citadel, Business Insider previously reported.
“Over the past few years, we invested considerable effort in improving the internal business, including bringing in new leadership,” England wrote. “Those efforts did not produce the results we expected, and the opportunity cost and resources consumed have been too high relative to the return.”
In the firm’s letter to investors, Walleye makes clear that it intends to continue trading stocks. Internal teams at the manager will now report to England, and Walleye intends to keep investing in externally run stock-picking funds and hiring internal PMs.
The firm recently hired Anna Dev, who previously worked in business development at Millennium, to help find external opportunities. Business Insider previously reported that the manager is one of several multi-strategy platforms that have put money to work in funds run by former Citadel traders, such as Tommaso Trento’s Benchstone Capital and Fifthdelta, run by Niall O’Keeffe and Tio Charbaghi.
October was a tough month for hedge funds across the board, and stock-picking teams were not spared. Equity-heavy firms such as Point72 Asset Management and Schonfeld Strategic Partners lost money for the month.
Sell-offs in big-tech names such as Meta and Intel highlighted a volatile month in which the S&P 500 index dropped roughly 1%. The amount of short-selling bets against different companies rose close to five-year highs, according to data from Goldman Sachs.
