The Trade - The Trade Hot 100

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Terence Nahar

Senior investment manager

ABERDEEN ASSET MANAGEMENT

Terence Nahar has built his career on designing liability driven investment strategies for buy-side firms using derivatives in a range of asset classes.

The products he uses within these strategies have undergone significant change since the financial crisis, with regulators completely reforming the over-the-counter derivatives market.

Heading up derivatives first at Royal London Asset Management and then Scottish Widows Investment Partnership – which has now become Aberdeen Asset Management – Nahar has navigated these firms through significant times of change.

Staying on top of widespread change is tough, but Nahar insists that there is much more to his role than just reacting to the effects of regulatory change.

“It is easy to focus on regulatory requirements, but our client base is exposed to much more than just changes in the regulatory environment,” he explains.

“The market is changing just by the fact that it is a dynamic market.

So opportunities and threats present
themselves on a continuous basis.”
Terence Nahar rose through the ranks
at investment banks in the early 2000s,
Nahar with roles at Deutsche Bank and
Goldman Sachs, along with a spell at
consultancy McKinsey & Co in Amsterdam.

Throughout his career his client base has consisted of mostly pension funds and insurance companies in the UK and the Netherlands. In that time, Nahar has seen the market’s use of derivatives change significantly, along with his own role.

“Pension trustees have become much more sophisticated in terms of their understanding of derivatives,” he says. “Take the term ‘swap’ for example, they wouldn’t really know where to place it. Nowadays they fully understand what it is, how it can be used to de-risk a fund and they are much more open to other products being used in terms of structuring and designing de-risk solutions.

“Liquidity has reduced significantly, primarily on the back of regulatory push-back in terms of derivatives used and requiring less leverage being applied in the system, initial margin, variation requirements etc. but I wouldn’t put it all down to regulations. As I said that would be a gross amplification of what has happened in the market.” n

Tim Meggs

Head of trading

FULCRUM ASSET MANAGEMENT

Heading up the trading desk at boutique asset manager Fulcrum, Tim Meggs leads a team which has doubled its assets under management in the two years he has held the role.

His team handles the trading flow for Fulcrum’s strategies and focuses on crunching execution data to improve performance.

At Fulcrum, Meggs also acts as a strategy manager for the multi-asset volatility fund; this involves strategy implementation and evolution along with quantitative research.

The strategy is systematic, and therefore doesn’t require the traditional portfolio manager role, however Meggs’ role is to oversee and assume responsibility for the strategy.

Armed with years of derivatives and quantitative trading experience, Meggs also has a Certificate in Quantitative Finance to go with his Master of Philosophy degree from the University of Oxford.

Meggs has leaned on his years of experience in derivatives trading which tracks back to 2004, where he was an equity exotics derivatives trader at CIBC World Markets.

From there he became an executive director, although still involved in quantitative cross-asset derivatives trading. His duties shifted to trading and positioning a large cross-asset exotic options book at the investment bank.