Balyasny’s Corbets unit sees investor departures as hedge fund revamps stock-picking team

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Balyasny Corbets investor exits

Highlights

Corbets, Balyasny's fundamental stock-picking unit, saw the departures of Thomas Stephens, Kevin Cottrell, and head of trading Ali Lombardo in 2024.
Alberto Mann, Mitul Shah, and David Corwin now lead Corbets, which maintained 15 portfolio management teams and nearly 100 investment professionals as of June.
Despite muted performance in 2024, Balyasny has hired portfolio managers including Ricky Mewani, Mirza Klis, and Stephen Suarez, signaling ongoing investment in talent.

Leadership and staffing changes at Corbets

As first reported by Business Insider, Thomas Stephens and Kevin Cottrell are no longer at Balyasny Asset Management, according to two people familiar with the matter. Stephens led Corbets, Balyasny’s fundamental stock-picking unit, from its 2022 launch until about a year ago and also ran a financial services portfolio until recently.

Stephens joined the firm in 2018 after money-management roles at Millennium Management and Citadel. Cottrell, a technology-focused portfolio manager, joined Corbets at the end of 2023 after running his own fund, KCL Capital, and had also previously traded at Point72 Asset Management.

Corbets is now led by portfolio managers Alberto Mann, Mitul Shah, and David Corwin, according to a person close to the manager. The unit’s website showed 15 portfolio management teams and nearly 100 investment professionals at the start of June, and the biographies for Stephens and Cottrell have since been removed.

Corbets also lost head of trading Ali Lombardo earlier this year, and she has since joined Viking Global in the same role. Her replacement, Ted Drury, the former head of trading for UBS’s O’Connor fund, is set to start next week.

Internal brand strategy and hedge fund implications

Balyasny has also added portfolio managers this year, including Ricky Mewani from Citadel, former Marshall Wace analyst Mirza Klis, and healthcare-focused Stephen Suarez from Hudson Bay. The changes show the firm is still investing in talent even as performance remains muted this year.

While Balyasny has dozens of stock-picking portfolio managers, Corbets is one of two internal brands that trade equities solely for the firm. The other, Longaeva Partners, is run by former Point72 investor Peter Goodwin and began trading roughly a year ago.

Large hedge fund platforms often use multiple brands in the same asset class to separate investment styles or geographic focus, while also helping recruitment and retention by giving investors a more entrepreneurial setup inside a larger organization. In stock-picking businesses, that structure can also improve access to corporate executives because each unit can be treated as a distinct client by sell-side firms.

In our earlier coverage of the Philippine Social Security System (SSS) equity portfolio performance, we detailed how the state pension fund defended recent mark-to-market declines by distinguishing unrealized paper losses from actual cash losses. We also outlined SSS’s long-term, fundamentals-focused approach, noting decades of realized gains and steady dividend income that it says support portfolio resilience and member obligations.

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