Drew Gillanders will be hiring for Millennium's new London equities business. Maybe not from Citadel

Drew Gillanders, aged 54, is leaving Citadel and joining Millennium. His exit from Citadel was reported last month. Bloomberg reported this week that Gillanders will soon be running a new Millennium business in London focused on international equities under Pete Santoro and Michael Chung.

Gillanders didn't respond to a request to comment for this article. Both Citadel and Millennium declined to comment. 

Gillanders hasn't actually arrived at Millennium's UK business yet. He's thought to be on a notice period which is likely to last for at least a year. Since his departure, Citadel's international equities business has been run by 40-year-old Nabeel Bhanji from Elliott Management. Bhanji joined in November 2024. Citadel restructured its London equities operation and the international equities business run by Gillanders has now been combined with Citadel's "Strategic Equity Investments" team, run by Bhanji. 

Gillanders himself spent seven years at Citadel after joining in 2019. As Citadel's head of international equities from 2023, Gillanders is thought to have run a business encompassing 10-15 different portfolios. If this is replicated at Millennium, he could be doing a lot of hiring there. 

However, this hiring at Millennium may not involve people from Citadel. Gillanders is likely to be under a non-solicit agreement that will prevent him from recruiting his former colleagues for at least 15 months. 

Citadel also operates in a very different way to Millennium. Speaking to London students two years ago, Gillanders explained that Citadel takes a long-term view on risk and is able to "take more duration than other funds."  

Gillanders elaborated that:

“Some of our peers have a more centralized risk function where if you’re down 2% you have capital taken away from you. This means that you’re having interactions with the risk function when you’re 85 basis points down, and so you’re playing not to lose rather than to win. Your returns in this case will likely be no more than 2% because you never let winners run and you cut losers very tightly.” 

This all sounds a bit similar to the approach at Millennium, where risk limits can be famously inflexible. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that Millennium can cut teams' capital in half when losses hit 5% and then fire portfolio managers when losses exceed 7.5%. Portfolio managers familiar with the flexy regime at Citadel may not be partial to the Millennium approach. 

Gillanders himself will also need to adapt. Millennium's equities business has been co-run by Peter Santoro since 2017. Like Gillanders, Santoro previously worked for Citadel and Morgan Stanley. Unlike Gillanders, who is a former M&A banker and is focused on fundamental investing, Santoro is a career equities trader. 

Santoro moved to London last year and has already overseen a build of Millennium's London equities business. In February, he hired Erdit Hoxha, the former co-head of equities at Goldman Sachs, to sit in London within Millennium's 'office of the chief investment officer.' He also added Antoine Foucher from North Rock in December last year to run "equity advisory services." Foucher then hired Dom Duffy from Squarepoint in August. 

If you want to work for Millennium's expanding London equities business, you could try hitting up Santoro before Gillanders arrives. Alternatively, there's Sameer Buch, the London-based fundamental equities business development executive who joined in May. 

Santoro and Buch are likely to have hired Gillanders. It's not clear how much Millennium paid for the privilege, but DG was likely earning at least $10m at Citadel in London, even though he wasn't listed as a partner at any of its UK entities from 2021. 

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