Pay at hedge fund Millennium fell below £1m in London last year
Hedge fund Millennium has a reputation for paying extremely well, particularly when it buying-out new portfolio managers with deferred bonuses from banks or rival funds. Average people at Millennium are not on packages of $50m+, though. In London, they're not even on £1m ($1.31m) now.
Newly released accounts for Millennium Capital Management Ltd for the year ending December 31st 2023, show that the company employed an average of 972 people last year and paid them £754m in total, an average of £776k each.
This was 31% less than Millennium's average London pay in 2022. Then, Millennium Capital Management Ltd. employed 765 people and paid them an average of £1.1m each.
It therefore seems that Millennium Capital Management Ltd. either hired 207 people last year and paid them a lot less than existing staff, or it hired 207 people last year and paid everyone less than before.
It might be a bit of each. Operating profits at MCM Ltd went from £392m in 2022 to £345m last year as turnover fell from £1.48bn to £1.41bn. There was less to go around. But the new staff were also disproportionately lower paid: the proportion of administrative staff at MCM Ltd. rose from 44% in 2022 to 47% in 2023.
Alongside MCM Ltd. Millennium also runs Millennium Capital Partners LLP (MCP LLP) in the UK. This houses its partners and highest paid portfolio managers. Pay at MCP LLP mostly takes the form of profit distribution. The amount of profit available for distribution to partners fell from £224m in 2022 to £189m last year. However, the average allocation of profit per partner rose nearly 10% to £8.9m, reflecting a reduction in the number of partners (14 to 12) and an apparent decision to allow partners to draw more of their profits in 2023 than previously.
How does this pay at Millennium compare to pay at Citadel in London? It's hard to say because Citadel's London accounts are spread across four different reporting entities, whereas Millennium has only two. In 2023, however, the partners at Citadel HF Management LLP had the potential to draw $23m (£18m) each, suggesting that Citadel is by far the more lucrative place to work if you're a top portfolio manager.
Both Millennium and Citadel pay a lot more than ExodusPoint in London, where average pay per head more than halved to £414k last year.
Millennium declined to comment.
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