Balyasny hires pro athlete with BofA credentials to lead global trading
If you’re worried that your finance career is taking away from your time to exercise or play sport, then you’re quite simply making excuses. You have time to be a professional athlete – and also be a hedge fund big shot.
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Stephen Peyser joined hedge fund Balyasny to be its global head of trading and capital markets last month. He joined the firm from Bank of America, where he spent 11 years in its equities team. Six of those years were as head of US cash equities trading; he made MD in 2020.
Before he joined BofA in 2014, he spent five years at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, but during that time (and briefly overlapping with his time at BofA), Peyser had perhaps one of the most interesting part-time jobs in the history of the industry.
During those years, he was a world-class professional lacrosse player. Peyser spent a total of six years playing for the New York Lizards and Chesapeake Bayhawks, bitter rivals who are the most successful Major League Lacross (MLL) teams in history.
Peyser played in the midfield for both teams, winning rookie of the week twice in three weeks, including for a spirited performance against then-defending-champions Philadelphia Barrage. “The win allowed the Pride to finish with a .500 record for the first time since 2003,” sports newsroom OurSportsCentral said at the time. Two months later, he started working on JPMorgan’s equities desk.
Lacrosse is a popular sport for finance types in the US. Former CIA executive and bank CEO A.B. Krongard told Bloomberg back in 2012 that "you could assemble a world-class team" solely from the banking and real estate firms in Baltimore. And the tradition of sunlighting as a banker and moonlighting as a pro lacrosse player was still strong as recently as last year.
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