Smart Hedge Fund

Goldman Sachs Hires Previous Amaranth Traders

Amaranth Advisors, LLC. is officially dead, but I'm glad its employees were taken good care of.

In another sign of Wall Street's intense interest in hedge funds, brokerage firm Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is hiring 17 members of the team that traded credit for the now-defunct Amaranth Advisors LLC, according to people familiar with the matter.

The group will become part of the alternative-asset-management business at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, which houses the Wall Street firm's hedge-fund investments and has $139 billion of its $629 billion in total assets under management.

Amaranth collapsed in mid-September when concentrated bets on natural gas went wrong. But the fate of Amaranth's nonenergy assets and its people shows that the demise of the fund, with losses of $6.5 billion, has hardly dented the hope that hedge funds can deliver outsize gains in a low-return world.

Amaranth's assets, including everything from illiquid investments in Asian companies to leveraged loans in European buyouts to U.S. mortgage securities, were sold off in hotly contested auctions at virtually no discount. Similarly, Amaranth's people have been sought after by hedge funds and investment banks. Other Amaranth traders have landed at banks including Deutsche Bank AG and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., as well as at various hedge funds.

The new Goldman team, under former Amaranth trader Gregg Felton, will pursue credit strategies for the alternative-investment division, first with the firm's own capital and later, possibly, with clients' money. According to letters to investors, Amaranth's credit team was a big driver of performance during the first months of 2006. Mr. Felton couldn't be reached for comment.