Goldman Sachs insiders say Justin Gmelich is causing them concern at Millennium

Justin Gmelich used to work for Goldman Sachs. Now he works for hedge fund Millennium. But Goldman Sachs insiders fear Justin has not forgotten them. They think he wants to pluck talent from their midst. 

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Gmelich left Goldman nearly six years ago now. He was played off the trading floor by a five-piece band playing "My Way" by Frank Sinatra, which is the kind of thing that happens when you've been at Goldman for 20 years and were very popular there as the COO of fixed income trading. 

Initially, Gmelich joined King Street Capital, another hedge fund. He only became co-chief investment officer of Millennium in 2023 when a previous incumbent - Bobby Jain - left to found his own hedge fund. And so it was that Goldman's fears began.

Because he left Goldman long ago and didn't join Millennium directly, Gmelich is not constrained by a non-solicit clause. He can hire who likes from Goldman Sachs for his new employer, and he potentially likes a lot of them.

Sources at Goldman say Gmelich is close to some of their current and former finest people. They include the likes of Toh Ne Win, Goldman's chief data officer for global markets and one of Gmelich's favourite GS quants, who left for Millennium in July 2023, shortly after Gmelich arrived. They also include Michael Kaprelian, the former head of management and strategy for Goldman's fixed income business, with whom Gmelich worked closely for over a decade and made an MD. Kaprelian joined Millennium in March 2025. There are concerns that more hires will follow.

Millennium already has a substantial ex-Goldman Sachs contingent. Before Gmelich arrived in 2023, Millennium had already hired Jeff Verschleiser, a former Goldman partner who once reported to Gmelich as its head of mortgage backed securities and credit risk. It also has Stacey Selig, who joined as deputy COO in 2021 and was formerly co-head of global structuring for the markets team at Goldman. It has Olga Naumovich, who joined as head of technologym Miami, in 2022 and previously spent 22 years working for Goldman, where she was most recently chief data officer and head of client experience. Millennium has Akash Patel, Goldman's former head of emerging markets trading. And it has Scott Rofey, a former Goldman rates trading MD. 

Any of these people could pluck talent from Goldman Sachs, but Goldman insiders say it's Gmelich that keeps them awake at night: his popularity at Goldman was such that people would willingly work with him again. Kapralian, for example, is understood to have been recently promoted as COO of the private arm of Goldman's asset and wealth management business, but he left anyway when Gmelich called. 

It's not just Millennium. Citadel Securities also hired Avanish Bhavsar, Goldman's former head of fixed income distribution in early 2023. It went back for Jim Esposito the co-head of Goldman's markets division in 2024. 

"Bhavsar, Gmelich, Esposito, these were our key strategy guys," says one Goldman insider. "Now they're competing against us."

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