Brevan Howard Asset Management

Overview

Brevan Howard Asset Management was established in 2002 by Alan Howard, alongside fellow Credit Suisse proprietary trading desk alumni Jean-Philippe Blochet, Chris Rokos, James Vernon, and Trifon Natsis. Howard, who had generated substantial profits trading interest-rate products for Credit Suisse's Financial Products division, seeded the firm with personal capital and quickly drew institutional inflows by offering a systematic, risk-managed approach to global macro trading. BHAM operates as the manager-of-managers arm, distinct from the direct-trading Brevan Howard Master Fund, and is designed to identify, allocate to, and monitor external hedge fund talent across liquid strategies. BHAM's primary investment strategy centers on discretionary global macro and relative-value fixed-income trading, executed by a network of external sub-advisors. The platform allocates capital to independent trading teams managing liquid portfolios across interest rates, foreign exchange, sovereign credit, and commodity markets. BHAM provides its managers with centralized infrastructure, risk management, and balance sheet, in exchange for a share of performance fees. The geographic footprint spans developed markets — with heavy concentration in G10 rates and FX — as well as select emerging-market positions, particularly in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe, where the firm has historically maintained trading relationships. Team size and current deployment figures for BHAM specifically are not publicly disaggregated from the broader Brevan Howard group, which at its peak in 2013 employed roughly 400 people and managed $40 billion across all vehicles, according to Bloomberg. The group maintains additional offices in Geneva, New York, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In recent years, the firm has expanded beyond its core macro franchise, launching a digital assets division in September 2021 with an initial $250 million allocation from Howard himself, and opening an Abu Dhabi office in 2023 to manage a reported $10 billion allocation from the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. BHAM's structural differentiator is its historical position as an institutional capital-preservation tool within a macro-focused organization. While many fund-of-hedge-fund platforms operate as independent allocators, BHAM sits inside a trading firm, allowing it to evaluate external managers with the same rigor applied to internal trading teams. The platform benefits from the group's centralized risk systems, which apply real-time position-level transparency demands on underlying managers — a constraint most external allocators cannot impose. This architecture has historically attracted pension funds and sovereign wealth funds seeking macro exposure with an embedded risk-monitoring layer.