London 12/10/2015 - Several former Noble traders are launching Concord Resources Ltd, a new trading house backed by private investors including Ospraie management's Dwight Anderson, sources said on Monday.
Noble's former global head of metals, Mark Hansen, will run the new venture, which will focus on non-ferrous metals, sources told FastMarkets. The company was registered in London on September 22 and also has offices in New York and Hong Kong.
Senior trader David Freeland will head the London office while Scott Evans will head New York and Paul Chen will be responsible in Hong Kong. All three of them have previously worked at Goldman Sachs.
Other traders joining the firm include Jeff Romanek, Paul Wilkes (known as Monty), Elyse Kohyann, Felix and Xavier Cauro, as well as Kazumitsu Futatsuka, several sources said on the sidelines of LME Week here.
Dwight Anderson, who founded US hedge fund Ospraie, will be the chairman of the new company. Other investors include Swiss precious metals firm MKS PAMP Group.
A wave of departures from Noble Resources was reported last week - the firm opted to optimise its business by reallocating capital away from copper, zinc and lead and into alumina and aluminium.
Noble is believed to have made significant losses in physical aluminium trading this year after premiums fell 80 percent since the start of January but one source said the losses in that market had been "[wiped off] the slate". The firm made a profit from copper, nickel, zinc and lead trades, two sources said, but there are question marks over what will happen to the Nyrstar four-year offtake agreement that Noble secured in October 2013.
In March this year, Noble surprised the market by cancelling nearly 100,000 tonnes of lead stocks from LME-registered warehouses to move the metal into fresh rent deals in South Korea. The deal is believed to have made money but also attracted unwelcome scrutiny from the LME.
Noble declined to comment and neither Ospraie nor the traders named above could be immediately reached.
(Additional reporting by Meimei Qin, editing by Mark Shaw)