Meet Deutsche Bank's secret 30 year-old credit trading star

Deutsche Bank's credit trading business is quite something, according to financial services intelligence firm Coalition, which ranked it joint first with J.P. Morgan and Bank of America Merrill Lynch's credit businesses in the first half of 2018. This may have something to do with the efforts of Chetan (Chetankumar Shah) and Ioannis (Yanni/John) Pipilis, Deutsche's co-heads of global credit trading. But it could equally be traced to someone Deutsche insiders say has turned out to be an unlikely star player: Ardacan Celebi, a junior-ish trader on the credit index desk.

Celebi joined Deutsche fourteen months ago after starting his career at J.P. Morgan in 2014 and moving to Barclays 14 months later: he has a history of job-hopping, and with good reason; he's very profitable.

"Arcan Celebi is one of the most profitable people in Deutsche's credit business so far this year," says one colleague. "It's kind of funny - a lot of the more senior guys on the desk have lost money; Arcan is carrying them."

Neither Deutsche nor Celebi himself responded to a request to comment on the claims. In the past year, however, Deutsche has become one of the biggest credit index traders in Europe from ranking around 10th previously, according to iTraxx. Celebi, who works under head of index trading Cedric Lespiau (who was hired from SocGen last year) and who is known internally as Mo Salah due to his theoretical resemblance to the Egyptian football player, is thought to be largely responsible for this.

Celebi's success comes as Deutsche reportedly made $35m by successfully betting on Turkish economic turmoil in August. More recently, though, some insiders suggest the flow credit desk has lost money.

It doesn't help that some of Deutsche's more experienced director-level credit professionals have been leaving. The German bank's direct lending team lost Neha Sethi, who went to Prodigy Finance in August, and Julien Carzola, who's understood to have quit for Nomura. Meanwhile, structured credit trader Varun Garg is said to have left for Credt Suisse, while credit trading Bilal Kahloon has gone to Barclays.

Given Celebi's history of job-hopping, Deutsche may want to induce him to stick around.

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