Morning Coffee: 31-year-old trader's wife ok with seeing him 30 mins a day. Bank CEOs begin rumbling on economy

What's it like to be married to a top trader? Like not being married to a top trader: you may barely see them; even at night they are fiddling with the terminal.

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31-year-old Jeffrey Yan might not be locked in an affair with Bloomberg products, but he appears to be strong on subjugating his relationship to work. His partner might say it's worth it: Yan is the founder of Hyperliquid, a blockchain and cryptocurrency trading exchange that employs 11 people and generated $900m in profit last year. When he cancelled a dinner date she had made it was because he was going to lose $100k.

Yan has a history of working 100 hour weeks, 14 hour days. He cut his teeth in the equities algorithms team at Hudson River and trades "perps" - perpetual futures derivative contracts with no expiry dates. He also owns and runs Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange operating on the blockchain, which he and his small team created themselves, and so it's not just trades that keep him up. Last year, there were nights he was awake at 1.30am and then again at 3am because of issues with Hyperliquid's infrastructure. 

Colossus has a profile of Yan. He is a fan of work. He says: “I think people are just a bit too soft in general. The brain is an organ. If you need to work more hours, you can train for it.” He cuts his own hair and devotes Sunday mornings only to leisure. Yan is described as 'ambitious but not arrogant.' He employs a small handful of intelligent introverts, one of whom likes plush toys and all of whom need bodyguards because of their net worth.

Yan thinks Hyperliquid can take over the world. His "aspirational goal" is for HyperLiquid to house all tradeable products, but he admits that this may take "multi-decades" and be hard. His partner may not see him for a while.

Separately, David Solomon at Goldman Sachs feels gruffly enthusiastic about dealmaking in the current economic situation and yesterday said that CEOs see this moment as the moment to, "drive scale and scale creation in businesses with significant technological change." This thrust, "candidly trumps some of the geopolitical risks because they have the opportunity to do consolidating trades," he said. 

Other CEOs seem to be saying something different. Georges Elhedery, who last year pivoted HSBC's investment bank towards the Middle East and Asia, told Bloomberg that the "some of these uncertainties have initially started to weigh on general confidence,” and that the broader economic impact of war in the Middle East could become a broader problem. Peter Orszag at Lazard deployed a more metaphorical approach and told Semafor we are in a "Road Runner" moment, implying pedalling in mid-air, a precipitous fall and then running on as if nothing happened.   

Meanwhile...

HSBC's head of CEEMEA DCM is going to Bank of America to do something similar. Nour Safra is also leaving HSBC and going to Goldman in Dubai. She was head of DCM for the Middle East and North Africa. (Bloomberg) 

Goldman Sachs shares fell after a surprise drop in fixed income trading revenues and the revelation that the deal pipeline is weaker. (Bloomberg) 

David Solomon said war impacted IPOs. “With the conflict in the Middle East, IPO activity slowed a little bit, particularly in March...The level of uncertainty is higher.” (WSJ)

Balyasny hired Dara Falahi from Capstone in New York. (FN)

Lucien Selce and Alexis Kuperfis were jailed in Geneva for insider trading on a tip from a SocGen banker. They earned $13m and $5m from their trades respectively. Selce has 'gray hair neatly trimmed on the sides and brushed.' Kuperfis likes to wear 'a quarter-zip blue jumper and chinos.'  (Bloomberg) 

XTX Markets CTO Joshua Leahy is going on his way. (Finance Magnates) 

Parents are paying $30k+ for their children to be coached into finance jobs. (Bloomberg) 

Luis von Ahn, who runs Duolingo, gets taxi drivers to interview prospective job candidates on their way to the office. "Part of the interview for us is how they treated their driver. Our belief is if they are gonna be mean to their driver they are probably gonna be to other people, particularly under them, so we did not want that.” (The Times) 

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