Lehman's Suria Resigns to Join Stan Druckenmiller at Duquesne

Ravi Suria, the Wall Street debt analyst who predicted the collapse of both Amazon.com AMZN and the entire telecommunications sector last year, is leaving Lehman Brothers to join the buy side.

Suria, 30, has accepted a job offer from hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller of Duquesne Capital Management, one of the best-performing global hedge funds of the last 20 years, according to sources familiar with Suria's move.

"I'm very proud to have been associated with a lot of people at Lehman Brothers," Suria said today. "While I'm tremendously excited about my new opportunity, I look forward to continuing my relationship with Lehman as a client."

Druckenmiller is perhaps best known as George Soros' longtime right-hand man, who left the famed speculator early last year. Duquesne runs $4 billion-$4.5 billion these days, according to sources familiar with the firm. Suria will join Duquesne as an analyst with a license to range among markets and asset categoies.

Suria's move to Duquesne is noteworthy for at least one reason. It strongly suggests that Druckenmiller shares Suria's bearish views. A hedge fund manager like Druckenmiller does not hire a well-known skeptic like Suria unless he expects more bad news for the financial markets. Druckenmiller happily stays out of the media's spotlight these days, but sources familiar with his thinking say that he is indeed convinced that the U.S. is in recession and that many industries remain vulnerable even at current levels. They add that he has aggressively shorted technology stocks in the last six months.

Suria's move to Duquesne will match an excellent fundamental analyst with one of the top global traders. Suria has focused mainly on individual names in the convertible securities, although his telecom work shows he can analyze entire sectors too. (TSC recently wrote about telecom debt woes in a Sector Spotlight.) Druckenmiller trades multiple asset classes and currencies.

Nonetheless, Suria should have no trouble keeping up. He has a Master's Degree in engineering and came up on the quantitative side of Wall Street. He is capable of contributing to Druckenmiller's derivatives-based trading strategies. (After all, much of the math used to price and trade options and futures is the same as that taught to advanced engineering students.)

Suria and Druckenmiller should get along fine. Both are self-confident intellects. One can imagine that Druckenmiller would be impressed by Suria's bold analytical style. The men also share a low tolerance for mediocre work.

Now that Suria is joining the buy side, he won't have to worry about angry executives like Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, who pressured Lehman to tone down Suria's most recent negative report on the Internet-based retailer. Bezos failed in that effort.