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Foreign fund houses are losing talent to Indian funds. JM Financial, although it recently lost a few top executives to its erstwhile partner Morgan Stanley, has snagged four senior JP Morgan staff to ramp up its institutional trading business. It has brought in Sameer Lumba, head of equity sales and Rohit Shah, VP and head of sales, trading, besides two others Rajiv Gala and Manish Dabir from JP Morgan, according to The Economic Times. It had also recently hired Ashith Kampani, formerly with Morgan Stanley, as MD of JM Financial Consultants.

The mother of all top level exits was when CLSA India lost four of its top traders to Indian broking firm India Infoline to set up the latter's institutional trading business. In May, Bharat Parajia, head of sales CLSA Singapore, H Nemkumar, country head CLSA India, Vasudev Jagannath, head of sales CLSA India and Aniruddha Dange, head of research, CLSA India, joined Nirmal Jain's outfit. They were offered huge sign-on bonuses too - nine million shares at Rs 440, while the India Infoline is currently trading at Rs 770 (baring today's 6 per cent collapse). The latest we heard is that India Infoline is now hiring people from UBS, another multinational broking house.

Similarly, Barclays Capital lost Peeyoosh Chaddha who moved to Edelweiss Capital as the co-head of AMC business in March this year. There is more to this trend, and it's likely we will see such movements more often. Headhunters attribute the trend to the entrepreneurial culture at Indian fund houses plus huge sign-on bonuses are also being dished out. Says Saket Jain, Partner of financial talent management company VitoIndia, "Fund managers are now looking at more entrepreneurial roles."

There is a huge demand for talent too that managers are jumping ship more often than before. Early this year, JM had sold its institutional broking business to its then partner Morgan Stanley for $445 million, while it retained the investment banking business. Bereft of a broking division, JM recently entered into a joint venture with Asit Kotecha's ASK Securities by picking up a 60 per cent stake for Rs 58.14 crore. And JM is looking to ramp up the staff in a big way.

JP Morgan, which was earlier in talks to acquire Enam Financial, is also not sitting idle. The firm recently hired 15 people to take its total staff to 35 in India. It beefed up its research division by hiring Shilp Krishnan from Kotak Mahindra, and Pradeep Mirchandani from Citi. For the time being, hiring is happening across Indian and foreign funds.