Hamza Lemssouguer didn’t come up through the usual hedge fund pipeline. He built his reputation the hard way, trading distressed and high-yield credit on a bank desk, where the margin for error is thin and the reward for spotting stress before everyone else is enormous. Before running his own fund, he served as a veteran debt trader and CIO at Credit Suisse, where he ran the European high-yield credit trading business and built a name for reading market dislocation before it became consensus.
That instinct eventually became the foundation of something bigger. In October 2021, Lemssouguer made the leap, raising seed capital through a strategic partnership with Squarepoint Capital, which helped launch the fund and provided its infrastructure, operations, and technology. He had actually begun building the strategy earlier, inside Credit Suisse Asset Management, before spinning it out with his team into a fully independent firm: Arini.
The scale-up since has been remarkable. What started as a seed-backed launch has grown into one of Europe’s leading credit hedge funds, now managing over $10 billion. Arini didn’t stop at credit trading either in 2023, the firm launched its debut European CLO platform, pricing a €401.3 million new-issue transaction investing in European broadly syndicated senior-secured loans, a major step in building out the firm beyond its original strategy.
Even as the firm has scaled, Lemssouguer has stayed close to the trading floor, and remains a regular voice on where credit markets are headed next. Earlier this year, he warned that rising costs of capital would eventually force significant defaults and disruption across markets, arguing that “the market always gets ahead of it.” He’s been candid, too, about how he got here. In an earlier interview describing his time at Credit Suisse, he was known as a junk bond trader who reeled in huge profits by spotting stress in credit markets, and said he was still doing exactly that on the buyside, “seeing it everywhere.”
Away from the trading desk, Lemssouguer keeps a relatively low profile. He lives in London with his wife, and the couple shares a passion for wildlife conservation, running a parrot breeding program focused on endangered species. He is a graduate of École Polytechnique.
From a high-yield trading desk to a $10 billion credit fund in under five years, Hamza Lemssouguer’s story is a case study in conviction: reading market stress before it hits the headlines, and betting a career on it.
