Michael Ohlsson, the former chief executive of Fidelity International in Australia, has joined a global financial markets trading firm with the brief to launch its funds management arm with external clients.

Ohlsson started last week as chief executive of Tibra Capital Management, the funds management subsidiary of Tibra Trading – a 200-person proprietary trading firm with offices in London, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Sydney and Wollongong.

åHe said yesterday that he had been recruited to build a global funds management business which capitalised on the firm’s strengths as a financial markets trader.  His first task was to decide which products to take to which markets around the world and which channels within each market to concentrate on.

Tibra was started in 2006 by chief executive Danny Bhandari, using sophisticated strategies to trade across various asset classes around the world including equities, bonds, cash and cash derivatives and energy. Its two main funds management strategies are an Australian equity long/short strategy and a Hong Kong equity long/short strategy. It also has a small European strategy. The Australian strategy was launched in September 2007.

Ohlsson said: "Whatever we do we will be leveraging our comparative advantage in trading financial markets, both here and overseas. The underlying trading business has been very successful, using sophisticated strategies in various asset classes."

Of the 200 people at the firm, about 75 are traders and 40 are ‘developers’ who design new trading technologies which aim to speed up the transaction processes.

Ohlsson was chief executive of Fidelity in Australia for about three-and-a-half years until late 2007, relaunching the company into the retail market after it had ended its previously exclusive distribution deal with Perpetual. Prior to that he spent more than 10 years at Barclays Global Advisors as head of institutional business and head of intermediary business.