Balyasny Hires Former Citadel Data Strategies Chief

Balyasny Asset Management hired Halla Yang as a senior quantitative researcher in Chicago, adding experience in alternative data and machine learning for investment research.

Yang joined Balyasny this month after eight years at Citadel. He spent five years as co-head and later sole head of Citadel’s data strategies group, which used data beyond conventional market and financial information.

The group applied artificial intelligence and other analytical methods to identify potential investment signals in complex datasets. Those datasets included satellite imagery and other sources that require substantial processing before investment teams can use them.

Yang left Citadel in April 2025 and spent time outside the firm before joining Balyasny. His earlier roles included data scientist at McKinsey, quantitative researcher at Jump Trading and vice president at Goldman Sachs.

Yang is a grandmaster on Kaggle, a platform for data science and machine learning competitions. A few hundred participants worldwide hold the ranking.