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UBS O’Connor, the $5.7 billion hedge-fund unit within Switzerland’s biggest bank, has lost at least six equity traders this year to Millennium Management, BlueCrest Capital Management and Tudor Investment, three people with knowledge of the matter said.

Felipe Cruz. Arnaud Langlois and Mark Napp have left to join the U.K. unit of Millennium, a New York hedge-fund firm with $17.8 billion of assets, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the departures haven’t been publicly announced. Bernard Ahkong and Rabin Tambyraja will join BlueCrest, which oversees $35 billion, the people said. Jason Randolph started working at Greenwich-based Tudor this week, one of the people said.

They’re leaving as O’Connor tries to keep top traders after UBS clamped down on immediate cash bonuses. The Zurich-based lender revamped its compensation structure across the entire bank in February, paying some bonuses in bonds that only vest after five years and can be wiped out if the firm has a capital shortfall. All six of the traders joining outside hedge funds were portfolio managers at O’Connor, the people said.

When you change things, there are risks and opportunities, said Chris Jones. who advises pension funds on investing in hedge funds as a managing director at Bfinance International Ltd. in London. The golden rule for remuneration at a hedge fund is that investors benefit when the manager’s compensation is truly aligned with the risk-and-return aims of those investors.

Millennium and London-based BlueCrest have been hiring employees in the past year as they add assets and expand their range of investments into fixed income and stocks respectively.

The headcount at Millennium, run by Israel Englander. increased by 32 percent last year to 1,250 as assets rose 25 percent to $16.9 billion, regulatory filings show. BlueCrest, the hedge-fund firm co-founded by former JPMorgan Chase trader Michael Platt. has more than doubled its assets since the end of 2009 and is returning to stocks after shutting down an equity hedge-fund six years ago.

Tudor, the $11.6 billion hedge-fund company run by Paul Tudor Jones. is considering starting its first equity fund since stock manager James Pallotta left the firm in 2009, people familiar with the matter said in February.

O’Connor has approximately 90 front-office investment professionals, and like most hedge funds will have departures and new joiners in any given year, Ollie Gadney. a London based spokesman for UBS, said by e-mail. The bank’s North American headquarters is based in Stamford. Spokesmen for Millennium, BlueCrest and Tudor all declined to comment.

Cruz’s registration with the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority has been inactive since May 10, Langlois’s after April 26 and Napp’s since May 1, according to the regulator’s website. Ahkong is listed as inactive since May 8 and Tambyraja as of two days later. The London traders, who have yet to start at their new firms, didn’t answer calls to their UBS telephones and couldn’t be located. Randolph, who is based in the U.S. didn’t respond to e-mails and calls to his office at Tudor.

Ahkong and Tambyraja will be part of a team targeting equities at BlueCrest run by Christian Dalban. who joined the firm in March from Nomura Holdings Inc. to oversee its expansion into stocks, one of the people said.

O’Connor, with offices in London, Chicago, New York, Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo, oversees about 18 percent of the $31.4 billion of assets managed by the Alternative and Quantitative Investments unit at UBS, according to the bank’s website. Its hedge funds, which are private pools of capital whose managers can bet on rising as well as falling asset prices, wager on stocks, bonds and corporate mergers.

The decision to tie some deferred pay to so-called contingent capital bonds, which can be written off if UBS’s common equity ratio falls below 7 percent or the bank needs a bailout, prompted complaints to management by O’Connor traders, one of the people familiar with the matter said.

UBS then reduced the portion that would be linked to the bonds, the person said. In addition, a part of a trader’s deferred pay will continue to be reinvested in the O’Connor hedge funds that they manage. Portfolio managers were told that paying their bonuses with CoCo bonds was a one-time decision and wouldn’t be repeated in future years, the person said.