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Chris Rokos’ hedge fund is on a roll. Following a promise to double headcount in London, Rokos Capital Management has just hired another senior investment bank trader.

Omar Gzouli, a former managing director at Barclays investment bank who held various senior roles in equity derivatives at the bank in New York, has just joined Rokos Capital Management in London as a partner, according to the Financial Conduct Authority register.

Gzouli is representative of the sort of senior hires that are being brought into Rokos as it expands. He was previously head of U.S. exotics trading for the Americas at Barclays, as well as leading its equity and funds structured markets (EFS) trading business in the region. He joined the bank as part of its acquisition of Lehman Brothers’ U.S. business in 2008.

He’s the second senior hire at Rokos this month. As we reported earlier, Ramnek Matharu, a former Goldman Sachs’ equities trader who made managing director at 31 in 2006 and retired from the bank before his 40^th birthday three years ago. Again, he was based out of New York.

Chris Rokos is the former star trader at Brevan Howard, who started Rokos Capital Management in 2015 after successfully contesting a high-profile non-compete dispute with his former employer that would have stopped him working in a hedge fund role for five years. Headcount has steadily grown over that period of time, but so-far this year it’s added five new investment staff and now has 25 people registered with the FCA.

Rokos initially recruited a number of quantitative and technical staff to get the fund off the ground, but has now turned its attention to hiring portfolio managers. It’s planning to double the number of portfolio managers from five to 10 in a “gradual expansion” and could increase assets under management from its current $6.7bn to $15bn.

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Before artificial intelligence and quantitative finance became popular, risk careers were all the thing. In the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, people who’d occupied trading jobs in investment banks switched into risk jobs in order to survive. Michael Balzac looks like one of those people. And the move has more than paid off.

Balzac has just joined Bank of America Merrill Lynch in New York City as a director-level senior risk manager on the global rates G10 FX and commodities desk. Previously, he spent eight years as global head of rates market risk at Credit Suisse, also in NYC.

Balzac’s move to BAML reflects the resurgence of macro trading desks as rates diverge globally. It also suggests the wisdom of jettisoning a traditional ‘front office’ banking career when a better offer becomes available in a growing support function.

Balzac himself has oscillated between the middle and the front office. He started his banking career in 2001 as a controller on the credit derivatives proprietary trading desk at Deutsche Bank before moving to Credit Suisse as a market risk manager in 2004. As trading jobs boomed in 2006 he moved to a VP level front office trading job with the Swiss bank for two and a half years. But when the crisis hit in 2009, he reverted to risk management. There, his career has gone to strength to strength.

Don’t assume that you have to gravitate towards the front office to get ahead. Sometimes it makes sense to leave trading behind. It worked for Balzac.

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Investment banks’ summer internships are incredibly competitive to get into, and there are so many young, type-A type personalities crunched up against each other that tension inevitably occurs. Some think the best tactic is to view their peers as competitors for full-time roles and spend as much time crafting a plan to deal with fellow interns as they do trying to impress their potential employer.

But I’m just going to lay it out for you: Fellow interns are your friends, or at least there is no reason why most shouldn’t be. While other IB summer analysts are technically the competition, unless you are at a boutique that takes 15 interns for five seats, you have no reason to worry about what the person next to you is doing. Here are three reasons why being overly competitive with your fellow IB interns is not the way to go:

1. Don’t obsess over the number of banking seats

Investment banks have internships so that they can get 10 weeks to screen potential hires. This is also a great time for them to invest in training and building relationships with future employees.

Their goal is retention. If a bank could give out offers to 100% of their interns and all 100% are accepted, then they would be extremely happy. The internship allows them to weed out anyone who they don’t think would be a good fit, in terms of either work ethic or culture.

Many interns come in thinking that they need to be better than everyone else or cut others down to get hired. That isn’t the case. A good worker who is a strong cultural fit and works well in teams is what banks are looking for in an analyst.

Banks also like giving offers to interns who they believe will accept. They like to tout their offer acceptance rates as an idea of how well their bank is perceived by new candidates. This also reduces their time and investment in finding new candidates. If they hire solid interns, then they don’t need to go and recruit new full-time analysts. Many banks are trying to do as little full-time recruitment of juniors as possible.

2. Your work speaks for itself

Some interns spend a lot of time worrying about what the interns in other groups are doing instead of thinking about their own work. You may get dismayed to hear one intern got to go to a bunch of meetings while you have been spending all your time building pitch books.

An intern that is put on four deal teams while his fellow intern is consistently put on pitch book after pitch book does not make one more likely to get an offer than the other. In the end, both can get offers, as it doesn’t matter how they compare against each other; it matters how well they work with their respective teams on each given task.

3. Competition is toxic

Many interns come in thinking that competition motivates them to succeed. It does in many instances, but as a banking intern, if you want to compete with anyone, then it should be yourself. The more you focus on what the next intern is doing, the worse you will do at your own work. Whoever you are working for will notice it, and the staffer will catch it.

If your fellow interns are working on something and learning a new skill that you feel would benefit you, then ask to learn it from them. You can make an enemy or you can make a friend, but only the latter will help you to get better at your own job. There will be times when you may need someone to help you get access to a file or print books, and this is when your intern friends will be great assets.

Some interns get caught up in the gossip mill of which interns are doing poorly at their job. Most full-time analysts view intern gossip as a big negative. No one likes someone with a bad attitude who takes pleasure in someone else’s weakness – cattiness and douchebaggery are not well-regarded. Bankers want to hire people they can sit next to for 80 hours a week – rather than hyper-competitive personalities, they are going to prefer the ones who consistently do good work and work well as teammates.

Anish Patel is a former investment banking analyst at BMO Capital Markets and corporate development consultant at Madison Wells Media. He created Valuation University, a resource for undergraduates interested in investment banking that provides career-development advice, insights into life at the desk, and financial modeling and valuation guides. Patel is the founder of a sparkling wine cocktail startup, Tinto Amorio.

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In a few days, approximately 50,000 candidates globally will take one of the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exams, which are given the first week of June, while you can also take Level I in December. If you’re one of them, you have reason to feel stressed. The pass rate isn’t high (43% of the 51,134 candidates who took the Level I exam in June 2016 passed, which is in line with past years) and the amount of studying you’re advised to do is enormous.

So what can you do to improve your chances? We’ve asked a selection of professionals, students, coaches and people from the CFA Institute for tips. This is what they suggest.

1. Engage in study sessions that are marathons, not sprints

If you want to pass the CFA Level I, you’re advised by the CFA Institute to spend six months preparing and to do between 300 and 400 hours of studying per exam during that time.

“Success is strongly correlated with the date you start revising,” says Nathalie Columelli, a former Deutsche Bank trader who now coaches people in the CFA exam.

Now is therefore not the time to be cramming for the June exam. Now’s the time to be starting to study for the exam in December!

“I like telling people to start studying six months before the exam, because it puts time on your side,” said Jamie Ziegler, the founder of JZA Coaching and a member of the CFA Institute’s retained speaker program. “By covering less material per day, and increasing the number of days, it also gives the brain a greater chance to absorb the material, as the result of more nights of sleep.”

In other words, the earlier you start studying, the greater your chances of success.

“This is the best moment to start revising [for December],” says Patricia Donnelly, head of consultant services at BNP Paribas Investment Partners and former president of the CFA Society France. “It’s generally calm at work and on the markets. If you start now, you can get ahead before things heat up after the summer.”

2. Plan carefully

Six months is a long time. And during that time it’s easy to go astray and to spend less time studying than you’d intended.

To prevent yourself from neglecting study times, Columelli advises using Outlook to block out 12 hours of revision time every week over the next six months. If things get in the way, make sure you transpose those blocked out hours to other times.

Philippe Maupas, president of CFA Society France, advises that students need to build two or three completely free weeks into their study schedules. That way, you can absorb any professional or personal issues which might come up. If nothing comes up, you can simply have a break. Or you can use that extra time to go back over the most difficult parts of the syllabus.

A common mistake is “not building ‘life’ into their study calendar, and running out of time,” Ziegler says.

3. Find a method of studying that works for you

“The best thing is to use a revision technique that you’ve employed for previous exams and that’s worked for you,” says Columelli. “Some people work best in the mornings, others at night. Some like to go to the library, others will work in their office or at home – each to their own!”

Corporate finance student, Bastien Doutreleau is currently doing an internship in Spain and preparing to take the CFA level II exam in December. When he studied for Level I, Doutreleau said he watched CFA videos and is regularly exchanged information with professionals who’d already passed the exam. Talking to those people with successful careers helped remind him why he decided to take the exams in the first place. On the other hand, Doutreleau said that he avoided CFA exam forums, which can be stressful places when you’re studying.

Ziegler suggests a secret weapon for those candidates who decide to use it: Meditate 5-8 minutes a day, ideally before getting ready to study.

“Meditating clears the mind, calms the nerves and relaxes the body,” Ziegler said. “In other words, it creates the ideal environment for deep concentration, problem-solving and memorization – and the research backs this up.

“I believe students need to find the methods and routines that work best for them, whether it’s solo or in a group,” she says. “And all students can benefit by building a short meditation practice into their study schedule.”

4. Make the most of the materials on offer

The CFA itself offers materials that will help you prepare for the exam.

“With your login and password you can access a heap of information and advice from the CFA site itself,” says Columelli. “Candidates too often neglect this,” she adds.

Donnelly suggests that students nearing the end of their study period look at the list of ‘Learning Outcome Statements (LOS)’ provided by the CFA Institute. They’re especially good for running through during a commute, or on the morning of the exam, she suggests.

“Buy study aids – audio as well as print,” said Jeffrey Keil, the owner and principal member of Keil Fiduciary Strategies, a mutual fund business consulting firm. “Don’t assume that older versions of the texts will suffice – they may not be up-to-date.”

Expect fintech questions on this year’s exams and even more in years to come when there will be a new set of introductory readings.

5. Practice, practice and practice

Some candidates spend way too much time on practice questions, drilling and drilling, rather than really taking the time to memorize the curriculum and understand the concepts. Also, don’t focus obsessively on certain parts of the curriculum that you think will make up the bulk of the test while neglecting others.

“It’s essential that you’re able to respond to the questions without stopping and that understand each one quickly and in the sort of conditions you’ll encounter in the exams,” says Bastien, who regularly put himself through timed mock exams prior to level I. “This is the best way of finding out how good you are and what you still need to work on. It will also give you confidence before the big day,” he said.

Go over hundreds of prior exam questions and understand why the answers cited are the best choices,” Keil said.

“Throw in twists to the questions and see if you can work out how the different scenarios change the answer,” he said. “Work through the math, by hand, for the numeric questions using many different scenarios – make sure you are fast.

“Don’t underestimate how well you must know the materials and how fast one must work to get through the entire exam,” he said.

6. Don’t leave anything out

Each of the ten units is important for CFA level I, says Maupas. You can’t leave anything out.

The first time he took CFA Level I, Bastien says he didn’t devote enough time to the economics material, on the grounds that it involved 300 page of coursework for just 10% of the marks in the exam (while other units were 100 pages of coursework for 15% of the exam). This was a big error, he admits.

It’s particularly important that you know the small subjects without much coursework extremely well. This is especially true for the ethical and professional standards section, says Donnelli. “A wrong note here can compromise your success in the whole exam if you’re on the border of passing and failing,” she says.

7. Have a strategy

The passing score in the CFA exam is a matter of utmost secrecy, but is thought to be around 70%.

If you want to pass, you’ll therefore need to be good at everything (see point six).

Bastien advises against studying one particular area at a time. Instead, he suggests proceeding in the style of a ‘crab’ and covering several disciplines at once during study sessions whilst alternating theoretical with quantitative disciplines.

Columelli advocates paying particular attention to details on subjects you’re traditionally good at in order to avoid careless mistakes. Work harder on the subjects where you achieve irregular results during mock exams, she adds.

8. Look after yourself as the exam approaches

“As the exam draws closer, you need to treat yourself a bit like a baby,” says Columelli. “Eat regularly, go outside, take in some fresh air at least twice a day.”

If you’re in a full time job, Donnelli advises taking some half days. They’ll help you relax and give you more time for studying. Some employers will even offer time off for exam preparation, she says.

9. Don’t disqualify yourself on the big day by doing something stupid

The CFA website has important information on the materials you can take into the exam – read it carefully. Make sure the information on your passport conforms to what you’ve written on the CFA entry forms. Recharge your calculator batteries. Give yourself enough travel time – remember that quite a few people will be converging on the exam hall.

10. Retain your common sense

As with all exams, you should:

– Start with the easy questions.

– Always give an answer. You have nothing to lose.

– Make an intelligent guess if you don’t know the answer.

– Don’t panic. At worse this is just preparation for your next attempt!

“Remind yourself that, if you don’t pass, you have to wait some time to take the next shot,” Keil says.

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Compliance jobs have been in demand in Hong Kong for several years as banks – HSBC and Standard Chartered chief among them – hired more staff to help tackle a growing global and local regulatory burden.

Over the last 12 month, however, vacancy levels have started to fall, say recruiters. Banks are investing more in regulatory technology and are finally reaching their required headcounts in compliance.

Still, compliance professionals in Hong Kong can move jobs with comparative ease in 2017 – and pick up large pay rises. Banks may not be expanding in the function, but they continue to hire new compliance employees to replace people who leave.

If you work in compliance, how do you know whether your Hong Kong salary remains competitive?

We’ve averaged out the latest Hong Kong salary surveys from five recruitment agencies across four compliance functions to produce the first table below, which shows base pay from analyst to director level.

If you’re looking to specialise in an area of Hong Kong compliance likely to provide a large salary, try anti-money laundering. The function is the best paid from VP-level onwards and AML candidates are also enjoying the largest salary rises.

“Candidates in this space are now getting 20% to 30% salary uplifts when changing jobs,” says Winnie Leung, director of regional compliance at Pure Search in Hong Kong. “This is due to large demand in the market and the talent pool in Hong Kong being relatively small. Banks, asset managers and consulting firms are all targeting the same pool, so employers need to pay a premium.”

Compliance bonuses have also been rising in Hong Kong in recent years. Directors can now earn bonuses equivalent to 50% of their base salaries, as the second table below (which applies across all compliance functions) shows.

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Last year I left my job as a corporate banker at one of Singapore’s three local banks to work in the same field at a foreign firm. So my experience of a Singapore bank is still fairly recent, but I also have a point of comparison, having been with my current European bank for more than 12 months.

I worked for the Singapore bank for about four years after joining straight from university. Here’s what I enjoyed and didn’t enjoy – and here’s what’s in store if you’re a graduate about to work for a local bank yourself.

First of all, I found the workplace to be genuinely co-operative. This may sound cheesy, but we worked together like a family and everyone helped each other out without much fuss. There weren’t many big egos.

The environment was nurturing to juniors and less cutthroat than at global banks, where graduates are often pushed to the brink with little support.

Colleagues from my own department and from others were actually willing to spare the time to teach me new skills – rather than bark orders at me or give me unhelpfully short answers.

The credit officers, for example, would walk me through how to write credit papers. There was no formal training programme telling them to get involved in this – they just did it to help me and the bank.

Generally speaking, juniors weren’t looked down upon or patronised – the bank put in a lot of effort to try to get us to stay. Promotions were fair, based on what you delivered rather than politics.

Surprisingly, what helped set up my career at the bank was doing a two-month stint in our call centre during my traineeship. As a result, by the time I became a relationship manager, I was already very good at solving client problems, and the banks’ operational procedures were already drilled into me. In a foreign bank you typically get thrown into the deep end and you learn these kind of things on the job.

Of course, working for a local bank in a front-office role comes with some big downsides.

The domestic firms have more ranks on the hierarchies than foreign banks do. My bank had three layers at VP-level alone, and two at AVP.

With the exception of Stan Chart and Citi, global banks here have much smaller local headcounts than Singapore banks do. So while promotions are made on merit, there’s a lot of competition for each promotion spot because there are plenty of people at the same level as you. It takes a long time to inch up the many steps of the management ladder.

And while Singapore banks have a co-operative culture, their sheer size means you rarely get much worthwhile face-time with senior managers in your department. My team at the European bank is fairly small and my ex-colleagues from my old firm are surprised at how friendly I am with my team head.

The work I did as a junior corporate banker at the Singapore bank could get tedious – think reviewing financial covenants for clients every quarter,

My new bank gives me access to large, more international clients. At the Singapore bank, by contrast, I was covering small and medium-sized companies and some were struggling to pay their debts because of a downturn in my industry.

Finally and importantly, the pay is terrible for RMs at Singapore banks. It would have taken me four to five years at my old bank to get to the same pay level as a fresh graduate receives at my current one.

Many bankers at local firms aren’t aware of just how significant the salary gap is. My former boss, a very experienced guy, was shocked by how much money I’d been offered to join a global bank.

Having said all that, I don’t regret my time at the local bank because the training and the get-your-hands-dirty type of work I did there improved my people management skills and set me up nicely for my current role.

Lucy Ng (we have used a pseudonym to protect her identity) is a corporate banker at a major European bank in Singapore.

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Financial services jobs go in and out of fashion. In 2001 equity research for internet companies was all the rage. In 2006, structuring collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) was the thing. In 2010, credit traders were popular. In 2014, compliance professionals were it. In 2017, it’s all about machine learning and big data. If you can get in here, your future in finance will be assured.

J.P. Morgan’s quantitative investing and derivatives strategy team, led Marko Kolanovic and Rajesh T. Krishnamachari, has just issued the most comprehensive report ever on big data and machine learning in financial services.

Titled, ‘Big Data and AI Strategies’ and subheaded, ‘Machine Learning and Alternative Data Approach to Investing’, the report says that machine learning will become crucial to the future functioning of markets. Analysts, portfolio managers, traders and chief investment officers all need to become familiar with machine learning techniques. If they don’t they’ll be left behind: traditional data sources like quarterly earnings and GDP figures will become increasingly irrelevant as managers using newer datasets and methods will be able to predict them in advance and to trade ahead of their release.

At 280 pages, the report is too long to cover in detail, but we’ve pulled out the most salient points for you below.

1. Banks will need to hire excellent data scientists who also understand how markets work

J.P. Morgan cautions against the fashion for banks and finance firms to prioritize data analysis skills over market knowledge. Doing so is dangerous. Understanding the economics behind the data and the signals is more important than developing complex technical solutions.

2. Machines are best equipped to make trading decisions in the short and medium term

J.P. Morgan notes that human beings are already all but excluded from high frequency trading. In future, they say machines will become increasingly prevalent over the medium term too: “Machines have the ability to quickly analyze news feeds and tweets, process earnings statements, scrape websites, and trade on these instantaneously.” This will help erode demand for fundamental analysts, equity long-short managers and macro investors.

In the long term, however, humans will retain an advantage: “Machines will likely not do well in assessing regime changes (market turning points) and forecasts which involve interpreting more complicated human responses such as those of politicians and central bankers, understanding client positioning, or anticipating crowding,” says J.P. Morgan. If you want to survive as a human investor, this is where you will need to make your niche,

4. An army of people will be needed to acquire, clean, and assess the data

Before machine learning strategies can be implemented, data scientists and quantitative researchers need to acquire and analyze the data with the aim of deriving tradable signals and insights.

J.P. Morgan notes that data analysis is complex. Today’s datasets are often bigger than yesterday’s. They can include anything from data generated by individuals (social media posts, product reviews, search trends, etc.), to data generated by business processes (company exhaust data, commercial transaction, credit card data, etc.) and data generated by sensors (satellite image data, foot and car traffic, ship locations, etc.). These new forms of data need to be analyzed before they can be used in a trading strategy. They also need to be assessed for ‘alpha content’ – their ability to generate alpha. Alpha content will be partially dependent upon the cost of the data, the amount of processing required and how well-used the dataset is already.

JPMorgan big data

5. There are different kinds of machine learning. And they are used for different purposes

Machine learning has various iterations, including supervised learning, unsupervised learning and deep and reinforcement learning.

The purpose of supervised learning is to establish a relationship between two datasets and to use one dataset to forecast the other. The purpose of unsupervised learning is to try to understand the structure of data and to identify the main drivers behind it. The purpose of deep learning is to use multi-layered neural networks to analyze a trend, while reinforcement learning encourages algorithms to explore and find the most profitable trading strategies.

JPMorgan machine learning classification

6. Supervised learning will be used to make trend-based predictions using sample data

In a finance context, J.P. Morgan says supervised learning algorithms are provided with provided historical data and asked to find the relationship that has the best predictive power. Supervised learning algorithms come in two varieties: regression and classification methods.

Regression-based supervised learning methods try to predict outputs based on input variables. For example, they might look at how the market will move if inflation spikes.

Classification methods work backwards and try to identify which category a set of classifications belong to.

7. Unsupervised learning will be used to identify relationships between a large number of variables

In unsupervised learning, a machine is given an entire set of returns from assets and doesn’t know which are the dependent and the independent variables. At a high level, unsupervised learning methods are categorized as clustering or factor analyses.

Clustering involves splitting a dataset into smaller groups based on some notion of similarity. For example, it cant involve identifying historical regimes with high and low volatility, rising and failing rates, or rising and falling inflation.

Factor analyses aim to identify the main drivers of the data or to identify best representation of the data. For example, yield curve movements can be described by the parallel shift of yields, steepening of the curve, and convexity of the curve. In a multi-asset portfolio, factor analysis will identify the main drivers such as momentum, value, carry, volatility, or liquidity.

8. Deep learning systems will undertake tasks that are hard for people to define but easy to perform

Deep learning is effectively an attempt to artificially recreate human intelligence. J.P. Morgan says deep learning is particularly well suited to the pre-processing of unstructured big data sets (for instance, it can be used to count cars in satellite images, or to identify sentiment in a press release.). A deep learning model could use a hypothetical financial data series to estimate the probability of a market correction.

Deep Learning methods are based on neural networks which are loosely inspired by the workings of the human brain. In a network, each neuron receives inputs from other neurons, and ‘computes’ a weighted average of these inputs. The relative weighting of different inputs is guided by the past experience.

JPMorgan neural network

9. Reinforcement learning will be used to choose a successive course of actions to maximize the final reward

The goal of reinforcement learning is to choose a course of successive actions in order to maximize the final (or cumulative) reward. Unlike supervised learning (which is typically a one step process), the reinforcement learning model doesn’t know the correct action at each step.

J.P. Morgan’s electronic trading group has already developed algorithms using reinforcement learning. The diagram below shows the bank’s machine learning model (we suspect it’s blurry on purpose).

JPMorgan algorithmic trading architecture

**10. You won’t need to be a machine learning expert, you will need to be an excellent quant and an excellent programmer**

J.P. Morgan says the skillset for the role of data scientists is virtually the same as for any other quantitative researchers. Existing buy side and sell side quants with backgrounds in computer science, statistics, maths, financial engineering, econometrics and natural sciences should therefore be able to reinvent themselves. Expertise in quantitative trading strategies will be the crucial skill. “It is much easier for a quant researcher to change the format/size of a dataset, and employ better statistical and Machine Learning tools, than for an IT expert, silicon valley entrepreneur, or academic to learn how to design a viable trading strategy,” say Kolanovic and Krishnamacharc.

By comparison, J.P. Morgan notes that you won’t need to know about machine learning in any great detail. – Most of the Machine Learning methods are already coded (e.g. in R): you just need to apply the existing models. As a start, they suggest you can look at small datasets using GUI-based software like Weka. Python also has extensive libraries like Keras (keras.io). And there are open source Machine Learning libraries like Tensorflow and Theano.

JPMorgan machine learning 2

11. These are the coding languages and data analysis packages you’ll need to know

If you’re only planning to learn one coding language related to machine learning, J.P. Morgan suggests you choose R, along with the related packages below. However, C++, Python and Java also have machine learning applications as shown below.

Machine learning tables

machine learning r

machine learning r3

12. And these are some examples of popular machine learning codes using Python

Machine learning python

machine learning python 2

Python code 3

13. Support functions are going to need to understand big data too

Lastly, J.P. Morgan notes that support functions need to know about big data too. The report says that too many recruiters and hiring managers are incapable of distinguishing between an ability to talk broadly about artificial intelligence and an ability to actually design a tradeable strategy At the same time, compliance teams will need to be able to vet machine learning models and to ensure that data is properly anonymized and doesn’t contain private information. The age of machine learning in finance is upon us.

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Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

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For the past two years Steve Cohen has been lying relatively low. Yes, he has a desk smack bang in the middle of the trading floor of his $11bn family office Point72 Asset Management, which houses around 1,000 employees, and has building a sizeable new presence in London and Asia, but this was a quiet time.

But Cohen’s hiatus from managing external capital was only really every likely to last until 2018. He was restricted by a civil settlement from supervising a registered fund until then, and Point72 has hinted that it was open to the idea of managing external capital for some time. The WSJ suggests Cohen is coming back big – he has plans launch a hedge fund with $20bn in AUM. This is larger than the $16bn SAC managed at its peak, although the $11bn currently overseen by Point72 is included in the new $20bn target.

As a reminder, SAC pleaded guilty to insider trading in 2013 and was forced pay out $1.8bn in fines. Although Cohen was under investigation, he was never charged and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s push to have him barred for life from the industry didn’t come to fruition. Instead, over the past two years, Cohen has employed over 1,000 people to manage his own personal fortune, and been making a push to open and grow new offices in Asia and the UK (following the closure of SAC’s London office in 2013), as well as its Stamford, Connecticut HQ. He’s also reinvented himself as a kind of “head coach” passing on pearls of wisdom to portfolio managers.

If nothing else, Cohen’s firm at least engenders loyalty – the average tenure of portfolio managers is 7.5 years, and former senior staff at SAC in London’s operation who never wanted to leave in the first place came back when it reopened its UK office in January 2015. Cohen’s firm has started hiring in graduates directly to address what he views as a shortage of talent in the industry, and has started to embrace the quant revolution by deploying algorithms that mimic his best portfolio managers’ trades, teaching all new recruits programming and data science techniques and offering unlimited holiday to lure scarce quant talent across.

Maybe he’s all set for the big day, but there’s one area where Point72 is likely to make concessions in order to hit the $20bn target, according to WSJ – fees. In its glory days, SAC would charge 3% annual management fee and a 50% cut of all trading profits. Now, this is likely fluctuate and the high rates will only apply when the firm registers a “banner stretch of investment gains”.

Separately, ever wonder why so many firms are struggling to hire technologists? Well, in an extensive blog, Dan Wang has attempted to shed some light into why the number of computer science graduates has remained low over the past ten years, despite a massive untick in demand and status for programmers. As Wang points out, a lot of developers feel they don’t need a computer science degree to get a top job anyway – MOOCs, bootcamps and self-teaching tends to get a lot of people in. Or maybe a lot of students still wander into degrees without thinking of the appeal of their skills after graduation, perhaps CS university degrees are too theoretical for the real world, or (whisper it), tech just still isn’t cool.

Meanwhile:

Deutsche Bank has just made a major fintech investment banker hire with Tommaso Zanobini joining from Jefferies (Business Insider)

And named Jeffrey Mensch as a new managing director in M&A. He’s an expert in tax structuring. (Business Wire)

Alex Gardega, the sculptor of Wall Street’s “Charging Bull” really hates the new addition of “Fearless Girl”. He’s just installed a “Pissing Pug” next to it (Market Watch)

HFT pioneers are leaving to “see what other fun is out there” (Financial Times)

AI pretenders fear: Google is launching an AI VC fund run by engineers (Axiom)

“I was rejected well over 100 times in a four month span” (Wall Street Oasis)

Your brain prefers an hour of work and then 15 minutes break (WE Forum)

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If you’ve spent your career in banking and finance, the chances are you’ve got some spaces in your CV. Maybe you’ve been bringing up children (men and women)? Maybe you quit to try a different career and then realized that was a bad idea? Maybe you’ve been ill? Maybe you found yourself out and couldn’t get back in again, or just wanted a break?

Whatever the reason for your gap or gaps, you can still get back in. You’ll need to start by rewriting your CV, from scratch – don’t just edit what you had before! Here’s how to go about it.

1. Structure your CV to beat the applicant tracking systems (ATS)

If you’ve been out of the job market, you might not understand the importance of the Applicant Tracking System or ATS. Some 99.9% of recruiters now use an ATS (recruitment database) and 80% of jobs advertised online are within an ATS. If you don’t understand how to get past one, you’re not going to get anywhere.

An ATS is basically an algorithm which screens your CV to see if it’s appropriate for the role you’re applying for. It’s vital you get the right key words in the right places, or you will be stuck in online limbo forever and your CV won’t even get to a human being. Be warned that an ATS cannot normally read data in a table, text box or PDF. Don’t use abbreviations, unless they’re universally recognized in your field (eg. ECM or DCM are fine).

If you have less than four years’ experience you’ll need to be sparing with keywords. In this case your CV shouldn’t be longer than one page. However, if you’ve got more than four years’ experience then go for it: use as many key words as possible.

2. Title your CV with your target role

What are you? If applying for the same job you had before, then under your name and contact details, give yourself the professional title that you had before you left the industry. ie Corporate Finance VP, Business Analyst, Operations Director. If you’ve never had this job title, then try: ‘Seeking: Project Manager’. This immediately aligns you with your target role in the mind of the recruiter.

3. Make a ‘career break sandwich’

You need to surround your career break with information which will appeal to recruiters. Think of this information as the bread and the career break as the filling – like a sandwich,

The top layer of bread is your profile at the top of your CV. This should detail all the very best bits about you in relation to your target role. Even if it happened 10 years ago, it doesn’t matter – it’s all about how you sell yourself. Avoid pronouns and soft skills. Think impact. What can you deliver?

Then comes your filling. This is where you squeeze in your break from finance. Keep it short and to the point: ‘Following planned career break from finance, now seeking a return to ……’ Don’t make this the focus of your CV.

Then comes some more bread: your professional experience section. This is where you emphasise what you’ve done professionally. The sandwich analogy (tried and tested by WomenReturners.com) applies to every part of your job search, from your cover letter to your interview.

4. Talk about your achievements, not your responsibilities

The market has changed. It’s no longer okay to paste your old job spec into your CV.

You need to talk about YOU, not the job you did.

The only reason you’ll be hired is because of the value you’re going to bring. Demonstrate that you can and have delivered. Think about challenges, initiatives, clients, projects, efficiencies, revenues, awards and impacts in your previous roles. What did YOU do? What was the outcome? Every point made must illustrate something specifically about you – remember FAB – fact, action and benefit.

5. Sell your breaks

Did you spend your career breaks doing something interesting? Have they made you a better person? Give a flavour of what you got from your time out. Talk about what you were up to in the ‘Additional Information’ section. Especially include pursuits that kept you commercially aware and developed relevant skills. Voluntary work shows integrity and leadership. Marathon running shows stamina, energy and commitment. Helping friends with start-ups and consultancy shows you’ve been thinking financially.

6. Mind your language

CV and cover letter language has changed. Phrases like “extensive experience, proven track record, motivated, results oriented, dynamic, team player, fast-paced, problem solver” are old fashioned, clichéd and meaningless. Don’t state the obvious. If you’re looking for work on a trading floor, of course it’s fast-paced – there is no need to say it. “Exceeded expectations” is an archaic term left over from the 70s.

Focus on solo achievements where possible. State the value you have delivered in the past and what you will deliver in the future. If you topped your goals, explain how and what the outcome was. Give tangible examples.

7. Don’t say the F word (at first)

Lastly, if you’ve been out of the market you might want to work flexibly. City empoyers are aware of the importance of flexible working, but you won’t want to ask for this upfront. Flexibility is part of the negotiation once the offer is on the table, not a condition of them making you the offer from the outset.

Victoria McLean is a former recruiter at Goldman Sachs and founder of City CV, a UK-based CV writing service.

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Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

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Photo credit: Blank by JasonBechtel is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

One of the best ways of securing a bigger title if you work in investment banking is to trade a bulge bracket bank for a smaller player.

So-called title inflation is a common tactic among bankers and traders leaving the likes of Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan for European or Asian banks. Take Isabel Mahony, the former co-head of financial credit trading at Morgan Stanley, who has just joined Japanese bank SMBC Nikko Capital Markets as head of fixed income (admittedly, after a long break from the industry), or Vaheesan Sinnathamby, an executive director at Goldman Sachs, signed up to Haitong Securities as a managing director earlier this year.

But it works the other way too. The latest example we’ve found is Thomas Blondin, who was a managing director and head of emerging markets trading for Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEEMEA) at Cantor Fitzgerald. He left Cantor in October, but has just joined Goldman Sachs as an executive director.

Blondin was hired by Cantor in October 2013 as part of the bank’s buildout of emerging markets sales and trading staff. It said at the time that he would focus on sovereign and corporate credit and will establish the bank’s CEEMEA emerging markets presence in London.

Blondin is the second ex-Goldman EM credit trader to arrive at Goldman in recent months. Steve Gooden, an MD in emerging markets trading at the bank, joined Goldman in November, reporting into head of CEEMEA EM credit trading, Akash Patel.

This is not necessarily a sign that Goldman is building in this area, more than it has gaps to fill in a sector where hiring is heating up. Gooden replaced Kevin Kelly, who departed for Jefferies, which is making a push in emerging markets credit trading, late last year. Other exits include Gokhan Buyuksarac, a highly-rated EM trader who left for Nomura last month, Damien McCaughley, who left for Susquehanna International Group and Andy Skraba, who quit for SocGen.

But maybe Goldman’s emerging markets desk has some big name allure. It’s led by Kunal Shah, the hot shot trader who made MD at 27 and partner four years later. Shah was previously a macro prop trader at the bank until 2007, when Dodd-Frank clamped down on bank’s trader their own money, and made the switch into emerging markets trading, where he’s been ever since.

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Wall Street has a problem – Donald Trump’s anti-immigration stance has turned off overseas applicants, and it’s the hottest sectors that are suffering.

Quants are the new kings of Wall Street, and banks are clamouring to hire more technology professionals in the age of automation, and yet fewer people are applying to these sectors in the U.S. than this time last year. Our data suggests that application numbers for IT jobs are down 20% for the first five months of 2017 compared the same period last year – before Trump’s election and before the UK voted to leave the European Union – while applications to quant jobs fell by 19.3% year on year.

Just as the Brexit referendum has impacted financial services professionals’ desire to apply to jobs in the City of London, Trump’s controversial presidency – along with the lure of tech behemoths such as Amazon and Google – have impacted the desirability of employment in the financial services industry across the U.S.

International applications to U.S.-based jobs from candidates in the U.K., Canada and Singapore/Hong Kong are down approximately 22%, 42% and 30% respectively year-to-date compared to the same period of 2016. Candidates based in the U.S. are not as dissuaded from applying – applications are down by around 14% over the same period.

Trump was elected on November 8 and his inauguration took place on January 20, meaning 2016’s figures reflect pre-election applications while 2017’s figures show applications in the wake of Trump’s surprise win. The president’s talk of changing the H1-B program and more significant changes to the immigration system has put a damper applications for tech and quant roles – typically the hardest for Wall Street firms to fill.

“More people coming back from abroad than asking to go abroad, and there are not as many individuals from abroad trying to come here – if they don’t have a work visa already, good luck,” said Robin Judson, the founder of recruitment firm Robin Judson Partners.

But what explains the equally significant drops in applications to U.S. jobs on the buy side – asset management, hedge funds, private equity and venture capital, collectively down around 22% year-over-year – as well as corporate banking (-21%), research/quantitative analytics (-19%) and IT/information services/operations (-20%)?

Some Wall Street professionals have left financial services altogether

One factor is that more experienced financial services professionals are changing careers, with many landing jobs at Amazon or big Silicon Valley firms such as Google and Uber, while others have joined a startup or started their own company.

“Fewer people are pursuing a longer-term career in financial services – after getting a few years of experience on Wall Street they are moving into other fields,” said Judson. “They may be moving to technology firms but they are not coders or programmers. People who have been bankers or fundamental analysts or research analysts on the buy side are moving into sales and marketing, financial and strategy roles.”
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If you want a senior banking job in Europe right now, you’ll probably need to come to London to find it. Come 2019 that could all change. After Brexit, it’s starting to look like analysts, associates and VPs could be in London and MDs could be located in Paris, Frankfurt and Dublin.

So says a new document from the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), the Paris-based regulator of Europe’s securities markets.

After Brexit, ESMA fears banks will try to minimize disruption to their operations by simply opening “letter-box offices” in EU-regulated jurisdictions whilst keeping the bulk of their activities in London.

ESMA doesn’t want this to happen and has already begun stipulating the conditions under which so-called “outsourcing” to London will be impermissible after 2019.

“As a general principle, EU market participants can only outsource or delegate tasks or functions [to the UK], but not responsibilities,” it says in today’s document, “…the ability to direct and control outsourced or delegated functions must always be retained by the market participant initiating the outsourcing or delegation [within the EU].”

Put simply, ESMA says “tasks and functions” concerning European clients can still take place in the UK after Brexit, but the responsibility for those tasks and functions will need to lie within the EU.

Peter Snowdon, a partner specializing in financial regulatory law at Norton Rose Fullbright in London, says it’s early to draw conclusions, but that if this is indeed the arrangement ESMA wants it should come as no surprise: “This would not be dissimilar to the way all outsourcing works. Under most outsourcing arrangements it’s common to outsource the function, but not the decision making in a strategic sense.”

The result, however, could be a dramatic change for the banking job market.

Ever since the mid-2000s banks like Goldman Sachs have had very few managing directors (MDs) in Frankfurt despite having hundreds of junior staff there. Continental European offices have been run out of London. Post-Brexit, London could be run out of Continental Europe.

It’s not just the senior “responsible” staff that ESMA wants in Paris and Frankfurt. Today’s document also specifies “important” activities and functions that ESMA says should not be located in outsourced centres (ie. London). These include: internal control functions, IT control infrastructure, risk assessment and compliance functions. The whole of the middle office, basically. In a worst case scenario, London will be left to front office juniors and VPs.

The good news for senior bankers who want to stay in London is that ESMA’s tentacles aren’t that long. New Financial, a think tank, says only a third of the business currently conducted in the City of London relates to the European Union and that only a fifth takes place under current “passporting” arrangements that allow banks based in the City to operate in Europe despite not being directly regulated there. ESMA may only be able to influence between 20% and 33% of jobs in the City, therefore.

The bad news is that banks are going to want to manage their costs. As Richard Gnodde, chief executive of Goldman Sachs International, said in a recent podcast, Goldman Sachs doesn’t want to segment its trading operations between London and Europe and doing so will increase costs. In a post-Brexit world, therefore, will banks really have two layers of senior management in Europe and in London? Or will they opt to run London as an outsourced centre full of junior staff taking orders from Europe. If ESMA has its way, it looks like the latter.

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Whether you’re among the select few who have passed the CFA, or are frantically cramming for the upcoming exams in June, it’s good to know how the qualification will affect your job prospects. As the CFA Institute itself admits – the CFA in itself will not get you a job, and it needs to be combined with the right experience. But where is it most highly-valued?

There are around 125,000 people who have either passed one level of the CFA, or are full Charterholders, on the eFinancialCareers CV database. We’ve crunched the numbers to find which firms are most likely to employ CFAs – based on the proportion of resumes mentioning either the CFA or Charterholder status – which sector you’re most likely to work in and how long you’re likely to have worked in the industry. Our results suggest that only a tiny proportion of people working in any top financial services organisations have passed all three levels of the CFA. Even on the buy-side the minority of employees have the any level qualification under their belt.

This supports the CFA’s own figures, which suggest that J.P. Morgan, UBS and Royal Bank of Canada are the biggest employers of CFA charterholders. J.P. Morgan employs over 250,000 people, but just 1,780 – or less than 1% – have passed all three levels of the CFA.

Our stats suggest that Pimco and Blackrock are the biggest proportional employers of CFAs by some distance – 24% and 21% of employees at these firms respectively in our database had passed some level of the exam. More surprising, considering the lack of CFA traction in hedge funds, is that hedge fund Bluecrest Capital Management and private equity firm KKR come in third and fourth with 18% and 16% respectively. The highest ranking investment banks were Jefferies and Goldman Sachs, with 15% of employees either studying for the CFA or holding the full charter. Meanwhile, J.P. Morgan, RBS and Societe Generale were the smallest employers of CFAs in the banking industry.

Asset management, not surprisingly, was by far the the biggest employer of CFAs by sector – 16% of all people on our database mentioning the CFA work in asset management. More surprising is the fact that 7% of all CFAs on our database worked in investment banking jobs and just 4% worked in wealth management. You also have a greater chance of working in risk management than a trading role if you take the CFA exams, our stats suggest.

Our data indicates that juniors are far more likely to go through the CFA exams. This chimes with the stats suggesting that more university students are taking level one – either as an undergraduate or as part of their Masters in Finance course. However, our analysis of the CFA’s directory shows that those working in investment banking with charterholder status tend to be at associate level or below. The CFA is clearly becoming more of a badge of honour among the uber-qualified juniors getting jobs in investment banking now.

Photo: Valeriy Kachaev/iStock/Thinkstock

From internal auditors to corporate bankers, from data scientists to financial crime experts – some candidates in Singapore and Hong Kong are still short supply and high demand.

If you’re in one of these hot Asian banking job functions, however, don’t get too complacent during the interview process.

Recruiters have spotted a recent uptick in disgruntled finance professionals looking to leave their current positions because the bank ‘over sold’ the responsibilities of the role in order to recruit them in a competitive job market.

Here’s how to find out during an interview whether the vacancy you’re applying for is really as good as it appears on the job description.

1. Research before the interview

While researching the bank is par for the course for candidates, many people fail to do enough digging into the actual vacancy – and they don’t ask the right questions at interviews as a result. “You must really understand the job in advance of the interview – for example, discuss it fully with a recruiter and any friends you might have in the target company,” says Maniyadeth Narayanan, a consultant at career advisory firm Lee Hecht Harrison in Singapore.

2. Go beyond the job description

“Establish what the manager’s top priorities are for the role, why they were chosen, how they align with the bank’s broader goals, and what the performance expectations are for the job,” says former ANZ corporate banker Jerald Chen, now a recruiter at Kerry Consulting in Singapore. “Based on how this is articulated you can determine whether the bank’s plans for the job have been clearly thought out and cascaded through the organisation. If some parts of the story don’t fit right – for example, setting high growth targets while shrinking headcount – this might be a signal to ask more questions.”

3. Find out why the incumbent is quitting

Finding out the real reason for the departure will help you determine whether the job is all it’s cracked up to be. “Candidates should always be mindful of any employers who are unable to address their concerns – the interviewer should be able to answer queries on why the incumbent is leaving or has left,” says Lynne Roeder, managing director of recruiters Hays in Singapore.

4. Talk to team members

Being grilled from people at all levels of the bank is common at graduate level, but it doesn’t always happen for more experienced hires. If you have concerns about the role, it’s in your interest to request additional interviews or informal meetings. “Besides HR and the line manager, you should meet with other members of the team or with senior management where possible,” says Roeder. “It’s an excellent indicator for assessing the reality of a job, company culture and team dynamics.”

5. Be wary if interviewers dominate the conversation

When an interviewer talks too much it’s a tell-tale sign that they’re desperate to hire and are bigging up the job beyond its real scope. “It is always better to have an open two-way conversation during the interview. As a benchmark, candidates should ask almost as many questions as the interviewers,” says Orelia Chan, an associate director senior manager at Pure Search in Singapore.

6. Or if they say yes to everything

It’s also a red flag if the interviewer keeps on agreeing with you despite you asking a series of probing questions about the job. “If they show too many compromising signs – such as saying yes to any requests – they actually come across as trying too hard to attract you,” says Chan.

7. Spot KPI mismatches

“It can be a warning sign if the KPIs for the vacancy don’t match what the usual KPIs are in that job function,” says Angela Kuek, director of search firm Meyer Consulting Group in Singapore. “For example, in a client-services role, one typical KPI is turnaround time on client requests. But if the interviewer instead keeps mentioning audit quality and checks, the role may not as client-facing as you expected.”

8. Note if they keep talking about timing

If the interviewer continually talks about needing someone to start as soon as possible, it could be a sign of desperation rather than just urgency, says Kuek. The role may be hard to fill and suffering from high turnover because previous incumbents have found it too challenging.

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From trading becoming automated to robots taking over the back-office, it’s no secret that technology is transforming (and sometimes replacing) jobs in the Asian banking industry.

Front-office roles are also feeling the effects of technological change – and not just because investment bankers have swankier internal IT platforms at their disposal.

More importantly, bankers must get to grips with how tech is impacting clients (and potential clients) in the industry sectors they focus on.

In my opinion (I’ve held several senior jobs in Asian IBD), bankers need to be able to spot Asian tech trends in advance. They need to know and network with the emerging tech-driven companies across Asia that might one day have M&A or capital markets requirements.

While in the recent past tech-trend spotting was the domain of TMT specialists, now every sector banker must be tech savvy if they want to succeed in their career.

Even if you’re not a TMT banker, tech is now eating into your industry and into your job. Banking is no longer neatly compartmentalised.

Real estate sector bankers have traditionally worked on deals involving commercial buildings and hotels, but companies driven by technology are shaking up their industry. Co-working firm WeWork, for example, is expanding in Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Healthcare bankers are witnessing their industry being revolutionised by pharmaceutical technology companies, while those in FIG are grappling with the rapid rise of fintech in China, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Meanwhile, for consumer bankers, technology is changing patterns of consumer behaviour – online delivery companies are expanding across Asia, for example.

Country coverage bankers don’t need to be quite as tech savvy, but they do need to understand tech trends in their markets, in particular how governments support technology.

These trends can come to light very quickly, especially in emerging Asian markets. China was a primarily cash-based economy until recently – foreign credit cards weren’t widely accepted – but now it’s common for even small merchants to accept the mobile payments system WeChat Pay.

That’s the kind of trend that a good China coverage banker should have picked up upon a few years ago.

But while bankers should ideally keep abreast of (and help predict) tech-driven market shifts in their sectors, too few of them are.

It’s the nature of investment banking that people are focused on the next six to nine months of their deal pipeline. That’s what will keep them afloat in the short term.

Bankers will often say they don’t have enough time to study future trends – they’re too busy. However, when a big tech trend or new tech company hits your sector, it’s too late to catch up and win business. Someone else will already be advising these clients.

So devoting time to uncovering the technology shifts in your sector will pay dividends long term.

To do this you need to get out there and speak to the tech community. I don’t mean your clients or even big prospective clients; I mean small start-ups – companies that aren’t ready for an IPO in the near future, but might be in the longer team.

In banking, tech savviness means more than keeping up with technology, it means staying ahead of the game.

Hong Kong-based Eric Sim is a former investment bank MD who is now a career coach and writer.

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Traders at Wall Street banks, including J.P. Morgan, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, are twiddling their thumbs, frustrated by the low market volatility and interest rates that have led to a boring-yet-challenging trading environment.

Goldman Sachs already blamed low volatility for its poor performance in the first quarter, and the way things are going the second quarter doesn’t look good either. – And not just at Goldman. J.P. Morgan says revenue from its trading businesses has dropped 15% so far in the second quarter from the same period a year ago because of low market volatility. Fixed-income trading is down for the first two months of the period and equities are up slightly.

The Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s unexpected election win spurred more corporate bond and interest rates trading over the past year, boosting trading revenue across Wall Street. Now, however, the fixed income reboot isn’t happening after all. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan also said trading revenues would be lower in the second quarter compared to last year. Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman said his firm is seeing similar declines in trading volume, with its second-quarter trading revenue on pace to drop at least 10%.

“Low rates, a more cautious outlook on rates, low volatility have led to low client flows and a generally quiet, subdued and challenging trading environment,” said J.P. Morgan CFO Marianne Lake at an investor conference in New York. “There’s not a lot to trade around right now, and so there’s not a lot of market themes.”

On the other hand, Credit Suisse is more optimistic, with the bank’s director of investment strategy and research telling Bloomberg that “animal spirits seem to be back in both the real world and the financial world.”

Separately, as director Ridley Scott prepares his long-awaited sequel Blade Runner 2049 for a fall release, a famous quote from the classic 1982 original – “‘More human than human’ is our motto” – now applies to front-office executives at one of the biggest banks on Wall Street.

Whether you call them cyborgs, human-android hybrids or replicants as in the movie, Morgan Stanley is preparing to enhance its 16k-plus financial advisers with machine-learning (ML) algorithms in an attempt to create an unstoppable wealth-management army.

The ML algos suggest trades, take over routine tasks and send advisers reminders when their clients’ birthdays are near, according to Bloomberg.

The brokerage behemoth’s primary goal for the project – known by its top-secret code name “Next Best Action” – is to use artificial intelligence (AI) to upgrade its workforce to better compete with fully automated robo-advisers. The bank is betting that wealthy families will gravitate more toward human advisers with ML-algorithmic assistants than mass-market asset-allocation software, although it is planning to offer one of the latter as well.

Algorithms will send Morgan Stanley employees multiple-choice recommendations based on things like market changes and events in a client’s life such as considering a mortgage and dealing with the death of a parent. ML programs will catalog all of advisers’ phone, email and website interactions, then track and improve their suggestions over time with the goal of generating more business.

Eventually the AI assistant will be able to answer questions by sifting through the bank’s 80k annual research reports, execute wire transfers and update a digital repository of client documents, such as wills and tax returns. Morgan Stanley is hiring associates to train baby-boomers who aren’t so tech-savvy to use the assistants.

The adoption of this technology is not a good sign for financial advisers’ compensation – top advisers used to be able to land multimillion-dollar bonuses by jumping to a competitor, but the combination of regulatory changes and automation will put a significant damper on that.

“Advisers [backed by algorithms] are going to be part of a value proposition, rather than the service conduit for the industry,” said Kendra Thompson, a managing director at Accenture, told Bloomberg. “The cutting of the bonus check, it’s nearly over.”

Financial advisers afraid that ML and AI are going to put them out of business have to pin their hopes on the old saw that the wealthy have complicated financial-planning needs that are best met by human experts. Tell that to the cyborgs.

Meanwhile:

As AI becomes powerful enough to forecast market moves better than humans, the next sector of the financial services industry it will disrupt is equity hedge funds.

This Goldman Sachs business hires people with piercings who wear jeans to the office and write on walls, tables and windows – and it is changing the broader bank’s culture. (Business Insider)

Goldman promoted U.S. equity trader Elizabeth Martin to the head of EMEA equities execution and global chief operating officer for electronic equities execution services. (The Trade)

A Citi currencies trader, who his boss described as a “good guy” but fired for confirming the identity of a client in an electronic chat with a rival, lost his employment lawsuit against the bank. (Bloomberg)

UBS is moving staff to lower-cost, smaller cities. (Finews.com)

The head the U.S. prime brokerage and clearing business at Societe Generale has left to join Euronext as chief information and technology officer. (The Trade)

This man went from working as a scientist at an aerospace manufacturer to Merrill Lynch, and now he works with entrepreneurs. (WSJ)

The pay for the CEOs of the biggest financial services companies in the U.S. doesn’t always match their performance. (WSJ))

Do a cost/benefit analysis of having an investment conscience. (Bloomberg)

Tips for throwing a work party without getting fired. (Bloomberg)

Literary genius Marcel Proust kept in close contact with his banker and made aggressive bets as an investor. (MarginalRevolution)
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Photo credit: Ladd Co., The Shaw Brothers, Warner Bros. & Blade Runner Partnership
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Two decades ago, data seemed fairly finite. There was macroeconomic data, like GDP figures and there was microeconomic data, like company reports. If you were cutting edge, you might have traded against meteorological data.

Today, that’s all changed. Data has exploded. As J.P. Morgan’s giant machine learning report explains, data sources have multiplied exponentially. Data can be generated by individuals (social media posts, product reviews, internet search trends), by business processes (company exhaust data, commercial transaction, credit card data, order book data), or by sensors (eg, cameras that track shopping habits).

These new “alpha generating” data sources have become a significant source of competitive advantage for investors. J.P. Morgan predicts that analysts and portfolio managers who don’t have access to these data sources will be left behind.

Not all the new data is used by banks, hedge funds and other financial services companies, but a lot is. JPM estimates that finance firms account for around 15% of spending in the $130bn big data market. The bank expects the market as a whole to grow to over $200bn by 2020.

If you want to work in or with big data, you need to get with the leading companies in the burgeoning data industry. J.P. Morgan identifies a large number of them in its machine learning report, and we’ve extracted some of the most interesting below. The data they provide can be used to influence a broad range of investing decisions across equity and fixed income markets. Some, like iSentium or Quandl have been set up by ex-bankers and analysts and are focused on the finance industry. Others, like Repustate are more oriented towards monitoring brand perception among consumers.

Some areas of the data industry (eg. blog sentiment and social media monitoring) are young and there are multiple small companies competing in the same space. Some consolidation in the list below therefore looks likely, but for the moment these are some of your best bets if you want a big data job that feeds into financial services. Good luck.

1. Accern

What? Trading alerts and analytics are derived from relevant finance-related news processed on over 300 million public news websites, blogs, social media websites such as Twitter, and public financial documents such as SEC filings.

2. Alexandria

What? Algorithms that assess the sentiment of unstructured information – such as high-value financial news feeds.

3. Alphamatician

What? Collects data from dozens of sources that collectively build a clear picture of such things as company and brand health, product and product category pricing and demand trends, customer engagement, and company risk factors.

4. Audit Analytics

What? Tracks issues related to audit, compliance, governance, corporate actions, and federal litigation from a broad range of public disclosures, including approximately 20,000 SEC company registrants.

5. Brave New Coin

What? A Market-Data Engine for the Blockchain & Digital Equities industry.

6. Brickstream

What? 3D Stereo video using bespoke cameras for counting visitors at stores.

7. Dataminr

What? ‘Transforms real-time data from Twitter and other public sources into actionable alerts.’

8. Dataprovider.com

What? Reports on information extracted from more than 100 million websites in 40 countries.

9. DataSift

What? Does analysis on data sources like Bitly, Blogs, Boards, Daily Motion, Disqus, FB, Instagram, IMDB, Intense Debate, LexisNexis, NewsCred, Reddit, Topix, Tumblr, Videos, Wikipedia, WordPress, Yammer and YouTube.

10. Descartes Labs

What? Full imagery archives (some including data only a few hours old) from hundreds of satellites.

11. Discern

What? Up-to-date data on companies, retail stores, restaurants, oil wells and real estate.

12. Eagle Alpha

What? Provides analytical Tools which enable clients to do proprietary analyses and Data sources includes a database of all the best alternative datasets worldwide

13. EIDOSearch

What? Patented pattern matching technology to project probable event outcomes and find relationships in Big Data.

14. Estimize

What? An earnings data set with exclusive insight on over 2000 stocks.

15. Factset Revere

What? A database of supply chain relationships

16. GDELT Project

What? Creating a platform that monitors the world’s news media in print, broadcast, and web formats.

17. Genscape

What? Data acquisition from satellite reconnaissance, artificial Intelligence, and maritime freight tracking.

18. Heckyl

What? Real time trending news from the web, government wires, news wires, blogs and Twitter.

19. Inferess

What? Turns news feeds into event-driven Analytics feeds.

20. InfoTrie

What? Scans and monitors millions of websites, blogs, and business news publications in real-time to analyze 50,000 + stocks, topics, people, commodities and other assets.

21. iSentium

What? iSense App transforms over 50 million Twitter messages per hour into a realtime sentiment time series.

22. Knowsis

What? A web intelligence company using cutting edge natural language processing and data science to extract value from non-traditional online sources.

23. Lexalytics

What? Processes billions of unstructured documents every day. It translates text into profitable decisions.

24. MarketPsych

What? Develops sentiment data across major news and social media outlets.

25. Markit Securities Finance

What? Global securities financing data.

26. MatterMark

What? A data platform to search companies and investors and create actionable lists of leads.

27. Premise

What? Millions of observations captured daily by a global network of contributors.

28. Quandl

What? Financial, economic and alternative data.

29. Quant Connect

What? Huge amount of data relating to past trades.

30. Quantcube

What? Real-time Big Data analytics to predict macro trends, success and failures of companies and individual behaviors.

31. Pricestats

What? Price information from over 1,000 retailers across nearly 70 countries.

32. Ravenpack

What? Transforms unstructured big data sets, such as traditional news and social media, into structured granular data and indicators to help financial services firms improve their performance.

33. RelateTheNews

What? Real-time analysis of text data.

34. Repustate

What? Perform sentiment analysis and extract semantic insights from social media, news, surveys, blogs, forums.

35. Return Path

What? Uses emails and purchase receipts to offer insight into purchase behaviour, brand affinity, and consumer preferences.

36. Sentify

What? Largest online ecosystem of crowd-experts and influencers in global financial markets used to generate trading signals.

37. Sentiment Trader

What? Over 300 Sentiment Surveys, Social Sentiment and other indicator for Equities, Bond, Currencies, ETFs and commodities.

38. Social Market Analytics

What? Harnesses unstructured yet valuable information embedded in social media streams and provide actionable intelligence in real time to clients.

39. Superfly insights

What? Detailed consumer purchasing insights using live transaction data inapp, online and in-store.

40. TheySay

What? Sentiment analysis with classifications such as emotion, humour, gender, risk, speculation, and sarcasm.

41. Tick Data

What? Historical intraday stock, futures, options and forex data.

42. YipitData

What? Collection and analysis of website data: publicly available information on company and government websites.

43. Yodlee

What? Insights based upon millions of anonymized consumer debit and credit transactions.

Different types of data and their history:

data history

Follow @MadameButcher
Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

““

Credit Suisse’s rebuild of its equities trading business is continuing apace. We understand that the Swiss bank has just recruited Douglas Crofton, the former head of cash equities trading for the Americas at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Crofton spent over 18 years at BAML according to his FINRA registration. His arrival at Credit Suisse marks another big hire for the Swiss bank’s cash equities business, which insiders say had been neglected for years.

Mike Stewart, the former head of equities at UBS, is joining Credit Suisse as global head of equities based in New York. In the past couple of months Credit Suisse has also hired Stuart Macguire from Deutsche Bank to run cash equities sales and trading in EMEA and Mike Di Iorio from Barclays as head of equities overall in EMEA. Stewart is arriving this month or next, Di Iorio is arriving in August. Macquire and Crofton’s ETA’s are unclear.

Credit Suisse insiders say the bank wants to be in the top five globally in equities. In the U.S. it’s ranked around sixth, but in Europe it’s fallen to eighth or even ninth. Crofton, a Harvard graduate and former lacrosse star, represents the first of several expected transformational hires for the U.S. equities business. Watch this space.

Credit Suisse confirmed Crofton’s arrival.

Follow @MadameButcher
Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

“”

Photo credit: Credit Suisse by eflon is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Credit Suisse may be making more of an effort to “protect its full-time employees” after making deep cuts to its global markets business in London, but senior staff are still heading for the door. The latest exit is Jerome Henrion, who headed the bank’s EMEA solutions group, which includes its macro and equity derivatives sales and trading businesses.

Henrion departed earlier this month, after more than 20 years working at the bank in various senior positions. He’s currently on gardening leave, but is set to make the switch to the buy-side – we understand that he’ll be moving to M&G Investments as a portfolio manager in August. He has not been replaced.

He was latterly head of the EMEA solutions coverage group and a member of the bank’s global markets operating committee. This group is a cross-asset sales team that cuts across equities, macro, and credit. Before this, he was head of the financial institutions group for Credit Suisse’s global markets business. He was also previously responsible for UK and Ireland fixed income.

Henrion is the latest senior exit from Credit Suisse’s ‘solutions’ group, which includes sales and trading functions for rates, FX and equity derivatives. Andrea Negri, a managing director and head of equity derivative sales in Europe, and Walter Rotondo, head of European equity derivatives convertibles trading, both departed at the end of last year.

Henrion joined Credit Suisse in August 1996 after graduating from Université libre de Bruxelles with a degree in engineering.

Credit Suisse took the decision to curb its macro business in the middle of last year, under the new strategy unveiled by CEO Tidjane Thiam, its FICC business is now more geared towards credit trading. Its credit trading business was part of the first quarter FICC party – with revenues up 135% compared to Q1 2016 – but while macro improved, its solutions business was down year on year 24% in the first quarter, largely because of reduced revenues in equity derivatives.

Credit Suisse declined to comment.

Follow @paultclarke

Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

Image: Getty Images

““

Jefferies’ CEO, Richard Handler, has written a blog on how to succeed in your summer internship. Among other things, he intones Jefferies’ coming interns to work hard but not to burn out, to take rest, to ignore “face time”, to be nice to clients and to be careful what they post on social media. He also says interns need to be careful with mistakes: “It is OK to make a mistake and learn what you did wrong…It is not OK to repeat the same mistake.”

What kind of mistakes do interns make? We asked a lot of current banking associates, vice presidents, managing directors, past and present, to tell us of internship bloopers they have made of witnessed. If you want to be one of the 50%+ of interns who convert their summer into a full-time job offer, you want to avoid the mistakes on the list below.

Failing to complete the intern project assigned to you

Your internship project will probably not be the most groundbreaking thing in the world. “Most interns are incapable of doing anything except answering the phone,” one equity salesman told us. “You usually just throw them a pile of work and make sure they’re out of the way. The work has to be unimportant, but they have to be made to feel that it’s very important and you have to turn the screws on them to get it done.”

However, if you don’t complete the project you’ll be in trouble. If you complete it in style, you might even develop a kind of personal mythology within the bank. In the summer of 2015, we understand that interns on Goldman’s trading floor were each assigned a project to complete in a week. Wajih Ahmed is said to have completed it in two hours. He’s now an inflation trader at GS and is known for his prowess as a summer analyst.

Failing to play politics

If you want an offer, you’ll need to work the human element of your internship. One associate recalls how, “a summer intern was hired in a Nordic sales/client relations role because she spoke Nordic languages and was a classic Nordic beauty. She soon realized that the role wasn’t for her, and she networked her way into an investment role in another division while still killing it at her internship. She was offered the a full-time role in her original team but turned it down. This pissed people off in that team who got HCM involved because they thought she was ‘poached’ by the other division.”

The intern in question still got an offer, but this is a high risk strategy to play.

Hooking up at the intern parties

There will be parties and there will be alcohol. There will also be eligible young interns.

You’re not there to hook up with other interns though – you’re there to get an offer. “You see interns getting drunk at networking events and flirting with the male employees,” says one associate. “This gets you a reputation – especially if you’re female.” Instead, she says you want to forget in-office connections with the managing directors who matter.

Failing to observe security procedures

Like all of London, banks are on high alert. As an intern, you don’t want to trigger a security warning. At one European bank last year an intern sent a pack of presentations to a private equity office for a sell-side presentation. However, the intern didn’t specify the return address. When the package arrived, it was deemed suspicious because there was no return address, and was blown up.

Talking too much too soon

Joseph Mauro, a former Goldman Sachs partner, offered interns advice on Twitter after he quit last June. For the first three weeks of any banking internship, he said you should spend 10% of your time talking and 90% of your time listening. It’s all about learning.

Expressing your own opinions

Similarly, if you want to convert a Goldman Sachs securities internship, Mauro says you need to walk before you can run. “It’s too early to have you own [view],” he says. “But you better know the house view.”

Forgetting to familiarize yourself with basics before the internship begins

Another intern made an entire PowerPoint presentation using only the “drawing” tool in PowerPoint and no Excel at all. Every chart and bar graph was meticulously hand-drawn. The VP and associate didn’t even discover this until the intern left.

“When I started out as a summer intern, I read all the investor prospectuses, research reports, investment products’ marketing literature, investor education materials, business press articles where my team was mentioned, especially relevant industry newsletters, etc. going back 2 years starting with the most recent (approx. 3,500-4,000 pages in all) in the first 3 weeks of the internship,” says one successful intern.

Getting the coffee run wrong

It may not seem like a big deal, but it is. As an intern you need to be organized and on time with lunch and coffee orders, especially when you’re dealing with MDs.

Not being the first person on the desk

You need to get the basics right, says one associate: “Coming in first, leaving last, taking notes diligently, asking smart questions, avoiding errors.”

Sleeping in the toilets

You’re going to be tired, but if you get caught sleeping at work it will be over. The toilets are not a bed.

Over-promising and under-delivering

“Don’t insist that you can deliver something in a few hours when it will take a day,” say ex-M&A bankers Thomas Viguier and Guillaume Tardy-Joubert of Coaching Assembly.

If you’re being handed a lot of work (this may not happen), Mae Busch, a former COO of Morgan Stanley Europe suggests you ask for advice on prioritizing your workload. She advises all young bankers to say, “I’d love to take that on too, but I’ve got three other projects. How would you like me to prioritize this because it won’t be possible to do them all.”

Wearing ostentatious jewelry or clothing

“Leave your Breitling at home,” says one trader. “The watch your mamma gave you for getting to uni is NOT a good show. Unless your people are hedge fund managers and you will bring their biz on the floor, no one likes a spoiled brat as a junior.”

Failing to ask questions and then failing to remember the answers to the questions

“Not paying attention to what you’re being taught and then asking questions that show you’re not listening is a common fault,” says one VP.

not paying attention to what someone is telling you and then questions you to find out you’re not listening – not remembering names

Failing to connect with anyone and forgetting people’s names

An intern who didn’t get an offer told us the personal connection was where he went wrong: “90% of the interns are capable, so ultimately it’s all about finding a team you can click with. Unless you’re a complete genius, the team aren’t going to take you unless you fit in. ” Forgetting names is a no-no. “At the end of the first week you need to know the names of everyone on your team and the surrounding teams,” says one VP.

Follow @MadameButcher

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2. Plan carefully

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4. Make the most of the materials on offer

5. Practice, practice and practice

6. Don’t leave anything out

7. Have a strategy

8. Look after yourself as the exam approaches

9. Don’t disqualify yourself on the big day by doing something stupid

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4. An army of people will be needed to acquire, clean, and assess the data

5. There are different kinds of machine learning. And they are used for different purposes

6. Supervised learning will be used to make trend-based predictions using sample data

7. Unsupervised learning will be used to identify relationships between a large number of variables

8. Deep learning systems will undertake tasks that are hard for people to define but easy to perform

9. Reinforcement learning will be used to choose a successive course of actions to maximize the final reward

10. You won’t need to be a machine learning expert, you will need to be an excellent quant and an excellent programmer

11. These are the coding languages and data analysis packages you’ll need to know

12. And these are some examples of popular machine learning codes using Python

13. Support functions are going to need to understand big data too

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1. Structure your CV to beat the applicant tracking systems (ATS)

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2. Go beyond the job description

3. Find out why the incumbent is quitting

4. Talk to team members

5. Be wary if interviewers dominate the conversation

6. Or if they say yes to everything

7. Spot KPI mismatches

8. Note if they keep talking about timing

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1. Accern

2. Alexandria

3. Alphamatician

4. Audit Analytics

5. Brave New Coin

6. Brickstream

7. Dataminr

8. Dataprovider.com

9. DataSift

10. Descartes Labs

11. Discern

12. Eagle Alpha

13. EIDOSearch

14. Estimize

15. Factset Revere

16. GDELT Project

17. Genscape

18. Heckyl

19. Inferess

20. InfoTrie

21. iSentium

22. Knowsis

**10. You won’t need to be a machine learning expert, you will need to be an excellent quant and an excellent programmer**