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That didn’t last long. In June 2016, Martin Cross, a veteran gilt trader at J.P. Morgan, retired. Thirteen months later, he’s back.

Cross is understood to have joined Citi. The bank confirmed his arrival. His role there isn’t clear, but given his extremely good pedigree and extremely weighty experience, it’s likely that he’s something pretty senior. – Head of gilt trading maybe?

This was Cross’s last role at J.P. Morgan, where he was head of gilts between 2012 and 2016. Before that he was head of gilts at BNP Paribas (for a mere six months), head of sterling rates trading at Nomura for nearly three years, head of sterling rates trading at Lehman for 5.5 years and head of sterling trading at Credit Suisse for five years.

Cross, basically, has form.

His return suggests that retirement isn’t all that. It also reflects the resurgent demand for rates traders as macroeconomic conditions across Europe diverge and central banks make differing noises on QE. Cross isn’t the only recent hire in the space. Scott Marsh, an executive director at Morgan Stanley and former director in rates trading at Deutsche Bank, has also joined Nomura. The Japanese bank confirmed his arrival.

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Photo credit: Citi London by Håkan Dahlström is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Forget all the hype around artificial intelligence (AI), if you’ve really got the skills that Silicon Valley and Wall Street need, you could haul in millions of dollars a year.

“Right now, AI is an elitist sport – there are very few people who know how to practice it,” said Tom Eck, the CTO of industry platforms at IBM and a software developer who has been involved in AI as far back as the early ’90s. “The top-tier AI researchers are getting paid the salaries of NFL quarterbacks, which tells you the demand and the perceived value.”

While Eck, speaking at the Markets Media’s Summer Trading event in New York, didn’t specify whether he meant starting quarterbacks or their backups, he did say that the best AI researchers are earning as much as the highest paid position in the National Football League. For reference, there are 31 quarterbacks who will make more than $5m this year, and the highest-paid QB in the league – the Oakland Raiders’ Derek Carr, fresh off signing a new contract last month – will get a cool $25m this year. He’ll earn a minimum of $70m over three years and could get up to $125m over five.

Financial services, healthcare and advertising are the three biggest adopters of AI at this stage, according to Eck.

AI is the act of imbuing a machine or a piece of software with the capabilities that we consider human cognition, basically making a machine act like a human brain. If we take neurons and model them mathematically as a simple formula with nonlinear components, we can create an interesting rules-based system using “if this, then that” algorithms capable of pattern recognition, Eck said.

But it’s still at the early stage.

“AI is statistics-based – here’s a set of data; take the data, extrapolate and give me a prediction of the most likely thing to happen,” he says. “That’s about model-generating, given a set of data.

“The machine learning system has to come up with a generator that would spit out that data set, working backwards from the data to a mathematical model, and then it is no longer limited to the data you’ve observed – AI can predict what tomorrow’s equity prices will be.”

Deep learning uses the same neural-network type of approach as AI but at gargantuan sizes. All models are fueled by data,

“Big data really means more data than you have the capability to deal with: high volume, high velocity that you want to process quickly and variability,” Eck said. “The data science role not going away anytime soon – with data, it’s garbage in, garbage out.

“Deep learning is more challenging because of volume, velocity and variability,” he says. “The interesting thing about deep learning is its ability to operate on unstructured data.”

The next step in the process of evolution is cognitive computing, a system that’s imbued with the ability to understand, reason, recognize the context and learn – and it has to have a human interface such as a natural language base.

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I cut costs in investment banks. This is my job. I am an expert in cutting costs and improving processes and creating efficiencies, especially in the technology function. If your job is going to disappear in the next 12 months, it will be someone like me that helps eliminate it.

So, what do I look for and how can you stay on my good side?

Firstly, I am the mistress of the hidden costs, the neglected costs, the little costs that might not seem like a lot but which add up. These are what I look for first – I don’t want to cut your job if I can avoid it (especially if you’re adding value), so I look for the things that aren’t obvious. Everyone else goes for headcount and travel, but I always start out looking for things like money spent on subscriptions which aren’t necessary, or software licenses which aren’t really used. I implement a policy for managing the data relating to these small costs and analyze which aren’t adding value.

Once the small but cumulative costs are gone, it’s time to get serious. This is when I’m going to look at your job. In particular, I’m going to look at where your job is based and whether it’s best done by a permanent member of staff or a contractor.

The contractor/permie debate is cyclical. When the future is uncertain, banks will often look at using contractors for technology roles: they’re more flexible and costs can be ramped up and down as necessary. When the future seems more certain, banks will risk bringing on permanent staff. Right now, there’s a trend for banks (see Deutsche Bank, for example) to centralize technology functions and to operate them in the most efficient manner possible using permanent people. In the long run, this works out cheaper.

As costs are centralized I will look at who else is doing a job like yours in the organization. Do you both need to be doing the same thing? Who should be doing your job and where should they be sitting?

If your job is very routine and predictable, I will probably look at off-shoring it to Southeast Asia or Central Europe. If you work in data processing, or model validation and you haven’t been moved offshore already, I’m afraid that it’s probably going to happen soon.

If your job is more of a mid-level role which requires a bit of judgement, it probably won’t be migrating far away. It will still be migrating, however: to somewhere out of London. If you’re a business analyst, a project manager, or a developer working on a non-critical front office system, you can expect to go somewhere near-shore like Glasgow (J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley), Belfast (Citi), or Chester (Bank of America). Goldman Sachs is even outsourcing these kinds of roles to Warsaw.

How can you survive the arrival of someone like me? Flexibility is everything. You need to be prepared to move. I would also suggest that you need to be prepared to work from home.

If you’re a junior working in a technology or an infrastructure role in a bank and you’re sitting in London, you’re at risk. You’re not at risk because of your skill-set (or lack of it). You’re not at risk because of your pay. You’re at risk because office space costs a packet in London and banks could replace you with someone working elsewhere far more cheaply. However, it’s always easy to find someone like you in near-shore locations, especially as your skills become more niche. For this reason, banks want to keep you, and they will want to keep you all the more if you’re prepared to spend two more days each week working from home so as to cut down on the need for precious office space. I predict that this is going to become a big thing in the next few years.

This is the bottom line then. If you want to position yourself for continued employment and advancement and avoid my gaze, you need to be flexible. You need to be flexible about who you work for. You need to be flexible about where you live (both in terms of country and region). And you need to be flexible about where you work (in the office, from home, on the road, or in coffee shops). Do that, and you might survive. Good luck.

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Goldman Sachs is allowing its technology workers to dress down. Cue excitement and a rush on high-end jeans. Except Goldman insiders, both in the tech division and without, say unusual clothing is nothing new at GS: there’s been ‘business casual’ in IBD in London for a while (unless you’re going to a meeting), and Fridays in all divisions can be wild.

“Friday is ripped jeans day on the trading floor,” says one GS technologist. “You can’t move for terrible jeans, which are often worn with stupidly expensive brown shoes. And then you have the odd person who likes a Hawaiian shirt.”

“We used to run crazy shirt competitions,” says one recently ex-MD in London fixed income trading. “The same guy won repetitively,” he adds, declining to elaborate further.

In equities, one New York salesman claims man-ankles (mankles) have been in evidence on Fridays. “The older people have been pretty bewildered by the younger people rolling up the cuffs of their pants with sneakers,” he says, adding that the Goldman Friday look – which may now migrate to the whole week in technology – resembles the outfit below for any men under 35.

Goldman’s London bankers deny any knowledge of this, however. “Ankles are not a thing,” says one. “You might wear a leather bracelet to celebrate the fact that it’s summer but chinos and polo shirt, (better still blue or white or striped pique) classic blazer, leather belt and boat shoes with socks. That’s it, even in NY.”

Nonetheless, some Goldman MDs, who previously espoused Salvatore Ferragamo loafers as their status footwear of choice, are reportedly switching to Yeezy Trainers, designed by Kanye West and costing $170+. “I tell my friends in music that Yeezys aren’t cool any more now that Goldman bankers have discovered them,” says one equities salesman in NY.

Goldman look

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Photo credit: black shoe by John Donges is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

The path into a hedge fund job isn’t always obvious and in the case of activist firm Elliott Advisors, its latest hires are far from the typical buy-side hire.

The hedge fund has just brought in Sheldon Sussman, a veteran banker who has worked for Lehman Brothers, Deutsche Bank and was head of global financial markets at Rabobank in London for over ten years. More recently, Sussman has been working at Raymond James, as their head of fixed income capital markets, before switching to a management advisor role at investment management firm TowerBrook Capital Partners.

Sussman joined Elliott’s UK operation in June as an investor, according to filings on the Financial Conduct Authority register.

He’s not the only recent addition to come from a less than typical background for a hedge fund. Richard Monahan, who spent the last seven years working for Deloitte where he was a director in its corporate finance division, has also just joined.

Monahan, who advised private equity, and other financial services organisations on M&A and debt capital markets transactions at Deloitte, will be making investments into the financial services industry in his new role.

Elliott Advisors, the British operation of the New York activist hedge fund Elliott Management, now has 54 employees in its Mayfair office in London – up from 50 since the beginning of this year.

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The labour market in Asian banking isn’t as buoyant as last year, so if you’re using recruiters to assist your job search you need to be extra sure that they’re experts in your sector.

The vast majority will be, but there are a few cowboy recruiters still operating in Hong Kong and Singapore. Here’s how to weed them out so you only work with the best.

1. Find out if they speak your language…

“Recruiters not speaking the same language as candidates is a common problem,” says Vince Natteri, director of recruitment at search firm Pinpoint Asia in Hong Kong. “For example, when an IT candidate talks about Unix, Linux, Java, AJAX or J2EE and the recruiter doesn’t understand him, this recruiter won’t be able to represent him as well as someone who does.”

2…and can answer specialist questions

“Use a specialist recruiter in your particular field. They’ll have better relationships with hiring managers at banks, know who’s in their teams, and potentially be the only person dealing with that vacancy,” says Richard Aldridge, a director at recruiters Black Swan Group in Singapore. “Asking targeted questions about all of the above should reveal the real specialists.”

3. Avoid recruiters who sell and don’t listen

Beware recruiters who begin meetings by giving you the hard sell about the job on offer. “The very basic rule of thumb in the recruitment industry is to listen to candidates first and talk next. There’s nothing to ‘sell’ until you first understand the candidate,” says Natteri.

4. Avoid those who can’t provide market insights

“Try to work with recruiters who give you a competitive edge: colour on hiring trends, market feedback on your weak points, and detailed backgrounds on prospective employers,” says Nick Wells, director at search firm Webber Chase in Singapore. “Avoid those who just offer social media ‘shout-outs’ for job ads.”

5. Don’t let your pay be revealed too soon

“One of the more common errors is mismanaging the release of a candidate’s salary, both current and expected,” says Ben Batten, country general manager of recruitment firm Volt in Singapore. “Sometimes just sending the CV to the bank with salary details and no justification can mean a candidate gets overlooked for this reason alone. For recruiters, getting all the information together so you can justify the salary to clients is critical, particularly if it’s over budget.”

6. Recruiters must know about “team dynamics”

“A good recruiter can fill you in on the ‘dynamics’ of the role, over and above the job description. For example, team dynamics, company culture, and personalities and big egos within the team,” says Angela Kuek, director of search firm Meyer Consulting Group in Singapore. “Then you can go for interviews better prepped. Bad recruiters just tell you to refer to the JD.”

7. And also be good career advisors

“A lot of recruiters simply aren’t experienced enough to provide good career advice,” says a recruiter in Singapore who asked not to be named. “Some will simply ‘advise’ you to take the role they have on offer, so it’s best to already know what kind of job you want, otherwise you could find yourself getting talked into something that’s not in your best interests.”

8. Shy away from recruiters who don’t ask for consent

“Make sure your recruiter asks your permission before they even discuss your details with a client, let alone send your resume for new roles,” says the anonymous Singapore recruiter. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve briefed a candidate about a job and got their go-ahead, but found that another recruiter had sent their details to the same bank without checking. Make sure you tell your recruiter upfront that they need your permission.”

9. The CV spammers

Not being explicit about consent could even lead to the ultimate recruiter crime – indiscriminate spamming of your CV to all the employers on their books. “The worst example I heard of this was a recruiter sending a resume to a sister business of the candidate’s, which shared the same HR function,” says recruiter James Carss. “The CV actually ended up on his boss’ desk, causing huge embarrassment all round.”

10. Recruiters who harass you to close the deal

“A senior IB candidate recently told us that he once dealt with a recruitment firm and received an offer from one of their banking clients,” says Natteri from Pinpoint Asia. “When he told the consultant he needed some time to think about it, he received further calls, about 20 minutes apart and lasting until midnight, from different managers in the firm telling him to take the offer. Their motivations were only focused on their fee and not what was best for the candidate and the bank.”

11. Some work on a ‘churn and burn’ mentality

“The bad recruitment firms have a high turnover of staff,” says Wells from Webber Chase. “You will always be called by a different recruiter rather than someone who has taken the time to build up a strong understanding of your needs – both personal and professional – to whom you are more than just a resume.”

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I work for a big European bank in Hong Kong (it’s not UBS, Credit Suisse or BNP Paribas – but it’s still a major player). After nine years in the job I’ve had enough and I want to join an American firm, preferably J.P. Morgan.

Why leave when I’ve successfully moved up the ranks to VP level here? For starters, my bank has been through some rough times globally – and I’m not talking 2008; I’m talking 2016.

People have been made redundant in Hong Kong, while others have left in frustration. And there’s obviously been a lot of water-cooler speculation about the future of the bank.

I’ve been more fortunate than many of my peers because I’m still here, but my long-term career prospects at this bank have recently diminished. Previous talk from HR about job mobility and international assignments have gone out the window.

I’d like to move into a new job function, in Hong Kong or elsewhere, but I can’t see any opportunities here.

While things aren’t as bad as they were in 2016, the bank still isn’t doing as much hiring – internally or externally – as it used to. Recruitment is still focused on anti-money laundering and compliance, and until very recently there was a policy that for every two people who left, only one could be hired to replace them.

In this kind of environment, managers and HR clearly aren’t in the mood to discuss career changes – they want us to just get on with your current jobs.

Moreover, the redundancies and the dearth of replacement hiring have increased my workload. I don’t have set hours anymore and I can’t delegate very easily; I just stay in the office until the work is done.

The bank’s recent troubles have also affected my job function in a more specific way.

In theory, I’m tasked with developing innovative financial products for clients in Hong Kong. But in the aftermath of 2016, everyone is more risk adverse and nobody is as interested in new product lines.

Managers are scared of signing them off and it’s difficult to set up the internal conversations I need. My team and I feel fatigued by the never-ending product hurdles we must overcome.

The big job cuts may be over for now, but for many staff the perception of our bank has been irrevocably damaged. The feeling is that we’re no longer a market leader as an investment bank; we’re just trying to stay alive.

Product-wise, we’re certainly falling behind the competition, especially Asian banks, US banks and even the fintechs.

I’ve only just started my job search, but I’m definitely targeting US banks. I can see, for example, that Citi and J.P. Morgan are investing a lot more in their technology operations in Asia than my bank is – and this directly benefits people in their product teams.

But I think my decision is mainly based on personal experience. I’ve worked with many J.P. Morgan employees over the years and they’ve always impressed me more than any of their counterparts. JPM, therefore, is at the top of my list.

Winton Cheung (we have used a pseudonym to protect his identity) works for a European bank in Hong Kong.

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Rothschild, one of largest M&A houses in Europe, hasn’t really broken into the U.S. However, now it wants to double its market share of revenues and its headcount there.

Rothschild has typically been among the top M&A advisers in Europe by deal value, but has struggled to crack the top 10 for U.S. deals. To change that, Rothschild hired Jimmy Neissa, the ex-global co-head of investment banking at UBS, to run the North American advisory business, who in turn has hired 12 new managing directors. These MDs cover technology, industrials and healthcare banking in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Washington, San Francisco and Toronto, according to Financial News.

Neissa told FN that he has an “inch-and-change”-thick stack of CVs from managing directors on his desk, waiting to be read.

One strange perk that Rothschild offers them, as if from another era: Butlers wait on senior bankers and clients in the executive dining rooms and at events hosted by the firm.

Rothschild’s U.S. business currently generates only about 20% of its global revenues, but as it expands in North America, senior managers hope it too can lure talent away from the big investment banks like boutiques PJT Partners, Moelis, Centerview, Evercore and Lazard have done.

Rothschild has already hired Lee LeBrun away from UBS to be the head of M&A for North America and Chris Gaertner from Credit Suisse to be the global head of technology, based in San Francisco. By next month, Rothschild will have 36 MDs, bringing its total North American workforce up to 158 healthcare, technology and industrials bankers.

Neissa wants to hire at least three more MDs soon, and he is also recruiting junior bankers, but not just from the Ivy League. He has changed about half of the U.S. schools the bank has traditionally recruited from, and he is the firm’s recruiting captain for the University of Texas, his alma mater.

Separately, meet Alan Mulligan, the highly paid banker in Dublin who quit it all to make films.

Mulligan had been due to go to America with his now ex-girlfriend – but instead spent the €5k ($5,700) he’d set aside for the trip on movie-making equipment. He found a film editor to tutor him and made a couple of short films, spending every spare moment learning new filming skills and networking.

His boss at the bank heard about his plans through the grapevine and tried to talk him out of it, even dangling a raise. It was then that he said the words that no banker should ever say to his boss: “He was like ‘you’re on good money now but do you not want to earn more?’ and I said ‘not really, I’m happy with what I have,’ and that was a bizarre answer to him because the idea of not being motivated by money was alien. That is literally all they have to keep you going,” Mulligan told the Irish Independent.

“He told me ‘I feel like you sit in the meetings and look at us like we’re robots’ – and I hadn’t thought about it like that, but he was probably right.”

Mulligan knew he was ready to leave banking for good, but he feared how the news of his decision would be received at home, especially since his mom had recently passed away. His dad was shocked but supportive and, a weight lifted from his shoulders, he promptly quit his lucrative job.

Mulligan’s film “The Limit of…” – which he made on a shoestring budget – is semi-autobiographical, as the plot centers on a young financier who loses his soul during the boom.

Meanwhile:

Gary Cohn is in the running to replace Janet Yellen. (New York Times)

Lloyd Blankfein was one of two major bank CEOs to survive the financial crisis and recently battled cancer, but rather than step down, he’s pushing an against-the-grain commitment to trading. (Bloomberg)

David Solomon, the 55-year-old co-president of Goldman Sachs, is probably the investment bank’s coolest employee – on the 4^th of July, he played a gig spinning EDM in the Bahamas under his stage name, D.J. D-Sol. (New York Times)

If you decide to leave financial services, Goldman recommends a career in sports data analytics. (Business Insider)

Commerzbank’s former head of corporate finance claims that after blowing the whistle on alleged misconduct at the German bank he was told to “shut up,” harassed and fired. (Bloomberg)

Vanguard’s CEO, Bill McNabb, is stepping down (New York Times)

David Einhorn may be a billionaire, but he had a rough first half of the year as investors pulled $400m out of his hedge fund. (WSJ)

Ray Dalio, the founder of hedge fund firm Bridgewater Associates, wrote that Ayn Rand’s “books pretty well capture the mindset” of the Trump administration, which “hates weak, unproductive, socialist people and policies, and it admires strong, can-do profit makers”. (WSJ)

The U.K.’s financial regulator is embracing regtech, in particular AI and machine learning. (CNBC)

An increasing number of young men, some of whom would otherwise be working in financial services or fintech, are instead being drawn into the immersive virtual worlds of video games. (WSJ)

It’s not a good time to be working at a recently en vogue trends-chasing quant fund. (Bloomberg)

Ditto high-frequency trading shops. (Bloomberg)
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Top UK graduates are now much less likely to choose an investment banking career, and those from the London School of Economics – which has been the biggest feeder school for financial services in the City for years – are increasingly considering other options.

But there’s still a good reason for students to choose to study at the universities most likely attract investment banks and hedge funds, as well as studying the subjects most likely to land you the job – you’ll earn more money. Students from the LSE earned an average of £38k in their first two years of their career, according to new figures from Emolument.com. City University, which teaches a large number of financial services related courses and has close links with financial services organisations in London, came in second with an average of £36k.

Cambridge, Oxford, Bath, Edinburgh, Durham, Warwick, Imperial College London and Loughborough – all target universities for the big investment banks – make up the top ten. Meanwhile, economics, engineering, management and strategy, mathematics and statistics, or the computer sciences graduates can expect to earn the most in the early years of their career. Those who studied English literature and fine arts earn far less on average.

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Working for a hedge fund is not what it once was. With the industry going through a crisis, struggling to justify sky high fees and paying less than it used to, traders who once clamoured to move to the buy-side are switching back into banks, and funds are shutting down at the highest level since 2008 – with 1,057 hedge funds biting the dust last year, according to Hedge Fund Research.

In March, Eton Park Capital, the $7bn New York-based hedge fund run by former Goldman Sachs banker Eric Mindich, shut its doors due to a “combination of industry headwinds, a difficult market environment and, importantly, our own disappointing 2016 results”, according to letter to investors at the time. Mindich is returning capital to investors and turning the hedge fund into a family office. In London, Eton Park had 16 partners at the time of its closure and around 23 administration staff, who suddenly found themselves looking for new jobs. Now, some are landing in new locations.

Most notably, Pedro Maqueda, a partner and analyst at Eton Park Capital, has just joined the London operation of Citadel. Maqueda, who spent three years at Eton Park after joining from Centaurus Capital in 2014, has just signed up to Surveyor Capital, one of three equity businesses that manage capital within Citadel’s multi-strategy funds. He joined earlier this month as an analyst, a Citadel spokesperson confirmed.

When a high-profile hedge fund closes, portfolio managers often start out on their own venture or scatter across the industry to join new funds. Maqueda follows Allan Merrill, head of merger event driven funds at Eton Park, who joined Citadel’s Greenwich office in March. Institutional Investor reported his appointment and said that he would be bringing three Eton Park analysts with him.

Meanwhile Jan Huo, a partner derivatives trader at Eton Park who started at the hedge fund in 2008, has just joined Element Capital in a similar role. The New York-based hedge fund opened a London office in 2015, but so far has just eight employees. It’s expanding, however, and now reportedly has $12bn in assets under management after a $2bn capital raising round in March.

Other Eton Park partners to secure new roles this year include Stuart Houlton, who joined Trinity Street Asset Management as head of trading, and Ali Benzakour, who left Eton Park at the tail end of last year and joined GLG Partners as a portfolio manager in January.

The closure of Eton Park sent shockwaves through the hedge fund industry. Partly, this was because of its size – at one point it at $14bn in assets under management – but also because Mindich started the fund 13 years ago and was something of a boy wonder. Mindich joined Goldman Sachs as an associate in its risk arbitrage department after graduating from Harvard with a degree in economics in 1988. Within a few years, he was named head of the department and, in 1994 aged just 27, Goldman named him in its partner class. He was reportedly the youngest person ever to be made partner at the bank. Even in the age of promoting millennials to MD and partner at Goldman Sachs, making it to partner in your 20s is a rarity. Another example of rapid promotion at Goldman is Kunal Shah, its head of emerging markets trading for EMEA, who made it to MD at 27 and was promoted to partner by the time he was 31.

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Charles Poliacof took a rather circuitous route to his current role as the chief revenue officer at Visible Alpha, a fintech firm that provides data analytics and a research distribution network connecting the buy side and the sell side. His career suffered a serious setback, but he was able to reinvent himself, like many Wall Street traders and fintech entrepreneurs have had to.

Poliacof started out as a proprietary trader for close to a decade at Schonfeld Group, where he managed a portfolio of equities and futures and was eventually promoted to manager of a trading desk, where he trained junior traders. During that time, he also immersed himself in the technology component of the trading business.

“I learned a lot about markets, identifying price dislocations and trading at Schonfeld, and I spent a lot of time with the quants as well, developing some of their strategies and working on trading technology and the infrastructure involved in building signal generation,” Poliacof says. “As the market structure evolved and pricing dynamics changed with the introduction of high-frequency trading, the role of the prop trader changed.

“A lot of those arbitrage signals that existed for minutes, hours or days were truncated to milliseconds,” he says. “Prop trading had to evolve and so did I.”

A poorly timed startup launch leads to soul-searching

Poliacof was bitten by tech bug at Schonfeld and decided to invest in himself by launching his own automated trading and investment analytics startup. The focus was on grey-box quantitative trading strategies, where firms use data to inform trades but a human is mining the signals, as opposed to black-box, where the algorithm executes the trade as well.

However, his timing was not good, as he soon found himself trying to build a business during the depths of the financial crisis.

“I wanted an opportunity to build my own track record,” Poliacof says. “I still traded my own proprietary capital as I worked to build the infrastructure for black-box trading, and I also started building technology to support grey-box trading, using tech to identify signals in the market and allowing the fundamental guys and prop traders to trade around those ideas and take a ‘quantamental’ approach.

“After I had an extremely successful 2008, and even though friends in the industry warned me that liquidity had dried up, I sank a lot of capital into building new infrastructure because I saw a lot of opportunities, but I slowly saw my returns disappear,” he says. “It was my first real lesson in abject failure.

“In 2009, I drank too much of my own Kool-Aid, but I learned an important lesson: It doesn’t matter what you’ve done or know, it only matters if you can execute – you can’t rely on what you’ve done in the past to assure success in what you’re going to do in the future.”

Regrouping and jumping to a hedge fund – then fintech

Despite the setback, opportunity soon knocked at multi-manager long/short equity hedge fund firm Centurion Investment Partners, which Poliacof joined as a portfolio manager and the co-head of trading.

The following year, a phone call with the CEO of Novus Partners, a fintech firm offering a portfolio analytics platform, changed his life dramatically. Soon after, he joined Novus as a managing director.

“A career switch was terrifying – I was going into fintech when I was 42 years old and had been doing the same thing for a very long time, and my new role involved business development, building up the sales team, product development and consulting with clients, all of which I had never done before,” Poliacof said. “I took a bit of a pay cut, and the next four years of my life were basically entrepreneurial school, learning everything I could about the pain points managers face, using tech, building best-of-breed sales and relationship-management practices and learning about the mistakes you want to avoid.

“Make sure to learn from your mistakes and course-correct as quickly as you can,” he says.

From there, Poliacof joined the C-suite of ONEaccess.io, which was subsequently acquired by Visible Alpha. He doesn’t regret his move into fintech by any means, but traders and other financial services professionals should know that it’s no cake walk.

“It’s easy to get enamored by fintech, but you have to figure out what you’re really passionate about – I work more today at 47 years old than I have done in my entire life, so there are tradeoffs, like less vacation,” Poliacof said. “You have to find your areas of strength and ask yourself, will your skills directly translate into the fintech world?

“How will you leverage your core competencies that will put you on a trajectory of growth?” he says. “Just because you were a senior position at a bank or hedge fund doesn’t mean you will be in a senior role after you make the leap, and just because you have had success previously, it doesn’t come automatically, you really have to work at it.”

The first step when making a dramatic career change is realizing that you have a lot to learn.

“My greatest fear was becoming a relic – the disaster in 2009 has followed me forever, and I channel that experience to this day,” Poliacof says. “For those who haven’t experienced failure before, it’s important that you learn, grow and continue to forge ahead.

“Be ambitious, be bold, try things and don’t be afraid to experiment,” he says. “You have some successes and failures, but the key is to get on an upward trajectory and keep an agile mindset.

“I’m somebody who changed careers midway through my life, later than most, but I finally found something I’m truly passionate about.”
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““

J.P. Morgan and Citi are the first major U.S. investment banks to unveil their Q2 results for 2017. Most banks have already warned investors that the fixed income currencies and commodities (FICC) party that characterised the first quarter is well and truly over. What’s more, J.P. Morgan’s dominance of the investment banking league tables and market share within most trading businesses are more likely to lead the charge than set the pace. But, what do you need to know?

1. J.P. Morgan has been hiring investment bankers again

Like most investment banks J.P. Morgan trimmed headcount during the first quarter, ejecting 367 in Q1, or a mere 1% of its total headcount in its corporate and investment bank. It’s now back up again for the first time since the third quarter of last year, when the annual intake of graduate hires always bolsters employee numbers. J.P. Morgan now has 49,228 people employed in the division – an increase of 423 people on the previous quarter. Every little helps.

2. Pay is heading down

J.P. Morgan’s compensation spend so far this year is down on 2016. In Q2, it accrued $2.4bn in compensation costs – a 10% reduction on the same period last year. J.P. Morgan bundles its investment bank in with corporate bankers, who are usually paid less, so its compensation revenue remains tiny relative to its competitors, at 28% of revenues.

3. Now’s the time to work in equity capital markets

The second quarter of 2017 was slower for investment bankers than the same period last year, according to Dealogic, but a big start to the year has meant that the first half was up 11% on the $36bn generated last year. However, M&A activity in the second quarter was down 9.2% globally. J.P. Morgan’s investment bankers have managed to avoid this slip and revenues were up by 8% in the division.

J.P. Morgan ranks number one across the board, so its not a big surprise to see revenues increase in all its advisory businesses. Equity capital markets teams have continued to enjoy a resurgence (up 80% in the first half) and J.P. Morgan’s division is up by 29% on last year during Q2. So far this year, debt capital markets revenues are on a par with 2016, but J.P. Morgan’s DCM bankers were up 5% in Q2.

If J.P. Morgan’s investment bankers have been going against the grain, Citi’s have had a great second quarter – at least compared to last year. Its equity capital markets revenues were up by 70%, to $225m, while advisory revenues increased by 32% and DCM was up by 9%.

Citi has been focusing more on its investment bank and making some big hires. One recent heavy-hitter to join was Alison Harding-Jones who came in as head of M&A in Europe, the Middle East and Africa and vice-chairman of corporate and investment banking in the region.

4. It’s worst for FICC than predicted

Analysts had factored in a 15% decline in fixed income revenues this quarter at J.P. Morgan, but it ended up down by 19%. Universal banks like J.P. Morgan and Citi were expected to benefit from rising interest rates, especially if they have “macro footprints” in FX and rates, according to a note issued this week by UBS analyst Brennan Hawken, but this has largely helped consumer divisions. J.P. Morgan blamed the FICC results on “sustained low volatility and tighter credit spreads”. It doesn’t break out revenues by division, but said that rates, credit and commodities were particularly badly affected.

Meanwhile, Citi’s fixed income division was down by just 6%. Again, it says that its rates division was the primary reason for this. Spreads tightening and last year there was a big bump in revenues because of the Brexit vote. Citi is closing the gap on J.P. Morgan and has continued to make some big hires in FICC, most recently Martin Cross, the former head of gilt trading at J.P. Morgan who came of retirement to join Citi.

5. Equities are stable

J.P. Morgan said that Q2 2016 was a particularly strong quarter for its equities business, so a 1% decline in revenues seems like a positive. The bank said that its corporate derivatives and prime services divisions were particularly strong in the last three months. Citi wasn’t so lucky – its 11% year on year decline in equities revenues was due to lower volatility it said.

6. It’s a good time to work in…treasury

The one area that higher interest rates have benefited within J.P. Morgan’s investment bank is its treasury services division. An 18% uptick in revenues year on year, to $1.1bn, is the strongest year on year improvement across the CIB.

7. Risk is off

J.P. Morgan’s traders are not exactly being given the freedom to extend themselves. Its value at risk (VaR) across its CIB was down 40% year on year. The biggest reduction was within fixed income, which was down by 64% on Q2 last year.

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Natixis has made a senior hire in Asian leverage and acquisition finance, a function it had earmarked for growth this year. Edmund Wong has joined the French firm in Hong Kong as an executive director.

He previously spent six years and eight months in the leveraged and structured solutions team at Standard Chartered in Hong Kong, focused on “leveraged finance, corporate acquisition finance, pre-IPO finance, share financing, privatisation, and cross-border finance”, according to his online profile.

Natixis has been bullish recently about its expansion plans in Asia and Wong works in a niche which is central to its ambitions. Chairman Francois Perol said in December last year that he sees growth opportunities for Natixis in Asian infrastructure, project and acquisition finance.

The wider corporate and investment banking division at Natixis will add to its 600-strong workforce in Asia in 2017, on the back of continued double-digit revenue growth, he added.

Natixis’ hiring of Wong appears well timed as it comes before an expected surge in demand for leverage and acquisition finance professionals in Asia.

“I think hiring will make a comeback in Asia over next 24 months. I’m already seeing increased appetite from the sell-side,” says trader-turned-headhunter Matthew Hoyle, director of Matthew Hoyle Financial Markets in Hong Kong. “Leverage finance allows banks to conservatively add risk to their balance sheet. It’s also more profitable when interest rates start moving around.”

Wong is a veteran in the field. Prior to joining Stan Chart he was an associate director in leverage finance at WestLB in Hong Kong, where he worked for four years.

He began his career in 1999 at DBS in Singapore, specialising in real estate finance, and moved to Hong Kong with the same bank in 2005.

Natixis made two senior internal appointments in Asia earlier this month. Daniel Klinger was promoted to head of loan syndication, Asia Pacific, and Bertrand Guiot was made head of global infrastructure and projects, Asia Pacific.

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““

Young finance professionals in Singapore and Hong Kong are in comparatively high demand this year as banks focus on junior recruitment at the expense of costly senior hires.

But as a result, recruiters in Asia are now struggling with an influx of shoddily written junior CVs that exaggerate candidates’ skills and experience.

“In Asia there’s now a growing tendency for junior candidates to put the skill set of the more senior person who sits next to them on their CV because they’ve seen what they do, so think they’re also capable of carrying out those duties,” says Kyle Blockley, managing partner of recruitment firm KS International.

Elliot Jackson, head of contracting at recruiters Morgan McKinley in Singapore, says he has seen banks in Asia withdraw offers from candidates who have “made up” information on their resumes – including work experience, qualifications, background information and IT systems experience. “Or they’ve been in roles that haven’t worked out and have stated inaccurate reasons for leaving.”

Banking recruiters in Hong Kong and Singapore are also exasperated at analyst-level candidates who exaggerate their involvement in transactions. “I’ve seen a junior relationship manager CV that claimed he managed to complete a major deal,” says Lim Chaileng, director of banking and financial services at recruitment company Randstad in Singapore. “The deal was in fact put together and led by a senior RM, with the junior only contributing some due diligence and research work as support.”

“I’ve seen juniors in Asia embellish their experience around leading projects and around their responsibilities,” says Nick Lambe, group managing director at recruitment agency Links International in Hong Kong. “For example, someone on an internal audit implied they were responsible for signing off that audit, when in fact there was a high degree of supervision.”

Embellishment isn’t the only problem dogging junior banking CVs – young finance professionals in Asia often simply load their resumes with too much information in an effort to make themselves appear more experienced and impressive than they are.

“Some juniors put overly lengthy descriptions for short-term banking contracts that lasted less than 12 months. And I also frequently come across finance candidates who add all their non-finance jobs during university just to lengthen their resumes,” says Lim from Randstad. “They should instead focus on any internship experience in banks or corporates to showcase their suitability in a professional environment.”

Lim adds: “Their goal is to increase their chances of being shortlisted for a job, but when instances like this happen, banks can usually tell that they have inflated their job descriptions – it’s a major red-flag against the candidate.”

“Lengthy junior CVs will not attract the attention of recruiters and hiring managers,” says Lambe from Links International. “And exaggerated CVs will be found out either at interview stage or at offer/background checking stage. To avoid embarrassment, all CVs need to be factual and 100% honest.”

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““

Roger Federer won his 19^th grand slam tennis title and men’s record eighth Wimbledon championship by beating Marin Cilic yesterday.

Rival Novak Djokovic, the former world No. 1 ranked player from Serbia, had to bow out of the fabled tournament during his quarter-final match against Czech Tomas Berdych with an elbow injury. Today, one of his coaches, 33-year-old Mario Ancic, is back at his day job – working for Credit Suisse on Wall Street.

As second jobs go, being a tennis coach isn’t standard fare for a banker, but Forbes says Ancic has history in tennis. He himself was a tennis pro for nine years, reaching the Wimbledon semifinals and clinching Olympic doubles bronze in 2004 before peaking at No. 7 in the world two years later. Ancic also struggled with a spate of injuries and glandular fever which eventually forced him to retire from professional tennis in 2011 at the age of 26 with more than $4 million in prize money. He joined Credit Suisse full time in 2015, after graduating from Columbia Law School.

At a press conference last week, Djokovic cracked a joke comparing Ancic, his old friend, to “The Wolf of Wall Street.” However, the Croat’s apparently offering up his tennis expertise to the Serb free of charge.

“We don’t have anything formal,” Djokovic said when asked about his arrangement with Ancic, adding that the latter had been scheduled to participate in the legends doubles tournament at Wimbledon anyway. “We don’t have any contracts. We don’t have any long-term agreements. It was a friendly talk between Mario and I. First of all, I spoke to Andre. Andre absolutely agreed with Mario being that second person who might potentially be spending a little bit more time with me on the road.”

Cilic is far from the only investment banker with a surprising second job. David Solomon, a co-president at Goldman Sachs and a leading contender to become the investment bank’s next CEO, moonlights as D.J. D-Sol spinning electronic dance music.

Separately, three of the biggest U.S. banks reported second-quarter earnings on Friday. Each broadly beat expectations, but trading businesses didn’t look that great. However, this may simply be because last year was so good. As Marianne Lake, the chief financial officer of J.P. Morgan, pointed out, the UK’s Brexit vote drove a flurry of market activity which meant the bank’s fixed income trading had enjoyed a 35% rise in revenue in the second quarter of 2016. Try beating that in a quiet market.

Meanwhile:

Front-office bankers beware: UBS is bringing automation and artificial intelligence to the trading floor at its investment bank. (Business Insider)

HSBC told 6k global markets division employees to cease and desist buying single-name stocks, bonds and concentrated exchange-traded funds on their personal accounts. (Bloomberg)

How Michael Sandberg dragged HSBC into the post-colonial world by creating a base in the U.S. and building a futuristic headquarters. (WSJ)

As Brexit negotiations drag on with no deal for the City in sight, Barclays is negotiating with Irish regulators to expand operations in Dublin to preserve access to E.U. markets. (Guardian)

France is hoping for the “hardest Brexit” and is “seemingly happy” for an outcome detrimental to the City of London. (FT)

John Mack, the ex-CEO of Morgan Stanley, and investment fund Venture One invested in Omega One, a Brooklyn-based startup that facilitates trading volatile cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. (Bloomberg)

The Securities and Exchange Commission busted Massachusetts Institute of Technology research scientist Fei Yan on federal charges of insider trading after he searched “how sec detect unusual trade” and “insider trading in an international account” before using info from his wife to reap $120k in illicit profits. (CNBC)

Ex-UBS exec Mitch Kessler, former Proteus Capital PM Manuel Fajardo and ex-Beacon VP partner Ty McGuire have launched a new hedge fund called Ocean Park Advisors. (HFMWeek)

The Goldman Sachs co-Chair J. Michael Evans, who engineered Wall Street’s largest-ever IPO, and his wife Lise are behind the biggest Hamptons real-estate listing of the summer. (New York Post)

Wells Fargo is hemorrhaging brokers, because … well, you know. (WSJ)

Tesla and SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk warns that artificial intelligence will threaten all human jobs and could even spark a war. (WSJ)

Google, Facebook, Amazon and other tech behemoths are transforming the U.S. economy and labor market, with scant public debate or scrutiny, and not even Wall Street may be able to stop them. (WSJ)

While you’re on the beach this summer, read these novels with finance themes and lessons on managing money, including “The Windfall” by Diksha Basu about a modest, unassuming man who suddenly becomes rich. (New York Times)
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““

If anyone’s moving this year, it’s leveraged finance professionals. And if anyone’s hiring, it’s Barclays, which is busy adding between 50 and 100 people to its investment bank. Now, however, Barclays will need to make another hire (or find some spare talent internally): Goldman just poached one of its senior leveraged finance bankers in London.

Marc Chowrimootoo, whom Barclays hired for its leveraged finance team in 2008, has just joined GS according to his LI profile. Headhunters say Goldman has been looking to strengthen its European leveraged finance bench since promoting Rob Pulford out of leveraged finance and into the role of head of financial sponsors for Europe two years ago.

Chowrimootoo has a history of playing the field: Goldman is the third bank he’s been MD at. Before Barclays, he spent four and a half years as an MD in BAML.

Banks have been strengthening their European leveraged finance teams this year, both as the market picks up and as leveraged finance bankers defect to hedge funds. Last month, Citi hired Toby Ali from BAML to head European leveraged finance and BAML has yet to fill the gap. HSBC hired J.P. Morgan veteran Ray Doody in February and is said to be still hiring by headhunters. Mitsubishi made two senior hires in January and may yet look to hire at the bottom end.

Although there are still gaps to fill, headhunters suggest Chowrimootoo might be the last big hire of the year in leveraged finance. “We’re into the summer lull now,” says one. “There’s not much going on and we’re starting to see people looking ahead to 2018.”

Chowrimootoo isn’t the only exchange of senior staff between Goldman and Barclays this year. Last month, Barclays hired Asita Anche, a former GS quant trader.

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““

Working for a boutique investment bank on Wall Street has its benefits over a ‘bulge bracket’ firm. For a start, a smaller organisation means a flatter hierarchy and therefore junior bankers are given greater access to clients, which is incredibly important for moving up later in your career.

However, there’s another unexpected bonus of working for a boutique – you’ll get paid more. New figures from finance forum Wall Street Oasis suggest that smaller banks pay their junior and mid-ranking bankers more than large investment banks. From the outset, analysts in boutiques earn more than their counterparts in large investment banks, it says – a first year analyst on Wall Street brings in $124k working for a boutique, according to the survey, while entry level bankers in bulge brackets can earn $102k. This advantage continues through analyst and associate ranks and, by the time you reach VP, boutiques pay you over $100k more per year on average.

This is important, largely because VP is the rank when a lot of investment bankers hit career stasis. Moving from VP to director is notoriously tough, and getting up to MD is even harder. It therefore helps that smaller banks offer more money. Even better, boutique investment banks have been grabbing market share off their larger competitors. Boutiques seem an attractive option.

But, there are downsides.

For a start, there’s the thorny issue of taking some degree of pleasure in your job. WSO’s survey suggests that, relatively speaking, those in larger banks are happier with their lot. For example, the top bank on Wall Street for employee satisfaction is Well Fargo, with close to 99% saying that they were happy in their roles, followed by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan. The top ranking smaller firm was Evercore, which came in 12th. Similarly, the big banks topped the rankings for career opportunities and advancement, suggesting that the extra money makes up for a lack of promotion opportunities.

Boutiques are also much harder to get into on average than bigger banks. Centerview Partners, PJT Partners, Greenhill, Evercore, and Moelis and Company were all deemed to have a tougher interview process than any of the larger investment banks.

The figures below across show an average for ranks across the different groups, but on a more subjective level you may be better off going into a bigger bank. J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo were voted the banks with the ‘best’ pay – how their employees felt their pay compared with their peers. Houlihan Lokey was the only bank to break up the dominance of the large banks on this criteria (coming in third), while BAML and Goldman rounded out the top five.

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What became of Chris Innes? One moment he was happily ensconced as head of equities for Americas at BNP Paribas. The next, he disappeared. Poof. His current whereabouts are unknown.

Innes’ FINRA registration shows that he left Paribas at the end of last month. He didn’t immediately respond to a request to comment on his plans. Nor did BNP Paribas immediately respond to a request to comment on the reasons for Innes’ exit.

It’s eminently possible that he retired. Innes is an equities veteran who started his career at Paine Webber back in 1992 before moving to Salomon (where he pioneered the Accelerated Share Repurchase technique), before moving to BAML and then the buy-side. After 25 years in the industry, Innes might be ready for a rest.

Alternatively, he may have been poached. 2017 is proving a good year for very senior equities professionals who want a new job on Wall Street. As European banks (think Credit Suisse and Barclays) strengthen their desks, there have been a flurry of top end hires – even as other mid-ranking and senior equities professionals who’ve been laid off find themselves locked out the market.

Overall, however, 2017 is far from a boom year for equities desks. Last week’s results from J.P. Morgan and Citi showed equities sales and trading revenues shrinking in the second quarter compared to the previous year and stalling across the whole of the first half.

BNP Paribas is one of the few banks going for growth right now: the French bank wants to achieve compound annual revenue growth across the corporate and investment bank of 4.5% over the next three years. In U.S. equities at least, it will seemingly be doing this under new leadership.

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“”

As we reported last week, Goldman Sachs’ applications for summer analyst programs and full time analyst programs are open. As of Saturday, it’s been possible for students to put themselves forward to work at Goldman Sachs in 2018.

In theory, you have plenty of time to get your Goldman application sorted out: deadlines for the firms’ analyst programs vary from October 29th (the EMEA full time analyst program) to December 3rd (the EMEA summer analyst program), with U.S deadlines interspersed between (click here for the full list).

In reality, you need to get a serious move on.

This is because, as Goldman points out on its graduate site, it accepts applicants on a first come first served basis. In other words, if you apply now and Goldman likes you, it will make you an offer and give you a place. But if you apply in November and Goldman likes you, it might want to make you an offer and give you a place, but there could be that there are no places left.

This matters, because Goldman Sachs receives a lot of applications. In 2016, Goldman told the Financial Times it received 223,849 applications for analyst and summer analyst positions combined. 130,000 of these applications were for 5,000 internships – an acceptance rate of just 4%.

If you delay in applying to Goldman, it’s therefore likely that tens of thousands of people will beat you to it, and be accepted before you even get a look-in. This applies particularly to “hot” divisions like investment banking (M&A and capital markets) and sales and trading. Rushing might be less imperative in divisions like technology, where Goldman hires a lot of people and struggles to attract them.

Of course, applying to GS isn’t easy. The firm famously uses a 300 word personal statement to differentiate between candidates and crafting this carefully has traditionally been considered crucial to success.

Goldman recruiters say the firm is deluged in applications from identikit candidates and that “creativity and effort” in the personal statement stand out. “There were some crazy submissions – poems and things,” one ex-GS recruiter recalls. “Someone who’d studied English Literature at Cambridge wrote a really brilliant and off-the-wall description of why they wanted to work for us and we invited them for interview because we thought they might have some brilliant and innovative ideas.”

If you make it through the personal statement, you can expect to be invited to a Hirevue interview. Unlike many other banks, Goldman doesn’t run assessment centres: if you make it through Hirevue, you’ll be asked to a series of individual interviews instead.

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“”

Photo credit: Stampede! by Dennis van Zuijlekom is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

It’s a day for disappearances. First, came Chris Innes, U.S. head of equities at BNP Paribas. Now it looks like Raj Nagella, one of Citi’s most senior quantitative equities traders has gone too.

There is no one with Nagella’s name on Citi’s internal directory and insiders say he’s left. Citi confirmed Nagella’s disappearance.

The exit comes after Citi’s equities sales and trading revenues declined nearly 11% year-on-year in the second quarter. At J.P. Morgan equities revenuens were down just 1% over the same period.

Nagella joined Citi in 2008 after leaving Bank of America. He held various positions at the U.S. bank, including head of U.S. algorithmic trading products and head of the Americas execution platform. His LinkedIn profile says he was made global head of cash products in 2014, but Citi insiders say he was a mere “quantitative analyst”. Nagella began his banking career at Goldman Sachs in 2001, where he helped popularize the use of algorithms in the trading business.

Observers suggest Nagella’s exit is symptomatic of Murray Roos’s growing influence. Roos joined Citi from Deutsche in 2015 and is global co-head of equities with Dan Keegan. Nagella isn’t the only change at the top of Citi’s equities business this year. Ryan Gould, a former equities MD left to manage the central risk book at UBS in May and Tom Chippas joined as global head of quantitative execution from blockchain start-up Axoni in June (Chippas was formerly CEO of Citadel Technology LLC).

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“”

Photo credit: citi by Tamas Neltz is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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6. Recruiters must know about “team dynamics”

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A poorly timed startup launch leads to soul-searching

Regrouping and jumping to a hedge fund – then fintech

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