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It’s been a good year to work on an emerging markets desk. Although market intelligence firm Coalition says emerging markets macro revenues were down 2% year-on-year in the first half, banks have been determined to build up their emerging markets desks. And they continue to do so, even as we hit the fourth quarter.

The latest big(gish) hire is Ansar Ali, an emerging markets rates trader who’s just joined UBS as an executive director after seven years at SocGen (where he was a director).

Ali isn’t UBS’s first emerging markets hire this year. UBS poached senior EM trader Dmitry Khoroshavtsev from Goldman in June, although he has yet to officially join. Both men are part of a bigger rebuilding of UBS’s macro sales and trading business.

Within macro, however, it’s emerging markets which stands out as the big growth area this year across the market as a whole. While traders say most FX desks are down by a double digit percentage this year, emerging markets desks are understood to be largely flat. This may be one reason banks like Credit Suisse, SocGen, Nomura, Goldman and Jefferies have been hiring in EM this year, triggering off musical chairs across the market.

By hiring this late in the year, banks are also indicating that 2018 is expected to be strong for emerging markets desks. Ali’s arrival at UBS now suggests he may even have had his bonus bought out by the Swiss bank. If you’re looking for the best place to work in fixed income now, emerging markets would seem to be it.

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The type of people private equity companies hire in London is changing. Five years ago, a junior recruit making the switch from to the buy-side will almost certainly have come from large U.S. investment bank, and probably will have graduated with a first from the London School of Economics. Now, though, there’s a curious ‘ideal’ private equity recruit – a analyst from a major bank who’s also a history graduate from Oxford University.

Private equity companies hiring associates from investment banks tend to hire junior bankers who studied at Oxford according to analysis of 300 people who secured buy-side job in London over the past 18 months by Private Equity Recruitment. While LSE, University College London and Imperial College London have long dominated investment banks’ UK graduate programmes, private equity firms prefer bankers who are more blue-blooded. The junior bankers private equity funds hire have most often studied at Oxford, followed by the University of Bristol and then the University of Warwick. The LSE does feature in the top five, but Durham University, Cambridge and Bocconi provided more private equity recruits than London universities.

Given that private equity funds are hiring from investment banks and investment banks like to hire economics and finance graduates, it’s unsurprising that economics and finance graduates still make up the majority of ex-banking analysts who go into private equity, although their dominance is less pronounced than on the sell-side. Our own analysis of the 2017 analyst class of Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley showed that up to 47% of new hires had studied economics, and 18-26% graduated with a Finance degree, compared to 27% and 20% respectively among PE recruits. The big difference in private equity is that history graduates comprised 14% of all placements in 2016-17.

What’s more, investment banks’ new enthusiasm for hiring in STEM students has not transferred to the buy-side.

“More people getting private equity jobs studied history than any single science or maths subject,” says Gail McManus, managing director of PER. “Usually, a humanities degree was combined with a top university like Oxford and experience working for a top U.S. investment bank.”

Investment banks have switched their graduate recruitment towards ‘harder’ degrees like engineering, science and technology over the past two years, but they still want some diversity of applicants. A Goldman recruiter told us earlier that they look for “unusual profiles”. “It’s all about trying to attract a diverse group of applicants who’ve studied history, or English Literature instead of just finance,” they said.

For every available junior private equity role, only 3% of applicants are put forward for interview. If this seems on a par with most investment banking graduate programmes, bear in mind that most trying to break into the buy-side already have two years in a top bank under their belts. But if only the top analysts are hired across to PE, the range of banks that buy-side firms are hiring from is expanding.

“Five years ago when we looked at this, about 80% of all people with banking backgrounds placed in private equity came from the six bulge bracket banks,” says McManus. “This is now more varied with only 50% from the bulge brackets. Mid-market private equity firms – even those with a domestic UK focus – are now looking at banking backgrounds when they may have favoured big four lead advisory or transaction services in the past. This has resulted in an increased demand from banks such as Rothschild and Lazard as well as the European investment banks.”

In other words, a broader range of private equity companies now favour recruits from investment banks instead of Big Four professional services firms or management consultants like Bain, McKinsey, or Boston Consulting Group, but they still want the best analysts and have had to cast the net wider.

Private equity firms’ preference for winners doesn’t necessarily mean that new recruits have impeccable academics. 26% of those landing the jobs had first class degrees, whereas 72% had a 2:1, which is the bare minimum for making it into an investment bank. The remaining 2% didn’t state a grade.

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If you’re an equity researcher at an investment bank in London now, you could be forgiven for feeling a little…queasy. Something horrible has been lurking around the corner all year and as we enter the fourth quarter, its shape is being thrown into sharper relief. With its request that banks charge separately for equity research, MiFID II always looked ugly. But with more and more assets managers saying they’ll try absorbing these extra costs themselves (rather than passing them on to clients), it’s looking uglier still.

Investment banks’ revenues relating to equity research were already predicted to fall by 30% after MiFID II comes into effect next year. As fund managers react to the erosion of their own profit margins from the extra costs, there’s a possibility revenues could reduce by even more. In the worst case scenario, McKinsey & Co. says revenues could be down 50%. Equity research businesses are far from ready to face this bleak reality: as McKinsey & Co. pointed out in June, while equity sales and trading headcount has been cut 40% since 2011, equity research headcount has been cut just 11%.

Something needs to change.

For the moment, headhunters specializing in equity research jobs in London say the only real change is to hiring: there isn’t any. In the run up to MiFID II, banks are sitting firmly on their hands.

This is surprising. MiFID II is widely expected to benefit top-rated equity research analysts whose star quality should be a big draw once banks can charge for their output. “I’d expected a lot more hiring at the top end,” says one headhunter. “It hasn’t happened.” More surprisingly, though, banks haven’t thrown their mediocre researchers out the window. Instead, there’s just an eerie silence before the MiFID roller coaster makes its move.

Headhunters predict this will all change once the process of charging for equity research gets underway in 2018. “Banks are going to give their researchers three to six months under the new regime,” predicts one. “Researchers will have one or two quarters to prove their ability to pull-in revenues, and if they can’t they’ll be out.” Once the dust has settled on the new model, he predicts a widespread equity research cull in June 2018.

Zaki Ahmed, director of equity-focused Financial Search Limited, says equity researchers are about to be exposed to the laws of nature: “It will be “survival of the fittest” in equity research. Some analysts have already consciously decided they will probably not make the grade in their sector so have switched to investor relations, the buy-side, or financial PR.”

The good news is that once the weak equity research specimens have been eliminated and budgets freed-up, research headhunters also predict a belated rush of recruitment. Everyone will want to hire the top equity researchers who can generate big revenues. Everyone will also want to hire those top researchers’ teams. “You will see the emergence of the ‘superstar analysts’,” predicts Ahmed. “These will be the top three or four people in their relevant sectors who have a strong franchise and are the “go to people” in their space….there will be a return of “team moves” where these top analysts will transfer their whole teams to other banks and even boutiques.”

The upshot is that if you work in equity research and you prove yourself as a big research fee earner or as the adjunct to a big fee earner in the first six months of 2018, you could be one of the most sought-after people in the market in 12 months’ time.

Not only that, but you could get paid a lot more than you do now. “There’s definitely going to be some pay inflation for these “franchise analysts”,” says another equity research headhunter. “Everyone’s going to want to the same people.”

How much will “franchise analysts” get paid? One headhunter suggests seven figures is conceivable, and predicts they’ll be lured with two year guarantees. Ahmed suggests some franchise analysts will move to independent research boutiques where they’ll be paid a percentage of their revenues.

Either way, for some equity researchers a great future probably beckons. It’s just surviving the next nine months that’s going to be difficult.

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If you are currently working at a huge bank like Goldman Sachs or J.P. Morgan and feel like your career growth has stalled, how can you tell when the time is right to join a smaller firm?

For Mark Traudt – who quit Goldman Sachs for a fintech start-up in 2003, back when an investment bank was the most well-paid and prestigious place for a technologist to be – he preffered the excitement of making a big impact at a small firm to the prestige of making a small impact at a big firm.

One of the biggest factors most people consider, understandably, is compensation.

“Your bonus upside is a lot better at a boutique investment bank, but your work/life balance may be worse,” said Brianne Toole, principal consultant on the investment banking team, Americas, at Selby Jennings. “You may have to work harder at a smaller firm.”

“It’s difficult if the team is small and the deal is big – but you’re likely to be rewarded on the other end come bonus time,” she says. While big banks are deferring more of their bonus payments, most boutiques are still paying in cash.

The appeal of a boutique

Boutique M&A houses like Centerview Partners, PJT Partners and Robey Warshaw have been involved in some big-ticket deals over the past couple of years. The knock-on effect has been to enhance the reputation of all boutiques including larger firms like Evercore, Moelis & Co and Houlihan Lokey. It also helps that ongoing job cuts at larger firms have eroded any sense of loyalty to a single organization.

Boutique investment banks are continuing to eat the lunch of large M&A advisory players in the U.S., but they’re also taking advantage of problems hitting bulge-bracket banks to bring in some top talent. Evercore and Lazard cracked the U.S. M&A advisory revenue top 10 list for the first nine months of this year, according to Dealogic. Firms such as Moelis, Perella Weinberg, Evercore and Houlihan Lokey pay quite well.

“Before we couldn’t move someone from a bulge-bracket or convince people to go from Goldman or J.P. Morgan to a boutique, but now it’s not a problem at all,” says Jeanne Branthover, a partner at DHR International.

“They think, ‘If I go to a smaller boutique, I could get a bigger bonus, take on more responsibility and make a bigger impact,’ so convincing them to make a move is not a problem anymore,” she says. “Nobody feels job security anymore – people saw Harvard MBA friends getting fired and realized that anyone can get fired, so now everybody keeps their ears open for opportunities out there.”

“Boutiques have ability to bring in big deals, and if they’re able to close them, there’s a huge reward,” says Toole. “Many of the elite boutiques have been able to attract great people from bulge-brackets lately.”

The case for leaving a bulge-bracket

While some bankers always seem to like to complain about their bonus, in recent years those complaints have gotten louder at certain bulge-brackets.

“Bonus pool sharing has really affected a lot of people in a negative way, especially at banks that had to pay a lot of fines and it affected everyone’s bonuses – it’s not in your control,” Toole says. “At a boutique, the money you bring into your firm will be reflected in your bonus, so there’s more upside.”

Most boutiques are privately held and therefore not subject to the same level of regulatory pressure as the larger firms, notes Anne Crowley, managing director at recruiters Jay Gaines & Co.

While large investment banks are very hierarchical, with juniors being pigeon-holed into one area of the business, the depth of roles at boutiques often means that career progression an be swifter – albeit less structured.

“The opportunity can be greater at a smaller firm, particularly if it is growing, but you need to be comfortable taking the lead or defining the role or path,” Crowley said. “If you have the right people, smaller firms can have a family-like atmosphere.

The case for staying put at a big bank

Smaller or boutique firms can be “personality-driven,” meaning the persona of the CEO can have an outsized influence on the inner workings and tone of the firm. This can be good for business, but it can also be problematic for career progression, Crowley says. Added to that are the fact that senior bankers at boutiques are often hired in from larger banks at a later stage in their career. This means opportunities to move up the ranks for those who joined a boutique as a junior are not always available.

Smaller firms often focus on one business area, which means they can be more vulnerable to changes in the economy or business climate.

Boutiques also tend to be less structured and more opportunistic.

“If you like structure and a defined career path, a smaller firm may not be the best place for you,” Crowley says.

Smaller firms may not provide the same level of complexity or functional rigor as a larger firm, she noted and the average size of M&A deals is lower.

Plus, smaller firms are typically less well known, and they may not command the same level of credibility and immediate recognition on your resume as some of the larger firms.

And while initially you may get promoted more quickly at a boutique, a smaller firm may not provide the same level of career growth potential over time as a larger firm, Crowley said. There are plenty of examples of Goldman veterans, even lifers, who have risen to senior, well-paid positions in

There are plenty of examples of Goldman veterans, even lifers, who have risen to senior, well-paid positions in HR, technology, Financial and Strategic Investors Group (FSIG) investment banking and M&A advisory. Of course, there is a comparably wide range of opportunities at J.P. Morgan, including people who switch from one group to another.

“As far as cons at a boutique, at the junior banker level, if you don’t have strong senior bankers above you, then you’re pitching all the time and sending out memos,” Toole says. “At a bulge-bracket, the brand name brings in business, so there’s not as much pitching involved.

“At a boutique, the deal flow is a lot more variable, so if they have a bad year your bonus will be small, and base salary can be 50% less than at a bulge-bracket,” she says. “At a smaller firm you’re handicapped by what you bring in and actually close.”
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I’ve been around. I’ve spent fifteen years working in a middle office job in investment banks and I’ve seen a few. I’ve worked for several of the big U.S. investment banks (you know the ones I mean) and I’ve worked some of the Europeans. Now, I’ve just joined Goldman Sachs and it’s true: this place is different.

How so? Well, Goldman is all about consensus. Unlike the banks I worked for before, no one here makes decisions alone. This is a partner-led place and rather than having a bunch of managing directors running their own shows, you have partners who are really invested across the whole business. This makes for a very different kind of environment. It’s an environment where everyone’s in it together and everyone has each other’s back.

To give you an example, I’m working on a large and complex project across multiple divisions. For the moment, things are just about going right – but there are also some serious niggles and places where things could go badly wrong. In the other banks I’ve worked for, there was always an element of throwing people under the bus during times of crisis. – When things didn’t work out, there was a culture of pointing fingers and blaming each other. At Goldman it’s very different. As the project progresses I’m noticing that there’s more and more engagement from partners and managing directors. There’s no blame culture here: it’s just about everyone working together to solve problems.

Of course, a super-consensual culture has its downsides. While MDs at other firms rush to make unilateral decisions, making decisions by consensus takes time. It’s not easy to hear everyone and to pull things together and sometimes the pace of decision-making can be frustrating. But when a decision is made it’s very well-anchored and very well thought through.

Another big difference about Goldman – particularly if you work in tech here – is that a lot of Goldman’s tech solutions are developed in-house whereas a lot of other banks have a history of buying things in from vendors. This also makes thing slow, and is quite an old-fashioned way of going about things, but it means that Goldman’s solutions tend to be the best: they’re designed for the job and are overseen by partners who really know the business.

Compared to the other banks I’ve worked for, Goldman is also a beacon of stability. Whereas banks like Citi, J.P. Morgan and Bank of America Merrill Lynch have been through big acquisition processes in the past decade, Goldman has grown organically. There are none of the myriad of different technologies and valuation systems other banks have had to contend with, and there’s none of the friction that comes with competing cultures. Goldman is Goldman – this gives the place a certain serenity.

Finally, Fabulous Fab and the Abacus deal aside, Goldman has managed to avoid legal issues. While European banks like UBS and Deutsche have notched up fines for bad behaviour, Goldman has been far less penalized by the regulators and seems pretty rock-solid and bullet-proof by comparison. The standards here seem better, the better people here seem better, and the culture here seems better. Maybe this is just rose-tinted thinking from a new joiner, but I don’t think so.

Brian Smith is the pseudonym of a recent senior hire in the middle office of Goldman Sachs.

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Over the next few weeks finance recruiters in Singapore and Hong Kong will be meeting candidates for jobs starting in the post-bonus season early next year.

If you’re meeting a recruiter yourself, you need to come armed with a list of pertinent questions about the job, the bank and the boss. Here’s what to ask.

1. What’s your relationship like with the bank?

“Always ask about the recruiter’s relationship with the bank – such as how long they’ve been working together and whether the recruiter has made any placements for them before,” says John Mullally, director of financial services at recruiters Robert Walters in Hong Kong. “The answer should provide insight into how strong an influence the recruiter has on the bank’s decision-making process, which in turn affects your chance of getting an interview.”

2. How long has the bank been looking to fill this role?

Long periods of searching the market may suggest that the bank is carrying out a thorough search. “But it usually shows that it’s unclear on what it wants from the new hire” says a Hong Kong-based recruiter.

3. How would you describe the leadership style of the hiring manager?

If your potential future manager has a leadership style that you may not like, try to find out about it as soon as possible. And even if they don’t, this question will help to kick start your interview preparation. “Understanding the hiring manager’s behaviour will help you interact better with them at interviews and respond to them more effectively,” says Han Lee, director of search firm Lico Resources in Singapore.

4. And how is the hiring manager perceived within the bank?

“As a candidate you want to hear an answer like ‘they’re a rising star’,” says Richard Aldridge, a director at recruiters Black Swan Group in Singapore. “A team that’s growing and is managed by a new superstar in the bank bodes well for the role you’re applying for. You may be able to align yourself to them and give your own career a boost.”

5. How much staff turnover has there been in the team over the past year?

Risk, compliance and other talent-short job functions within Asian banking have experienced high staff turnover of late. If a team bucks this trend, it suggests staff satisfaction is strong. “Ask some questions around the recruiter’s knowledge of team dynamics,” says the Hong Kong recruiter. “How long has the team been in place? How many people have been hired over the past year? Has there been much employee turnover?”

6. How will this role enable me to reach my two-year and five-year career plans?

Banks in Asia are increasingly asking recruiters to weed out candidates they suspect of being potential job hoppers. Mentioning long-term objectives without any prompting is highly recommended. “It demonstrates you have a plan and are serious about your own career,” says the Hong Kong recruiter.

7. How does the bank promote internal progression?

Aldridge recommends the following questions: “Is this a team that other people within the bank have moved into?” and “how do you promote internal progression?”. He adds: “As a candidate, you want to hear that previous team members have stayed with the bank and have been given interesting opportunities – lateral or vertical. If not, then probe deeper as to why.”

8. Where are other people with a similar background to me getting interviews?

Most people only ask how many other candidates are applying for the vacancy under discussion. If you want a real sense of your competition, ask broader questions about who’s actually getting interviews. “This allows you to know how your experience is being viewed in the market and what the chances of you getting interviews or jobs is,” says Mullally from Robert Walters. “The recruiter should be able to give specific answers to this question, such as the names of the roles and firms they see people with similar backgrounds going into. They should give clear parameters about what kind of jobs are available in the market and what aren’t.”

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It’s difficult to imagine for students toiling away through multiple internships, while attempting to secure amazing academics to land their first banking job, but things were a little more relaxed for the generation that’s currently heading up the big banks. Lloyd Blankfein told Goldman Sachs’ interns last year to ‘chill’ and find themselves a little before striving towards banking.

Now Sergio Ermotti, UBS’s CEO who – like Blankfein – has a trading background, has said that he never saw banking as a long-term option. Instead, he merely signed up to an apprenticeship in Switzerland as a 15-year-old as a stop-gap until he could become a…P.E. teacher.

“The most practical thing was to do an apprenticeship with a bank to get up to speed with accounting, finance, and so on,” he told Bloomberg Businessweek in a wide-ranging interview. “When I finish that, I’ll go into sports. I never thought that I would stay at the bank.”

The thing, however, is that Ermotti had a pre-conceived idea of what working for a bank would be – ie, boring. When he ended up on the trading floor with “all this info bombarding us that would affect financial markets”, he realised there was more to it. He was hooked. “Every other step I took for the next 10 years was only so that I could get into working at a big securities house as a trader,” he said.

Ermotti’s supposedly relaxed approach hides a clear steely determinism, and an element of luck. “In 1987, Merrill Lynch asked me to open a Swiss capital markets operation. I was 27,” he said. In hindsight, I was lucky enough to start a business from scratch. And I mean from zero—no offices even, just a space with walls between different areas. We decided to tear down the walls. I had to go out and order everything from phones to desks and also hire people.”

Ermotti was given the chance to replicate the Zurich office in London. His advice to making it into a strategic management role is to make “horizontal” moves throughout your career, rather than trying to climb the pole in one area of specialism. That, he says, “does not make you a good manager”. Being able to make tough decisions does, he said, which might explain the brutal downsizing of UBS’s investment bank with him at the helm.

“Learning to kill your darlings was also big from an emotional point of view,” he said. “When you need to have difficult discussions with people who’ve been working with you for a long time, it’s not easy. You have to recognize that things have changed and move on.”

Separately, there’s one character trait that will make you irresistible to professional services firms and investment banks alike – insecurity. Specifically, according to the FT, the type of insecurity that provides the drive to continually succeed. “Partners are earning over £800,000 a year and the average guy here will be thinking, ‘God, I’m not worth it’,” said the managing partner of one law firm.

Meanwhile:

Goldman is making a habit of hiring in people at partner level. Mike Blum, the former chief technology officer at KCG Holdings, is joining as CTO for its electronic trading unit. (Business Insider)

UBS could get by with 30% fewer employees as technology takes hold. Good news, though, the jobs that will remain in banking will be “more interesting” (Reuters)

Reid Marsh, an industrials investment banker who has held senior roles at Barclays in Asia, is its new head of investment banking outside of the Americas (Financial Times)

Asset managers are clubbing together to ensure that they don’t face a talent crunch after Brexit (Financial News)

Fidelity has introduced a new fee model that cuts management fees and adds in a performance element (Financial Times)

It’s essentially copying hedge funds (BreakingViews)

Hedge funds are flipping ICOs: “It’s not healthy for the ecosystem, and it’s pretty abusive.” (Bloomberg)

Still thinking about #Bitcoin. No conclusion – not endorsing/rejecting. Know that folks also were skeptical when paper money displaced gold.

— Lloyd Blankfein (@lloydblankfein) October 3, 2017

Don’t blame John Cryan for Deutsche Bank’s woes (Financial Times)

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In hedge fund terms, AQR Capital Management is a giant. It has 800 or so employees globally, $185bn in assets under management, and earned profits of $530m last year – more than the world’s biggest publicly-traded hedge fund Man Group.

By comparison, the London operation of the hedge fund run by billionaire Cliff Asness, is a tiny speck. It made £4.7m ($6.2m) on revenues of £20.4m ($27m) in the year ending December 2016, according to new accounts released on Companies House this week, up from £3.4m ($4.5m) in 2015.

AQR also employs a mere 19 staff in London. There are some clear benefits, however – the office is growing and the pay is big.

Headcount increased by 72% last year, even if this just equates to adding eight people, and AQR has continued to hire in 2017. It now has 23 people listed with the Financial Conduct Authority, up from 18 at the beginning of this year. Recent new hires include Elliott Coleman, who moved from BlackRock’s iShares team into a business development role in May, and Caroline Pillot, a former managing director at hedge fund Permal Group who moved into a senior sales role in August.

Unlike the CEOs of other large quant hedge funds, Asness may have missed out on the top 10 richest hedge fund managers this year, but AQR appears very generous to its London staff. On a per head basis, it shelled out £657.8k ($873.4k) to its 19 employees this year. This is, however, down on the £730k ($933.5k) average payment last year.

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It may be unusual for bankers to make a move in the fourth quarter, but firms are still making hires for front-office roles – even when they have to buy out or guarantee the new hire’s bonus. If you’re currently in the market for a new job or even looking ahead to next year’s recruitment wave, you have to know what you’re up against.

We’ve broken out the jobs on Wall Street – specifically the New York metropolitan tri-state area, which also includes New Jersey and Connecticut – that had the most applications on eFinancialCareers during the first three quarters of 2017, based on an average 30-day application rate over that period. Below are the most popular job sectors that are achieving the most applications in and around New York City.

The most notable trend? While the buy-side is still quite desirable, the sell-side is still holding its own on Wall Street, even if that may not be true in every market across the U.S.

The most desirable sectors in the New York tri-state area

1. Investment banking/M&A

In some parts of the country, it may be all about fintech, professional services or the buy side, but in New York, a lot of people want to work at a big prestigious Wall Street bank like Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanly, BAML and Citi – or perhaps an elite boutique or middle-market firm.

The hiring of M&A bankers continued on Wall Street over the summer, with associates and vice presidents (VPs) at the top of banks’ lists. On average, 24 professionals applied to each investment banking/M&A job posting on eFinancialCareers in July, down from 73 last August and 72 last September.

However, that was a blip, because over the first nine months of the year, the sector averaged 76 applications per posting.

2. Research

Other than private equity, no other sector demonstrated more demand for such a limited number of job postings. It is well known that the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) II, the rise of quantitative analytics and other factors have ushered in a new era of research.

Morgan Stanley is an example of a bank that continued to hire researchers this year. However, the game is changing, and traditional, fundamental researchers are looking at other options offering more job security and lowering expectations for their compensation whether they decide to stick it out or make a move.

The sector averaged 69 applications per posting over the first three quarters of this year.

3. Private equity and venture capital

Private equity and venture capital are both notoriously difficult to break into. PE firms’ on-cycle recruitment is becoming more competitive and kicks off earlier every year – for many investment banking analysts, the process begins as soon as they start on the training program. There are always the typical candidates with two years of investment banking experience moving into private equity – sales, marketing, distribution and capital-raising professionals are all highly sought-after – and the post-MBA hires who PE firms recruit before their last year.

Over the first nine months of the year, the sector averaged 67 applications per posting.

4. Trading and commodities

While fixed income, currencies and commodities traders still haven’t been as impacted by algorithmic electronic trading as their equities-focused brethren, many believe that trading algorithms are getting so sophisticated that human traders cannot keep up over the long term.

The flip side of that coin? It is leading to the rise of quantitative – and hybrid “quantamental” – trading jobs. More investment banks are looking at data science, big data analytics and AI in a revenue-generation capacity, much as quant hedge funds have been using machine learning for algorithmic execution.

Many firms want to hire data scientists who understand trading, quants with people skills and traders who can code and understand predictive analytics.

Trading and commodities came in fourth (an average of 64 applications per posting) and fifth (63 applications per posting) respectively.

5. Hedge funds and long-only asset management

Plenty of traditional asset management firms and hedge funds hire from universities’ graduating classes, and while banking is still a huge talent pipeline for them, it’s not always so easy to move from the sell side to the buy side.

Other than data scientists and quants, the perception is that buy-side recruitment has been muted as active managers’ performance struggles and fee pressures from popular passive investment strategies like ETFs and index-tracking mutual funds have sparked a series of mergers, fund closures and job cuts.

However, the biggest and most successful firms have been getting bigger, both in terms of their assets under management and headcount, including for investment team and portfolio manager roles.

Hedge funds and asset management placed sixth (an average of 59 applications per posting) and seventh (58 applications per posting) respectively.
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It’s that time of year. You probably feel a bit fatigued. – Maybe you feel a bit rheumy with latest viral syndrome? Maybe you’ve been slowly destroying your mental and physical health with less than eight hours’ sleep a night? Maybe your two weeks off in the summer had as much resonance as a Michael Jackson song on a sticky iPod? Maybe you just need another holiday. If so, you will look upon 26 year-old Michael Summers and weep. He just had the whole summer off, and he just got a good new job at Deutsche Bank.

Summers is the latest ex-employee of Haitong Securities to find a new home. As we reported previously, Haitong has opped-off 67% of its staff in the past 18 months. Many – like Summers – were let go in April. Several, like Summers had the entire summer (appropriately enough) to kick-back and have just returned to work as the weather turns.

Summers declined to comment for this article. However, after leaving Haitong in April his LinkedIn profile suggests he just got a much better job working on Deutsche’s flow equity derivatives sales desk in London. His sojourn at Haitong lasted 16 months and he previously spent 17 months at Morgan Stanley. When Deutsche announced its second quarter results in July, it said it planned to stock up on ‘specialist sales and distribution” people for its equities business. Summers was clearly in luck.

Summers isn’t the only ex-Haitong employee to find a new job after a long summer at the beach. As we reported last month, Credit Suisse hired Jamil Hallak, a former Haitong emerging markets MD, who also left in April. Marcus Miholich, Haitong’s former head of Delta One trading, left in June and turned up at State Street Global Advisors as head of Nordics in September.

Not all former Haitong people have been re-homed however. Clemens Lancing, Haitong’s former head of global markets and an ex-head of European flow derivatives trading at J.P. Morgan, says he’s only just started looking for a new role after taking the summer out. He’s now open to opportunities in London, Frankfurt, or Geneva – and is very well rested indeed.

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The head of Deutsche Bank’s prime broking business in the U.S. has departed to return to his former employer, Goldman Sachs, in a senior equity sales role.

Marcelo Pizzimbono has left his role within Deutsche’s prime broking business, which has endured a tumultuous two years of cut backs, slumping revenues and senior personnel changes, to re-join Goldman Sachs.

Pizzimbono spent over ten years at Goldman Sachs, where he was a managing director in U.S. equities sales, before departing for Deutsche in 2010, initially as head of New York research sales. At Deutsche, he was promoted to head of prime brokerage for the Americas in January 2015, following the departure of Scott Carter, who in August of the same year joined AQR Capital Management as head of portfolio finance.

Also in 2015, Ashley Wilson and Greg Bunn were promoted to co-global heads of prime finance at Deutsche Bank. Meanwhile, Simon Kempton, its head of international prime brokerage in London, and Daniel Kaplan, who led its European prime finance division, were hired by Citigroup.

We understand that Pizzimbono will occupy a senior equities sales role at Goldman. A spokesperson at the bank declined to comment.

Deutsche has continued to struggle within its prime finance division since scaling back the business by cutting some of its smaller hedge fund clients loose in 2015, a move echoed by other banks who struggled to justify large, capital hungry prime broking businesses in an era when closer regulators are paying closer attention to their balance sheets.

In September last year, around 10 hedge funds reduced their positions with Deutsche’s prime broking business over fears about its financial position. It’s still feeling the impact of this – Deutsche said in its Q2 results that its equities business was down 28% year on year and that prime services revenues were “significantly lower reflecting lower margins and lower client balances”.

Goldman’s prime services division ranks joint second globally alongside J.P. Morgan, according to research firm Coalition. Morgan Stanley tops the rankings.

While most banks cut their prime broking businesses as they streamlined trading client lists after tougher capital requirements after the financial crisis, there are signs of life again in the U.S. job market. As we reported, CIBC Capital Markets, RBC Capital Markets and TD Securities – led by former Goldman Sachs partner David Santina – are all hiring on Wall Street.

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Now is a precarious time to work for a large hedge fund. Both Bluecrest Capital Management and Moore Capital Management, run by billionaires Louis Bacon and Michael Platt respectively, have been chopping money management staff and curtailing compensation over the past year.

UK hedge funds are usually private companies and typically file at least two sets of accounts – one for the LLP, which includes senior partners of the firm, and others that cover the broader company housing its rank and file employees. Both Bluecrest Capital Management, the family office run by Michael Platt, and the $13.4bn hedge fund Moore Capital Management have filed their 2016 reports for both entities today.

Bluecrest said that it had cut headcount at the broader company by 21% over the course of the year – or 89 people – and global employee numbers are now 337. Moore Capital Management, meanwhile said that it had reduced overall employee numbers from 105 to 101 last year. However, this concealed an increase in the number of people in admin and research functions and 28% cut in portfolio managers, who were reduced by 10 people.

While both funds have been cutting employees at their broader companies, senior staff numbers at the LLPs have remained relatively sheltered. Bluecrest cut just two partners last year (and now has 85). Moore also cut two senior staff (down to 23).

Bluecrest’s UK LLP has, however, been (a lot) more successful than Moore’s. It made a profit of £95m in 2016, up from £53.4m in 2015. Bluecrest has been paying its senior management accordingly. It shelled out £96.7m to its members last year, an increase of 27% on 2015.

Moore Capital’s European partnership, meanwhile, made a profit of £41.1m last year, down from £57.5m on 2015. Reflecting this, it has been cutting pay for partners: in 2015, it paid them an average of £2.4m; in 2016, this was down to £1.6m.

The under-performing Moore has also cut pay for the rank and file at its broader company: there average pay per head for its employees fell from £447.6k in 2015 to £356.4k last year. By comparison, employees who survived the job at Bluecrest were in luck; their pay averaged £357k last year, compared to £262k in 2015.

More recently, neither fund has been exactly thriving. Moore was said to cut around 30 jobs across New York and London this July. Bluecrest, meanwhile, has kept UK headcount relatively consistent through 2017, but senior staff have been leaving. Christian Dalban, Nomura’s former head of equities trading who joined Bluecrest to build a London equities team of around 12 people, left in June. Derek Flynn, it’s head of equity execution trading also left in late September. Meanwhile, Eric Childs, a portfolio manager in rates and FX, returned to banking to join Barclays as head of US dollar swaps trading last month.

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As recently as two years ago banks in Singapore were offering pay rises of more than 20% to lure new recruits. Not anymore.

But 10%-plus increases are still possible for candidates moving between banks. Which job functions are offering the biggest salary hikes in Singapore banking?

To find out, we asked seven recruitment agencies to tell us percentage pay increments (at VP level) for the most in-demand job sectors. We then averaged out their figures to produce the list of 13 jobs below.

Quants top our table, with an average of 18%. High academic barriers to entering the profession and local skill shortages are constantly pushing up pay, says Gary Lai, managing director for Southeast Asia at recruiters Charterhouse Partnership.

Unsurprisingly, cyber security is also enjoying relatively healthy pay increments. “With evolving security guidelines in Singapore, it’s an area where there’s a supply/demand gap both for banks and insurance firms,” says Nilay Khandelwal, regional director of recruitment agency Michael Page in Singapore.

M&A and capital markets both make our list, although 16% average pay increases are still low in historical terms for front-office functions. “There’s weak hiring demand from the banks – most have been downsizing in Asia – and huge oversupply of candidates,” says Jay Abeyasinghe, associate director of financial services at recruiters Morgan McKinley in Singapore.

While compliance candidates could count on 25% two years ago, 16% is now the norm. Compliance hiring is falling as technology takes over jobs and banks achieve headcount targets. However, the employment market remains “strong” compared to other jobs, says Matthieu Imbert-Bouchard, MD of Robert Half. The more specialist the compliance role, the higher the pay rise, adds Natasha Madhavan, head of risk at Selby Jennings.

Internal audit job seekers are currently picking up 15% on average, but unlike compliance professionals, upward pressure on their salaries is increasing. “Specialist roles where the candidate pool is relatively small – compliance audit or IT infrastructure audit, for example – can command higher pay rises,” says Tim Klimcke, director of financial services at recruiters Robert Walters in Singapore.

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If you want to work on J.P. Morgan’s Quantitative and Derivative Strategy team within the bank’s Global Research group, then you better have a PhD in one of three areas: applied mathematics, computer science and statistics.

That’s according to Rajesh Krishnamachari, a vice president of quantitative and derivatives strategy – a quant investment strategist and researcher using machine learning and big data-based investing – at J.P. Morgan Chase. He gave an afternoon keynote address at The Trading Show New York.

“Our team has PhDs in different disciplines – there are a couple with PhDs in applied math, who work on computational geometric algorithms, PhDs [in computer science] with the deep-learning skills we’re trying to enhance on, and PhDs in statistics, who apply classical mathematical techniques to writing algorithms,” Krishnamachari said. “[That said,] do not discount the value of fundamental knowledge, because the fundamental narrative does not change – we’re still looking at data inputs such as GDP, what central banks are doing and geopolitics.

“When a PhD joins the team, I assume that I’m going to train them on economics and finance,” he says. “Rigorous mathematics might not lead you to the right answer, so even when you hire people with the backgrounds I mentioned, you have to make sure they have the right markets intuition.”

Krishnamachari said that he and his team work on classifying nascent datasets – assessing the relevance and applications of various datasets generated by individuals, businesses and machines; advanced machine-learning algorithms – supervised learning, unsupervised learning, deep learning and reinforcement learning; and processing alternative data.

“Data can come from individual people, machines or groups of human beings who have organized themselves into business processes,” Krishnamachari said. “To understand the world, we have to classify data via a taxonomy, for example, classifying data by the asset class that it’s relevant to: equities, commodities, credit, rates or FX.

“Some data might night be viable as a stand-alone signal but they would be in the context of a portfolio,” he said.

A must for success in this role? You have to know your algorithms and the provenance of the tools employed in modern financial data analysis, including statistics, electrical engineering, computer science and financial econometrics.

“Machine learning is just advanced statistics from a computational perspective,” Krishnamachari said. “Classical tools are still valuable in the age of machine learning and artificial intelligence.”

Another lesson he teaches his team: the complexity of each algorithm is dependent on the sample size of the dataset. J.P. Morgan uses Google’s Deep Q-Learning for algorithmic execution.

“If you’re trying to do style rotations, don’t use an overly complex algo,” Krishnamachari said. “In financial services, the data are not very large sample sizes – there is a religious dogma in Silicon Valley, ‘Do not overfit,’ but in finance, it is very common.”

Machine learning, an algorithm that quantifiably improves its performance as more data is input, affects every aspect of the quant investing business, including style selection, style sector rotation, portfolio construction, yield generation and tail hedging.

“We don’t believe it’s a fad – it’s a trend that’s going to stay,” Krishnamachari said.
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If you’re applying for a technology job in an investment bank, you’ve probably thought of working with the systems that support banks’ sales and trading activities. After all, this is where the highest paid jobs with the greatest exposure to the “front office” are, even though some technologists say they’re best avoided.

Before stepping into an interview for a front office tech job, however, you might want to know exactly what the trading systems do. In this respect, a new report from Greenwich Associates is helpful. Titled, ‘The Technology to Succeed in Fixed Income Trading,” it spends most of its time describing how fixed income trading tech systems function. These are the salient points…

1. As machines take over trading floors, human traders are being supplemented by various types of technology

Human beings are not disappearing from trading floors: they’re just being jazzed up a bit. As “electronification” of trading proceeds apace, Greenwich says there are three key types of technology used to help humans in fixed income trading: autoquoting, real-time pricing systems and low touch hedging tools.

2. Complex algorithms now provide clients with pricing information

Under so-called request for quote trading, clients effectively ask dealing desks in banks to quote prices for particular trades. While traders used to give prices over the telephone, a large portion of RFQs are now handled by so-called “autoquoting systems”.

These systems use mathematical algorithms to generate prices. Before coming up with a price (often in a matter of milliseconds) these algorithms look at public and private data about the security being traded, and add in information from the chart below, including information about the trading counterparty (the client being traded with) and current market conditions. Pricing algorithms also need to take into consideration the dealer’s current exposure to the market to ensure the trade won’t lead to the risk of a big loss. – If a client is a huge buyer, for example, the bank might quote a high price and back off.

As clients demand firm pricing, Greenwich says pricing algorithms are increasingly important source of competitive advantage – and that dealers are increasingly investing in them: “If done properly, such an algorithm connected to the right distribution technology will put the bank ahead of its peers with better pricing, higher margins and reduced risk.”

3. “Internalization engines” are now used to help banks hedge trades

Once upon a time, Greenwich says traders were tasked with hedging (mitigating) the risk associated with their trading activities. To do this, they’d usually either find a customer to take the opposite side of the trade or an inter-dealer broker to pass the risk onto a competitor.

Not any more.

Nowadays, hedging is done via so-called “internalization engines.” These are a sort of internal search engine which looks across a bank’s trades and tries to find ones which will offset the risk that’s been taken on with the new transaction. For example, Greenwich says that if the mortgage desk in New York is looking to buy U.S. Treasuries to adjust the duration of their portfolio, and a corporate customer of the rates desk in London is looking to sell U.S. Treasuries to raise cash, the internalization engine will flag that match and execute the trade.

Greenwich notes that internalization is a big thing for big banks which have all kinds of diverse activities. In future, however, it suggests that smaller banks could club together to create their own internalization pools spread across members of the group (although this would surely raise all sorts of issues about risk sharing).

4. Sometimes internalization engines don’t work though

Although internalization engines are now the go-to hedging systems for big banks, Greenwich notes that they’re not always enough. When an internalization engine can’t find the right matching trade, the bank still has to hedge on the broader market. And this requires another kind of pricing technology.

In this instance, Greenwich says dealers look at “aggregated liquidity streams.” These come both from other peers and so-called “non-bank liquidity providers” like Virtu or Sun Trading. This technology steams prices and puts the banks at the receiving end. If the bank still can’t find an appropriate hedging trade, it will go to anonymous market venues like NEX Group’s BrokerTec and Nasdaq’s eSpeed. Greenwich notes that trading here is, “exchange-like, with anonymous trading and prices on the screen that are immediately executable.” These are seen as a last-resort option.

5. In future, more hedging will take place through derivatives markets

Greenwich notes that today’s internalization engines and aggregate liquidity streams don’t make as much use of futures and options as they ought to. “Market impact, liquidity, fees, and capital impacts should all be used to execute the most efficient offsetting trade, regardless of whether it is a credit default swap, ETF or Eurodollar future at the CME,” says Greenwich. Right now, systems can’t really do this.

6. You don’t need to work in a trading technology team at a bank to work in trading tech

Lastly, Greenwich notes that banks are increasingly buying trading technology systems “off the shelf” from vendor companies. 80% of equity investors now use an execution management system (EMS) provided by a third party. Something similar is coming to the world of fixed income trading.

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If you want to adorn yourself with desirable qualifications and valuable knowledge of the sort that leading banks are desperate to find now, you want to avoid doing an MBA and probably even a Masters in Finance. The most sought-after of today’s students are those who’ve studied machine learning.

As we reported yesterday, J.P. Morgan is looking for PhDs with expertise in machine learning to build algorithms that can analyze large data sets. Goldman Sachs is currently hiring a machine learning and data science engineer to, “crunch billions of data points each day to inform firm-wide market insights and strategies.” And Google…. Google is all about machine learning these days.

A long article in Wired outlines Google’s machine learning evangelism. Although Google’s been running machine learning classes for its employees since 2005, its proselytizing on the subject has recently gone through the roof. Right now, only 10% of Google’s 25,000 engineers are familiar with machine learning; in future it wants them all to be. To this end, it’s just opened a new machine learning lab in Zurich and has seats to fill.

And where does Google go when it wants the best machine learning students in the world? Seemingly to Pedro Domingos, a professor of machine learning at the University of Washington who’s authored a book called the “Master Algorithm.” “My students, no matter who, always get an offer from Google,” Domingos tells Wired. Helpfully, he’s posted his machine learning classes on Youtube, although we suspect that studying them there won’t have quite the same affect.

People who succeed in machine learning aren’t quite the same as traditional coders. Wired suggests old-school coders are control freaks who like to build a universe in which they are supreme. Masters of machine learning are more creative and experimental and mathematical. “It’s a discipline really of doing experimentation with the different algorithms, or about which sets of training data work really well for your use case,” says John Giannandrea, Google’s key promoter of machine learning. “The computer science part doesn’t go away. But there is more of a focus on mathematics and statistics and less of a focus on writing half a million lines of code.”

Separately, Business Insider has assembled a long and impressive list of the top under 35 year-olds in finance. Everyone on it is enough to inspire feelings of inadequacy, but none more so than Razzy Ghomeshi, whom aged just 28 is the head of investment grade trading at RBC Capital Markets in the U.S.

Meanwhile:

You probably don’t want to work in trading for a European bank in Europe when MiFID II trading rules come in next year: their revenue growth is expected to slow considerably, with Deutsche Bank the worst affected. (Bloomberg)

Goldman Sachs leased some new office space in Frankfurt’s financial district. (Bloomberg)

Frankfurt’s housing market could go the same way as London’s. Rents have already risen 50% since 2006 and are expected to rise further still as bankers descend. (Bloomberg)

Fidelity’s adding 250 staff in Dublin. (Financial News)

13 banks have now selected Frankfurt or Berlin as their new EU hub. 12 have selected Dublin. (Financial Times)

Private credit funds are the place to be. They managed about $600bn at the end of last year.That figure could grow to $1tn by 2020. (Financial Times)

You might also want to consider working for fast growing messaging company Symphony Communications, which aspires to take over from Bloomberg. It now has 230,000 users, up from 220,000 a month ago. (SCMP)

Symphony’s CEO confesses to driving colleagues crazy. (Business Insider)

Irrepressible Scaramucci: “” have a huge opportunity ahead of me. I don’t know what it is exactly, but it’ll be huge.” (Vice)

If you sleep less than eight or nine hours a night, you will die young. (Financial Times)

Never all Byron Trott a, “chubby boy.” (Business Insider)

Study finds a lot of MBA graduates end up in mid-level positions where median pay is $124k. This isn’t great given that you need to make a gross salary premium of $30k a year for 10 years just to recoup the cost of investing in the course. (Financial Times)

Children today are better at delaying gratification than previous generations. (BPS)

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The quant hedge fund spun out by the systematic trading prop trading team at Barclays two years ago, has nearly doubled staff and massively hiked up compensation for its London operation over the past year.

Squarepoint Capital, one of the most buzzed about hedge funds launched in 2015 after a team of around 60 quants and systematic traders within Barclays’ nQuants team spun out of the bank to go it alone, increased its London headcount by 95% over the course of 2016, according to newly released accounts.

It had 45 people at the end of last year, up from 23 in 2015 and has been paying them more. On an average pay per head basis, Squarepoint paid £311.6k last year, compared to £210k in 2015. Its partners have been bringing in more money – they made an average profit of £659.6k last year, up from £603.4k for the previous period.

There’s a downside to hiring so many staff – a big uptick in costs. Squarepoint spent over £14m on its employees last year (£10m more than 2015) and despite an uptick in revenues, its profits fell from £9.5m in 2015 to £5.6m last year.

Barclays inherited the nQuants team after it bought Lehman Brothers’ U.S. business in 2008. It was founded in 2000 by Olivier Durantel and Gregoire Schneider, who remain in senior roles at Squarepoint. The firm has offices in London, Singapore, New York, Geneva, Zug, Paris and Montreal.

In London, Squarepoint’s EMEA chief investment officer is former Barclays systematic trader Pierre-Adrien Nicolas, while ex-Barclays quants Thibaut Bondoux, Clement Larrecq, Charles Caverne and Salim Louzgani all occupy senior roles in the UK.

Last year, one of the more significant hires was Rahil Iqbal, who joined as a quantitative researcher from J.P. Morgan where he was head of EMEA index strategy.

More recently, Squarepoint has been competing for talent with large investment banks and big-hitting hedge funds. Nathan Benabou joined from J.P. Morgan’s quant team in April as a systematic trader, Oleg Bogoslvskiy came from KCG Holdings and quant researcher Bruno DeCourt joined from Citadel.

Squarepoint doesn’t appear to have finished recruiting. Currently it has roles for senior quant researchers across long term equity, high performance and price action stat divisions within all its office locations.

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There are many reasons to work for a Big Four accounting firm (ie. Deloitte, PWC, EY or KPMG).

Chief among them is the fact that they hire literally huge numbers of people. In 2017, for example, Deloitte alone recruited 70,000 “new professionals” – one hire every eight minutes. Hiring in investment banks is modest by comparison: Goldman Sachs, for example only employs 34,400 people in total and it ended last year with 400 fewer staff than it began.

How do you get one of these plentiful jobs with the Big Four though? And – given that are still 18 applications to every available graduate job at Big Four firms (in the UK), which jobs are easiest to achieve?

Based on the newly released reports from Deloitte and PWC, here’s how to target your Big Four application for maximum effect.

1. Apply as a “client service” professional

As the chart below shows, most of the people who work for PWC are actually out there servicing clients: support staff and partners comprise a tiny proportion of the total headcount.

Moreover, these client service jobs are where the growth is. Overall headcount is up 13.5% at PWC in the past two years, but for client service professionals it’s up 15%. By comparison, PWC’s number of practice support staff have only gone up 9% in the same period.

The muted growth in support staff hiring is in direct contrast to investment banks – which have been loading on with middle and back office staff in areas like compliance and technology to deal with regulatory requirements and cutting back on client facing people in the process.

The thing to remember though, is that client facing professionals at Big Four firms are probably working in areas like compliance and technology – and are selling their services into banks…. (hence the growth). Support staff in banks are client facing staff in the Big Four.

2. Apply in Asia

Asia is where the job growth is in the Big Four. At Deloitte, Asian revenues rose the fastest last year and employee numbers grew to match. There was a similar trend at PWC, where – if you’re not applying in Asia – you might want to apply in Europe.

3. Apply in “risk advisory” or consulting – not audit

Audit and assurance still form the backbone of revenues at Big Four firms. At PWC UK, for example, 36% of revenues were generated by the assurance division in 2017. But, putting together the accounts for large corporations isn’t where the growth is at Big Four firms.

The growth – as the chart below for Deloitte Global shows, is now in areas like risk advisory and consulting.

What does this mean? Deloitte defines risk advisory as things like, “cyber, and innovative solutions in the areas of robotic process automation, risk sensing, and predictive analytics.” Consulting is all about helping clients “accelerate business model transformation” through “strategic acquisitions, alliances and investments in areas such as artificial intelligence, robotics, cognitive, creative digital consulting, cloud computing, blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT).”

It’s not just Deloitte. PWC doesn’t provide global figures for its revenue growth by division, but in the UK (where it does), consulting revenues are also rising faster than the rest.

Old-fashioned audit is pretty boring and staid by comparison.

4. Join either as a graduate or as an “experienced professional”

If you’re trying to get into an investment bank, your best bet is to join as a graduate. Although banks will sometimes hire people from industry into their equity research or M&A teams, it’s not normal for them to do so.

By comparison, as the chart below shows, Big Four firms like PWC hire both graduates and experienced professionals. – You can get a job in the Big Four once you’ve spent a few years working elsewhere; they want industry knowledge.

5. Specialize in the financial services industry

When the Big Four hire experienced professionals from industry, they’re looking for people who have experience of the industries where their clients are located. And guess what – a lot of their clients are banks and financial services firms.

As the chart below shows, financial services clients are PWC’s number one segment globally. If you’ve spent a few years in risk or technology with a bank, PWC would probably very much like to hear from you.

6.Don’t be privately educated

While banks have a well-documented tendency to hire middle class students, accounting firms are doing their best to hire from across the social spectrum.

PWC, for example, has a ‘social mobility team leader’ and 74% of its UK graduate hires were state school educated last year. It also monitors the proportion of people it hires from families receiving income support (14%) or who received free school meals (10%).

7. Moderate your pay expectations

Lastly, it’s no good applying to a Big Four firm which banking-style pay aspirations. The chart below shows average pay at PWC and Goldman Sachs in the UK. Basically, PWC pays a lot less. This changes if you make it to partner level, but for that you’ll also need luck and patience, and even then you won’t earn much more than the average person at GS.

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Photo credit: Numbered by ChristopherTitzer is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Three Credit Suisse heavy-hitters have left the bank to launch a new consultancy to help investment banks with everything from planning for Brexit to hiring the best staff.

David Long, who held various senior positions at Credit Suisse during his 25 years at the bank, has formed Pall Mall Risk Reduction with two other former colleagues who have also held chief operating officer roles at Credit Suisse.

Long was latterly head of strategic initiatives at Credit Suisse, a role that involved planning for its business model after the Brexit vote. He was also previously group chief operating officer (COO) for its EMEA operation.

Also heading up the new company is Nick Wilcock, who was latterly COO for northern Europe within Credit Suisse’s investment bank and also president of its Moscow office during his 30 years at the bank, and Charanpal Matharu, who spent 13 years at Credit Suisse most recently as a COO within its investment banking controls team.

Our attempts to contact Long were not successful, but the firm describes itself as a “COO practice” seeking to help banks to reduce operational and conduct risk. It offers a broad range of services including helping investment banks plan for the impact of Brexit, training and managing employees, technology management and helping investment banks with burdensome regulations. They are also engaged in ‘strategic advisory’ work – which could mean cost-cutting and redundancy programmes within the investment banks.

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It’s not easy to find exceptional 20-somethings to join a hedge fund nowadays. Admittedly, Steve Cohen’s Point72 isn’t strictly a hedge fund (it’s a family office managing Cohen’s own money), but it suffers from this problem all the same. Last year Cohen publicly bemoaned the lack of decent talent. Since then, Point72 has ramped-up a machine-learning program to try automating trading decisions, while its Academy – which trains up its juniors, has set about attracting more fish into its hiring pond.

The Academy wants more women. It’s just launched a $20k scholarship for women in the sophomore year of U.S. university courses. Female students have until October 20th to apply and must do so alongside an application for Point72’s New York City summer intern program.

Jonathan Jones, Point72’s head of investment talent development, says the applicant pool for the Academy has typically been 70% to 75% male, and the fund wanted to do something about it.”Our objective is to be the destination of choice for the brightest talent in the industry,” says Jones. “It was important for us to seek to expand our appeal to women specifically. You could argue that one of the afflictions our industry has in general is sameness or group-think: too many people of similar backgrounds.”

Point72 has senior female role models on its staff already. Its macro trading business is run by a woman. So its investor relations business. So is the Academy itself.

Ultimately, Jones says the Academy wouldn’t mind having 50% of its Academy recruits as women (rather like Evercore’s UK analyst program). However, he admits it’s not easy to find this proportion of women in hedge funds’ traditionally preferred academic disciplines of finance, economics, mathematics and computer sciences, which tend to skew towards men. For this reason, Jones says the Academy is also focused on hiring people from liberal arts backgrounds.

Liberal arts students aren’t typical hedge fund applicants, particularly when the hedge fund in question has seemingly been going all out to hire quants and specialists in machine learning. But Jones says it’s wrong to assume that a liberal arts degree is no preparation for an investing career. “We already have people with backgrounds in history or music. Our natural applicant pool skews towards finance, but Jami Goodfriend – who runs the Academy, has a particular preference for people from a history background. She believes they have a better ability to understand the overall story that accompanies the numbers on a spreadsheet.”

Needless to say, Point72 isn’t just keen to hire female historians. Male historians can apply too.

It seems fair to wonder why the fund wants more women and liberal artists to apply. It already has far more applicants than it can handle: there were 1,500 applications for around five places in Europe last year. It’s all about diversity, says Jones: “The best teams are comprised of a diverse set of members. We perceive that difference makes a difference.”

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1. What’s your relationship like with the bank?

2. How long has the bank been looking to fill this role?

3. How would you describe the leadership style of the hiring manager?

4. And how is the hiring manager perceived within the bank?

5. How much staff turnover has there been in the team over the past year?

6. How will this role enable me to reach my two-year and five-year career plans?

7. How does the bank promote internal progression?

8. Where are other people with a similar background to me getting interviews?

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The most desirable sectors in the New York tri-state area

1. Investment banking/M&A

2. Research

3. Private equity and venture capital

4. Trading and commodities

5. Hedge funds and long-only asset management

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1. As machines take over trading floors, human traders are being supplemented by various types of technology

2. Complex algorithms now provide clients with pricing information

3. “Internalization engines” are now used to help banks hedge trades

4. Sometimes internalization engines don’t work though

5. In future, more hedging will take place through derivatives markets

6. You don’t need to work in a trading technology team at a bank to work in trading tech

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1. Apply as a “client service” professional

2. Apply in Asia

3. Apply in “risk advisory” or consulting – not audit

4. Join either as a graduate or as an “experienced professional”

5. Specialize in the financial services industry

6.Don’t be privately educated

7. Moderate your pay expectations

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