How can you persuade a Goldman Sachs investment banker to leave a perch at the pinnacle of the global finance industry for a job that pays less than half as much?
How about offering him the opportunity to work for every banker’s favourite technology firm?
Reuters reports that three ‘mid-ranking’ Goldman Sachs bankers have quit the firm for Uber, the ‘ride-hailing’ company. Ian Kleinfield, a former Goldman vice president in the clean technology and renewables sector, has joined Uber’s corporate development team. Prabir Adarkar and Chris Lapointe, both vice presidents in Goldman’s telecoms, media and technology group, have joined Uber too, seemingly also in corporate development.
Their motivation for moving doesn’t appear to be money. Uber reportedly pays its corporate development professionals around $200k, while recruiters estimate that the men would have been earning $500k each at Goldman Sachs. Curiously, the bankers have quit banking just before bonuses are paid. The timing also seems ‘interesting’ in light of Goldman’s recent managing director promotions. – Prabir Adarkar had been a Goldman vice president for seven years and didn’t make MD. – Maybe he didn’t want to hang on until Goldman’s next round of MD promotions in 2017?
Separately, if you have any intention of working for David Harding, the billionaire hedge fund manager and founder of Winton Capital Management, on no account utter the phrase, ‘efficient markets hypothesis.’ Those words will whip Harding into a state of apoplexy. “The [efficient market] theory said everything I stand for and everything I have done my entire life is a complete waste of time,” he told the Australian Financial Review. More than that, Harding said the theory is wrong – if markets were genuinely efficient and encompassed all available data, he wouldn’t be able to create algorithms that mined data to systematically beat them.
Meanwhile:
JPMorgan says flow credit traders everywhere have actually had an ok quarter. (Barrons)
Leaving the European Union could be very bad for the UK fund management industry. – There’s a danger that asset managers will no longer be able to manage EU-domiciled funds from London. (Financial News)
The implementation of Europe’s MiFID II rules is being pushed back from January 2017 to January 2018 so that banks have more time to train staff and update computer systems. They’ll also get more time to hire top-ranked equity researchers. (Financial Times)
Deutsche Bank is making a mere 40 of its German investment banking staff redundant. (eFinancialCareers.de)
John Cryan should refuse his bonus. (Bloomberg)
Point72 is trying hard to be nicer to its staff. There’s no more of the down and out approach, where you’re fired when you lose more than 10%, and some ex-McKinsey consultants have been brought in to increase the empathy. (Bloomberg)
Why I didn’t like being a consultant. (WSO)
HSBC really ought to move its headquarters to Hong Kong. (BloombergView)
Don’t ask a managing director to get coffee with you. They don’t have time. Ask for a coffee in their office instead. (BusinessInsider)
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