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J.P. Morgan’s European banks equity research team, led by Kian Abouhossein, has released a new and timely note on the future of the banking industry today. It’s not ostensibly about keeping your job in a time of turmoil, but if this is your priority there are plenty of takeaways. You just have to follow the guidelines below.

1. Cling on for dear life over the next 10 months. And then relax

If J.P. Morgan’s analysts are right, 2016 will be tough and 2017 will not. If you can last until the end of this year, you should therefore be ok.

2. Stay away from the credit desks

2016 will not be nice for fixed income currency and commodity (FICC) traders. However, 2016 will be especially horrible for credit traders. Therefore, avoid credit trading desks like the plague.

3. Stay away from the credit desks at Credit Suisse

Some banks’ fixed income divisions are more exposed to the problems of credit trading than others. The chart below shows which these are. Credit Suisse is in deepest, but Morgan Stanley looks a little precarious too. J.P. Morgan predicts that both banks will likely make more credit cuts.

4. But, do work for a US investment bank

Credit trading at Morgan Stanley excepted, J.P. Morgan thinks US banks look pretty healthy now. If points out that they’re, “much better capitalised than their European peers…ahead on resolution of litigation issues…and have cleaner P&L.. and clean ROE unlike their European counterparts.” There should be less need for cost cutting and strategy shifts as a result.

5. Don’t work in the back office or on a contract basis for Deutsche Bank

Like Goldman Sachs’ analysts, J.P. Morgan’s analysts say Deutsche Bank has a real need to prove that it can actually cut costs as promised. They suggest that one way of doing this will be for Deutsche to take its middle and back office properly in hand: “DB has one of the highest back office and consultant ratios and we think these need to be addressed.”

J.P. Morgan’s analysts are less pessimistic regarding front office investment banking jobs at Deutsche, about which they have only positive things to say: “We do not believe the IB franchise of DB has been impacted by the current newsflow and spread widening…We continue to see DB as a Tier 1 FICC player and the last standing IB in Europe.”

6. Go and work for a top five bank in equities

J.P. Morgan’s analysts reiterate that trading market share in equities is becoming focused in five top players. These players are shown in the red square below.

7. Go and work for a top five bank in FICC

Trading market share in FICC is also becoming focused in five top players. Again, they’re shown in the red square below.

8. Go and work for Goldman Sachs

J.P. Morgan’s analysts are pretty excited about Goldman Sachs. “We see GS as a tier 1 player in both fixed income and equities,” they say. “Hence we expect GS to perform better than peers in the current challenging revenue environment.”

Even better, they point out that Goldman has no need of cutting jobs because it can simply cut pay – which is above the market average anyway.

9. Stay away from ECM

2016 has not started well in investment banking divisions (IBD). But, as the chart below shows, it has started especially badly in equity capital markets (ECM). If this continues, headcount cuts seem horribly inevitable.

10. Beware of Barclays

Lastly, Jes Staley is due to lay out his strategy for Barclays in a few weeks’ time.

J.P. Morgan’s analysts think Jes will almost certainly take the juice away from the investment bank. “We believe that re-allocation of capital away from the IB is the only way to sustainably unlock value,” they say, pointing out that Barclays’ investment bank generates a return on equity of less than 6%, while the rest of Barclays’ businesses have a return on equity in excess of 14%. In these circumstances, they suggest that it makes sense to cull capital allocated to the investment bank by 30%. Barclays is already cutting thousands of jobs from its investment bank; if JPM’s analysts are right there could be more cuts to come.

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Photo credit: Maria Ly is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Expect some stiff competition if you want to get a job at Goldman Sachs. The firm receives 267,000 applications every year, and hires just 3% of these people.

The strength of Goldman’s appeal is evidenced by the fact that it tops our 2016 eFinancialCareers Ideal Employer rankings, which quizzed over 6,500 financial services employees in the U.S., U.K. and Asia on which companies they want to work for.

Goldman Sachs outranked its U.S. peers like J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley, which ranked second and fourth respectively, as well as Google (third) and asset management behemoth BlackRock, which came in fifth.

At the forefront of Goldman Sachs’ recruitment programme is Edith Cooper, global head of human capital management and executive vice president at Goldman Sachs. She says any potential employee can expect an “extensive interview methodology”. As well as the obvious factors like assessing someone’s experience and technical know-how, she says that an “ability to work through adverse situations” is also very important.

“Among the most important factors is how effectively you work as part of an overall organization,” she says.

Getting in at Goldman Sachs

One of Goldman’s perceived strengths in our survey was, predictably, compensation, with 85% of respondents suggesting that it pays competitive salaries and bonuses. Goldman has stated previously that its culture is still geared towards paying for performance, despite moves to cut compensation at other banks, but to suggest that compensation at Goldman is above and beyond its competitors or impervious to market movements is something of a myth.

CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s pay packet slipped by $1m on 2014 to $23m last year after a difficult period for the firm and a record $5bn fine to resolve civil claims dating back to 2007. Its overall compensation pool remained flat year-on-year, but an 8% increase in employees meant that average pay per head fell to $344k last year, from $379k in 2014.

How important is pay at Goldman Sachs?

“Several years ago, senior executives reinforced our compensation principles, which hold true at every level of the firm – we recognize and pay for performance, but in the context of not just the individual but the business across the divisions,” Cooper says. “One of the levers is compensation for performance.”

In 2013, Goldman Sachs said that it had 43,000 applications for 1,900 available graduate positions. Despite the huge interest in working for Goldman Sachs, Cooper says that their recruitment process has had to evolve to cast the net as wide as possible for potential employees, particularly at a graduate level.

The old tactics of turning up on campus at top universities have been supplemented by increased use of technology to both filter candidates and find them from unusual sources. Technology helps whittle down a shortlist, but Goldman considers every application, says Cooper.

“It’s important to find the best broad group of candidates beyond GPA and top-level information, going deeper to analyze a database of experiences rather than a database of facts and figures,” she says.

Goldman also uses social media to uncover potential candidates.

“We have a mobile recruiting app, host webinars and Google+ hangouts, use LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube, and publish a tremendous amount of content on our careers site,” Cooper says.

Getting promoted at Goldman Sachs

Making it up the ranks was also an important factor for most people participating in our research. Of those people who wanted to work for Goldman Sachs, 81% said that opportunities for promotion were important to them, but only 62% perceived it as a strength of the firm.

Goldman’s ‘360’ degree appraisal process is notoriously tough, during which the employee, the employee’s superiors, peers and reports all offer their verdict on a potential promotion. In total, around 15 people could be involved in the process.

Cooper says that promotions are often decided on if the person has the right attitude, is “highly motivated” and contributes to the overall culture of the firm.

“In terms of who gets promoted, it’s people who are dynamic, intellectually curious and comfortable understanding that market forces can lead to opportunities and risk for our clients, being able to connect the dots to all of the things that are important to clients,” she says.

Work-life balance at Goldman Sachs

Finance professionals appear to have accepted that long hours are part and parcel of working in the industry. The vast majority of investment banks in our rankings scored badly on working hours, and just 13% of people who wanted to work for Goldman Sachs perceived it as a strength of the company.

Goldman has been making efforts to address this. Firstly, it introduced ‘protected Saturdays’ for juniors – meaning they have to be out of the office by 9pm on Friday and do not return until 9am Sunday – and it’s also tried to add more career stability and satisfaction.

The firm used to hire juniors with a two-year contract. Now, juniors are hired just as any other employee is, not for a specific timeframe but rather for as long as it’s still working out for both sides.

Goldman has also added a policy of accelerated promotion to the best IBD associates after two years, known as a “third-year mobility opportunity” allowing them to work in different region or group.

“We recognize that we work in a dynamic and demanding industry; however, we also know that it is important for our people to have the time to focus on their responsibilities and interests outside of work,” Cooper says.

Relative to its peers, Goldman is progressive in terms of flexible working arrangements. For a start, its onsite childcare facility has been credited with helping more senior women in client-facing positions transition more easily back into the workforce.

“Whether it be through the use of technology, flexible work arrangements, onsite childcare, gyms and healthcare facilities or any other number of programs, we aim to provide our people the flexibility and support they need for all phases of their lives, both personally and professionally,” she says.

Retention at Goldman Sachs

Cooper says that Goldman is making efforts to ensure that junior bankers have opportunities to learn and are able to “connect with those around them”. Juniors are taken on an “apprenticeship model” where they learn on the job and are also given a chance to build a network that could help with internal moves.

“We know that many professionals, junior and more seasoned employees are interested in taking on new responsibilities and learning about and working in other business areas, and so we provide opportunities for our people to move around within the firm,” she says.

View the complete 2016 eFinancialCareers Ideal Employer Rankings

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Todd Bault has been around. The 49 year-old managing director on Citi’s financials research team ranked as one of the best analysts of the year in Institutional Investor’s survey in 2005. He’s been an analyst at Sanford Bernstein and he’s worked at Citi since 2013. Bault (seen here looking sternly humorous) might fade into obscurity, however, were it not for his ability to think dramatically outside the box.

When you’re an equities analyst, it can make sense to make an audacious call, and Bault has done just that. In a note issued yesterday, he suggested that the world would be a better place if only Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc.were to buy American International Group Inc (AIG), expand it into financial services and then turn the former insurer into a Fintech lab.

As Dealbreaker points out, this will clearly never happen. Bault, however, is onto something. In a single flight of fancy he’s a) got his name out there and b) indulged his own fintech whims. Bault himself is not immune to the urge to quit banking and do something more interesting in the ‘fintech space’ – He left the industry for a year in 2012 to become chief marketing officer at Extraordinary Reinsurance (a company whose ‘financial technology creates the first liquid market place for insurance contracts‘), but came back and joined Citi. You can take the man out of fintech, but you can’t take fintech out the man…

Separately, who’s familiar with Haddington, a small town in East Lothian, Scotland, population less than 9,000? It is here that you will find Tim Wood, a portfolio manager at McInroy & Wood Portfolios. Financial News reports that Wood has achieved returns of 178.99% over the past decade, making him one of the top fund managers in the world. We hadn’t heard of Haddington either.

Meanwhile:

Ex-banker now working for a fintech firm: “There’s a fundamental change taking place in banks. They see the unbelievable costs in their technology, and if there are ways to bring them down by working with outside firms, that’s got to be meaningful.” (Bloomberg)

Three heads of equity research leave UBS for destinations unknown. (Business Insider)

Credit derivatives trader leaves Goldman Sachs in London. (Bloomberg)

Man leaves Goldman Sachs for DLA Piper. (Pitchbook)

Dave Olsen, global head of clearing at J.P. Morgan, will be leaving the post to “pursue new opportunities.’ (Financial News)

Jacques Callaghan, the co-head of investment banking in Europe at Canadian bank Canaccord Genuity, has joined Macquarie Capital. (Financial News)

Jamie Dimon will be far too risk averse now he owns all that stock in JPM. (Dealbreaker)

Natixis hired Peter Cui from Jefferies for ABS trading. (Global Capital)

SocGen post trade services head joins Blockchain start-up. (Finextra)

Trainer inspires overweight bankers to get in shape with photos of ex-girlfriends’ new ripped boyfriends. (Dealbreaker)

Ex-US military intelligence officer is now surveilling electronic communications at Barclays. (Bloomberg)

British bankers are more than welcome in Paris. (Politico)

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Not long ago, hedge funds were known for recruiting trading talent from investment banks. However, this is changing. These days, hedge funds are hiring an increasing number of people from masters in finance and MBA courses.

At the London Business School we have a good relationship with hedge funds: we opened a hedge fund research centre in 2001 and it’s now incorporated into our AQR Institute of Asset Management. Each year, we have around 100 hedge funds coming to campus, which gives us a pretty good idea what they’re looking for.

If you want a junior job in a hedge fund, there are few things you need to consider.

1. Hedge fund jobs are broader than you think

If you want to work for a hedge fund, you probably want to be a portfolio manager (PM) or analyst. But you’ll restrict yourself unnecessarily if these are the only hedge fund roles you’re considering.

These days, not all jobs in hedge funds involve analysis and portfolio management: we also place people straight into investor relations, compliance, operations, accounting and risk. People think hedge funds are just about analysis and investment, but this isn’t the case.

2. The hedge fund that hires you will depend upon the course you studied

Hedge funds pursuing different strategies like to hire people with different types of qualification. We find that the more quantitative hedge funds like to hire people from our Masters in Finance or Masters in Management programs. However, funds with a stronger focus on company engagement- for example, event-driven funds and equity long short funds, are more likely to hire people from our MBA and MIM course.

3. You’ll need to be able to add value from the outset

Whereas banks will still train people, hedge funds are looking for people who can add value from day one. They still want an excellent academic record, but they also look for people with expertise in the industries they’re investing in. If you’ve worked in pharmaceuticals, for example, you might get hired by a hedge fund that invests in the pharma industry.

4. Hedge funds look for different skills to banks

Just because you’ve worked in a bank, that doesn’t mean you’ll have the skills hedge funds are interested in. Hedge funds place a premium on skills like making connections between data and understanding the supply chains in investment projects. People with banking experience don’t always have that ability.

An understanding of supply chains is also popular – it means you can work across a number of different sectors.

5. Hedge funds like to trial people on a part time basis

If you go to work for an investment bank after one of our courses, you can expect to complete an internship. When you go to work for a hedge fund, it’s a bit different. – A lot of our students who go into hedge funds will work for the fund one day a week while they’re studying. They then have the opportunity to join full time when they graduate.

6. Hedge funds don’t pay a fortune and they’re not always a stable career option

Lastly, hedge funds are happy to pay a premium for good talent, but the people earning millions and millions a year are outliers. We also advise our students to do some due diligence on the funds they join. If you join a fund with less than $100m under management, you might be taking a risk. Hedge Funds only start to become profitable above this mark and it has been difficult for them to raise capital in this current market as investors have poured their money into larger funds.

Ki Kuganesan is the Senior Sector Manager, Hedge Funds at London Business School’s careers centre.

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Bonuses have disappointed most investment bankers this year, and Wall Street professionals are no exception. Despite pressure on big banks to pressure on big banks to keep their best associates and vice presidents happy with decent compensation, most have been left underwhelmed.

“Huge bonuses are, for the most part, a thing of the past on Wall Street,” says Jeanne Branthover, managing partner and the head of the global financial services practice at Boyden, an executive search firm. “This year, bonuses are expected to be flat or lower than last year.”

In fact, she and other headhunters estimated that the average bonus across the industry is down approximately 10% year-over-year.

“Even with the increase in mergers-and-acquisitions activity, most firms are trying to lower costs from underperforming areas and take it out in bonuses,” Branthover says. “Many will be very disappointed after working long, long hours and being in a profitable area or group.”

Superstars that firms desperately want to keep may see larger bonuses than their peers, but most likely nothing approaching the figure that they expected, she said.

This is a similar situation to London, where most bankers are disappointed with this year’s payouts, particularly in high-performing M&A divisions. However, M&A activity in the U.S. was very strong in 2015, so a reduction on 2014 is particularly galling.

Investment banks continue have costs eaten up by risk management, operational controls and compliance, and those factors taken together with the overall performance of the organization means that bonuses are underwhelming.

“I’m pretty much hearing flat-to-down – down at hedge funds, flat-to-down at investment banks, depending on overall performance of the bank,” Carol Hartman, managing partner of the financial services practice, North America, at DHR International “Some people seem to be very accepting, although outperformers seem to be very frustrated.”

This is gone down particularly badly at the junior level, where underpaying of analysts has led some to consider moves to the buy-side when would have otherwise stayed in banking. Private equity juniors have done comparatively well.

“There are 24- and 25-year-olds in private equity making $300k or $400k,” says Hartman.

Hartman estimates that a third-year analyst or a first-year associate at a private equity firm makes $150k in base salary plus a bonus in the 90%-110% range.

It’s no surprise that revenues in the fixed income currencies and commodities (FICC) businesses of the investment banks have been particularly badly hit after revenues slumped on an already poor 2014 at most big banks. However, even equities traders are disappointed, says Dylan Pany, a principal consultant and the head of fundamental trading at Selby Jennings. Compensation consultants Johnson Associates had predicted up to a 10% rise for equities professionals this year, but this hasn’t happened.

Street-wide headcount reductions occurred in those particular areas, and banks are moving capital to focus on equity for trading revenue,” Pany said. “If you are in sales and trading in the equity space your bonuses will be better than those in the FICC business, but nothing stellar.”

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It’s less than two years since Tom King won his power struggle against Skip McGee at Barclays. Now King is leaving – and he’s not the only one.

Since the beginning of February, 21 people have left Barclays’ investment bank in London, most of them with more than 10 years’ industry experience, according to filings on the Financial Conduct Authority Register.

Guillermo Felices, head of asset allocation research for Europe and Ian Scott, head of global and European equity strategy have left. Frances Horn, a director in global cash Asian equities for UK clients, Gavin Kearney, a London-based director in pan-Asian equity salesman, and Hideo Yoshioka, another director in pan-Asian equity sales, have left too.

Fabio Martirani, a director in global emerging equities research sales for UK and European accounts and Bimal Shah, an emerging markets equity trader, have also departed.

In research, Cristina Marzea, head of CEEMEA and LatAm banks research and Hanzade Kilickiran, head of Turkey equity research have gone.

And in fixed income, Andrea Marangoni, managing director and head of special situations and distressed debt has gone, along with high yield and investment grade trader Nikolai Hartley and credit analyst Darren Hook.

The exits in London come ahead of Barclays’ fourth quarter results presentation on March 1st, when new CEO Jes Staley is expected to outline his strategy for the bank. They follow reports that Staley is cutting an additional 1,000 jobs from the investment bank, including the closure of its cash equity research, sales and trading businesses and convertible bond-trading operations in Asia.

Barclays is understood to have begun announcing bonuses in its investment bank last week (although payment this year has been delayed until March), suggesting that anyone leaving the bank in the few weeks forewent his/her performance pay for 2015.

What Tom King’s exit means for Barclays’ investment bank

Should Barclays’ bankers fear 55 year-old King’s ‘retirement’ as CEO of the investment bank? Maybe.

King is an established champion of the investment bank. He stood up to Barclays’ ex-CEO Antony Jenkins when Jenkins wanted to make even deeper cuts to Barclays’ investment banking business. During his two years as investment banking CEO, King has been instrumental in building up Barclays’ advisory and capital markets businesses and has maintained the equities business outside Asia despite its persistent under-performance compared to the rest of the market.

Now King’s going. Has he opted for retirement in the face of a whole new plan to decimate the investment bank? Does he know something about Jes Staley’s new strategy that we don’t? After all, J.P. Morgan’s analysts are pushing for a further 30% reduction in risk weighted assets in the unit on the grounds that it only generates returns of 6% compared to 14% in Barclays’ other businesses.

We’ll only know for sure on March 1st. Until then, Barclays’ investment bankers can only hope that King’s departure doesn’t herald Jenkins’-style cuts, and is instead a reflection of Staley’s preference for putting his own people in positions of power.

King isn’t the only senior Barclays incumbent jettisoned under Jes. Staley also got rid of Jonathan Moulds, the former Barclays COO and BofA executive who only joined in January 2015. Moulds reportedly went because Staley wanted to ‘install his own choice in the role’ – namely Paul Compton, a former colleague from his time at J.P. Morgan.

If nothing else, therefore, King’s exit suggests that Barclays remains highly political, and that it helps to be on Staley’s side if you want to survive.

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You survive the first round of job cuts. But can you survive the second? And the third? And the fourth? No? That’s unfortunate, because this is what you’ll need to do if you want to come through 2016 with your finance career intact.

Credit Suisse’s job cuts are a good example of this phenomenon. Last October, the Swiss bank disclosed plans to cut or off-shore 2,000 jobs at its London office. Since then, Credit Suisse has made at least two rounds of job cuts. Firstly, it made around 100 fixed income traders in the run-up to Christmas. Then it told an unspecified number of staff their jobs were at risk in mid-January. Now, the Times reports that it’s getting ready to dispense with another 200 people in London next Monday.

The latest victims will reportedly be a mixture of front office bankers (ie. fixed income traders) and infrastructure staff. It doesn’t help that Credit Suisses’s fixed income traders had an abnormally bad 2015 and that its equities traders didn’t do much better. However, the worst placed people at the Swiss bank may well be credit traders – credit trading revenues are expected to fall further in 2016 and J.P. Morgan’s analysts point out that Credit Suisse’s fixed income business is over-dependent on its credit desks. Nonetheless, traders at Credit Suisse might prefer to know their fates soon rather than succumb to death by a thousand small cuts.

Separately, who would be an equities analyst? While the sector offers the potential for excitement through outlandish investment calls such as that of Citi’s Todd Bault, it also brings the potential to crash and burn whilst attracting large personal regulatory fines.

The latest regulatory analyst to fall foul of the latter is Charles Grom, a former Deutsche Bank equity research analyst. The Financial Times reports that Grom expressed private reservations to hedge fund clients about a company (‘Big Lots’) whilst maintaining a “buy” recommendation in a report issued the following day. Grom came to the conclusion that Big Lots wasn’t such a great investment after meeting the company’s management during a Big Lots investor roadshow organized by Deutsche, but didn’t feel able to downgrade the company directly after Deutsche hosted their event. For this wrongdoing, Grom has been fined $100k and banned from working in the industry for a full year.

Meanwhile:

The UK M&A pipeline could be affected as the Brexit vote gets nearer: ‘Citigroup’s global co-head of M&A Peter Tague, who is based in New York, warned that an exit could dampen CEO confidence and reduce the number of transatlantic takeover deals.’ (Financial News)

HSBC pay chaos strikes again: wealth managers at the bank were suddenly told they won’t get a pay rise after all. Only under-paid top performers, juniors and some mid-level employees will get a hike. (Financial Times)

Weird National Trust conspiracy theory explains why HSBC decided to stay in the UK. (Evening Standard)

If only Point72 Asset Management could hire more talent…(Business Insider)

On the joys of Frankfurt: “I’ve known bankers who have been miserable about moving here for work for a four-year placement but when they are called back home they don’t want to go because life is so good here for them and for their families — it is so civilised.” (Evening Standard)

Two ex HBOS traders made millions betting the UK housing market wouldn’t experience mass defaults. (Bloomberg)

“How I went from being an Irish cattle farmer to an expert on the European banking system.” (Bloomberg)

Female college athletes make great employees; and male college football and basketball players pay a physical price later in life. (WSJ)

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MBAs have fallen out of love with investment banking and investment banks are trying to win them back the only way they know how – by throwing money at the problem.

Median salaries for MBAs going into investment banking from top business schools in the US and UK have increased by around 25% on last year, even as the number graduates choosing the sector continues to decline – or at best remain static.

In a strangely consistent turn of events, median salaries for MBAs going into investment banking at Wharton, Columbia, Yale, Chicago Booth and MIT Sloan have increased from $100k in 2014 to $125k for the class of 2015.

Add in sign on bonuses and other variable compensation – which has remained largely static year-on-year at the schools that break it out – and investment banks are comfortably among the biggest payers for new MBA graduates.

Is all this money encouraging MBAs into investment banking? Not really. The largest proportion of MBAs going into investment banking came from NYU Stern, where 24% of the class of 2015 went into the sector (30% went into consulting). But this is on the wane – in 2014, 27% went into banking and in 2013, 30% choose the industry.

At Stanford and Harvard the situation is more dire. Despite the 25% pay increase at Harvard, just 5% of the class of 2015 choose investment banking – the same proportion as 2014 – while 4% of Stanford graduates choose the sector, down from 5% the previous year.

It’s not simply a case of MBAs heading into entrepreneurship or a hot fintech start-up instead.

At Harvard, financial services broadly defined still accounts for the largest proportion of hires (27%). However, Harvard’s MBAs aren’t going into investment banking specifically. Instead, they’re off to private equity (which attracted 10% of students) and to investment management (which attracted 9% of students). It’s a similar pattern at Stanford, where 13% of students went into private equity (PE).

The appeal of the PE industry is well known – pay. At Harvard, MBAs going into private equity were offered median salaries of $150k and additional guaranteed compensation of $125k. At Stanford, one person going into PE received a $250k sign on bonus.

NY Stern, Columbia, Chicago Booth and Wharton – traditional feeder schools for banks – all maintained consistent proportions of MBAs going into investment banking. However, at London Business School – which accounts for a third of investment banking placements in the City – said that just 8% of the class of 2015 choose the sector (down from 12% in 2014).

Are investment banks more popular anywhere? Yes, at Cornell, where the proportion of people going into banking rose from 11% to 17% year on year.

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Will the ability to code in Python get you a technology job in financial services? Yes. When we last looked at our CV database, there were ‘only’ 7 Python CVs for every Python job advertised on the site – fewer than for any other coding language.

If you want to be assured of success, however, you’ll need to be good, preferably exceptional. And one Oxford University student has shown just what exceptional Python coding skills look like.

Alex Hamed Ahmadi, a graduate student at Oxford University who previously worked as a core strategist at Goldman Sachs and assistant vice president at Barclays Capital, is the winner of Man Group AHL’s coding competition. When the competition was launched last year, Man invited students of any age and level to write code to control a player on ‘Hexplode,’ an old-school computer game in which two players take place counters in cells on a hexagonal board. When the number of tokens in each cell reaches a critical level, the cell ‘hexplodes’ and distributes them to adjacent cells. The winner removes all the other player’s counters from the board, or forces the other player to make an invalid move, or has to wait more than five seconds for the other player to make a move. You can read the full rules here.

Ahmadi’s winning solution is shown in the code below (click on the image for the whole thing). What makes it special? “At its core my algorithm is an iterative deepening Alpha-Beta NegaScout search, with a transposition table and a decent move-ordering system,” he tells us.

Ahmadi says being a good coder is about more than attending a four month coding bootcamp. “The ability to “just write code” is easily learned, but learning to write high quality code with few or no bugs is something that can takes years of experience,” he says. “There are elements of discipline: The ability to force yourself to do things you may not want to do such as write tests, read and re-read code to check for errors, and to learn new methodologies that improve the way you work. Finally you have skill sets specific to certain situations: For example, the ability to quickly read and modify somebody else’s code.”

Accordingly, Ahmadi didn’t take the most obvious approach to the Hexplode challenge. “I experimented with various methods for pruning, sorting of moves, aspiration windows, and of course the evaluation function,” he says. “One of the fundamental design choices of my algorithm was to drop a highly complicated evaluation function I had developed, in favour of a simplistic function that was fast enough to allow the algorithm to search 1-2 levels deeper. I also used a bit of machine learning to tune the coefficients used in scoring. Finally, I had a number of “support” programs such as a reference implementation, a database of positions for benchmarking, and unit testing in order to test and verify the correctness of performance optimizations.”

Think you’re an expert at coding in Python? Look at Ahmadi’s code below (click on the image, or here, for the full text), and think again.

The code bundle (the “Code”) has been provided for information purposes only and AHL Partners LLP retains full ownership of any and all intellectual and industrial property rights in the Code. Insofar as permitted by law, neither AHL Partners LLP nor any person or entity associated with it shall in any circumstances be responsible or liable to any individual or entity or accept any liability for any loss incurred or damage howsoever caused to any individual or entity as a result of downloading or using the Code in any way.

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Five years ago, getting a job in an investment bank was a question of completing a numerical test, filling in an application for a summer internship position, attending some interviews and converting your summer internship into a job, Not any more. These days, you’ll typically need to complete internship after internship after internship before you get a full time offer. You’ll need to participate in finance clubs and ‘leadership’ activities. It will help if you’ve set up your own company. And you’ll need impeccable grades.

“People here are burning out before they even make it inside a bank,” says one student at a London university with a summer internship at a major US bank. “They can’t handle the pressure of all the psychometric tests and application processes which are required just to get an internship.”

“I came really close to burning out,” admits another student from a top London university who’s joining a US bank’s trading desk this summer. “I applied to around 40 banks and boutiques for internships, and I was running the investment society and completing my college work. None of those 40 applications came to anything and it put me under tremendous stress. I ended up cold calling trading houses in London.”

With banks like Goldman Sachs only hiring one in every 33 applicants, competition for places on banks’ analyst programmes remains incredibly intense. And with banks cutting graduate recruitment targets for 2016, students are under increasing pressure to differentiate themselves from the crowd.

“It seems that the industry has got a lot more competitive,” says another London student who’s secured an IBD internship at a top US bank this summer. “It seems banks now require work experience, entrepreneurial experience, high grades, and leadership positions.” He thinks banks are doing it deliberately: “They’re testing your mettle. If you can cope, they can see that you’ll be ok within a highly-pressured industry like investment banking.”

What’s the trick to surviving the harsh new reality as a student with banking aspirations? The successful students we spoke to revealed several coping mechanisms.

1. Get a spring internship

Firstly, you absolutely need to secure a spring internship or ‘insight week’ in your first year. If you do this, you’ll be in the slipstream for a second year internship and full time position. If you don’t, you’ll make life far, far harder later on.

“Securing a spring week helped me massively,” says one student at London’s Imperial College. “During the spring week, I was able to interact with the people responsible for filling the summer internships on a human level – I was more than another CV on their screen or nervous interviewee carrying a leather satchel. Thanks to that spring week, I’ve got a summer internship already lined up.”

2. Apply, apply, and apply again until you get a foot in the door

Getting a first job in banking – even if it’s just a spring internship, requires persistence. “I’ve got friends who received 10 rejections from different banks,” says one student. “You need to keep applying – it’s a numbers game.”

The student who unsuccessfully applied for spring weeks at 40 banks and boutiques in London said he eventually landed a few days of unpaid work experience at a small trading house in London after cold-calling. “I was desperate,” he says. “I could see that I needed to gain some relevant experience if I was going to be noticed, but no one would give me any.”

3. Pace yourself

The incoming IBD analyst says he took a different approach: “I spent my first year of university enjoying student life. However, I still managed to secure a spring week by applying at the right time and reaching out the right people. I then spent my second year doing things to boost my CV. And then I spent my third year focusing on my studies and taking the CFA Level I exam which has given me additional knowledge and shows I’m interested in the industry.”

In this way, he says he managed to secure this summer’s internship without too much strain. “If you play your cards right, at the right time, and make sure you’re well positioned, you can get a banking job without killing yourself.”

Another student who’s secured an internship this summer stresses the need to commit long term: “Even when you get an internship, over half of you won’t be converted into full-timers. It takes a long, long time and a lot of persistence to get a job in banking and a lot of people just don’t have the discipline and resilience to make it.”

4. Luck

Needless to say, luck is luck and if you don’t have it, there’s not much you can do to get it. Even so, all the students we spoke to stressed the element of serendipity in the investment banking application process. “I see plenty of people who are as good as me, who’ve been through all the processes I’ve been through and who don’t have an offer,” says one student. “I’ve also seen people who’ve got offers with the ‘bare minimum’ on their CVs. Some people have it easy, some don’t.”

5. Enjoyment

Lastly, if you want to last the long process of securing a job in banking, you’ll need to enjoy the race.

Some students develop a whole philosophical ethos around hard work: “If you truly want to achieve something, working hard to enhance your chances of success should come naturally,” says one incoming intern at Goldman Sachs, “Of course it will be tiring, but if you want to achieve it it’s worth it. It’s not just the result that matters, but how you develop during the process. I’ve made sacrifices and have constantly asked myself whether I truly want to achieve this goal.”

Others just ‘love finance.’ “What’s really helped is my interest in the mechanics of the financial system,” says another imminent intern. “I keep myself motivated because I like what I’m learning, I’m meeting incredibly smart people, and having a fun time along the way!”

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Photo credit: Hurdles start by robert voors is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Hedge funds run by women perform no better than hedge funds run by men, according to a new academic study that contradicts previous research and an increasing body of evidence that women make better investors.

Rajesh Aggarwal and Nicole Boyson, researchers at the Northeastern University Boston, concluded that “all female managers perform no differently than all male-managed funds and have similar risk profiles”, after analysing the performance of all hedge funds launched between 1994-2013.

Strangely, those with a mixture of both male and female fund managers did worse than single-gender hedge funds, it says.

Previous studies have suggested otherwise. Hedge Fund Research said last year that since 2007 women-owned or run hedge funds have returned 57%, against an industry average of 37%, while an index from professional services firm Rothstein Kass created in 2013 said that female-run funds outperformed men for the last two years.

Over the longer term, however, there’s no difference between the genders at hedge funds, said the research. Perhaps there’s a good reason for this though – women are woefully under-represented in hedge funds and those that do work in the industry are indirectly discriminated against.

The industry is utterly dominated by men – to the extent that older hedge fund managers feel the pressure to maintain the ‘body of a warrior’ to compete with younger traders. Of the hedge funds launched since 1994, just 2.6% were run exclusively by a female fund manager. That’s 439 hedge funds with at least one woman running a fund, compared to 9,081 with male portfolio managers.

While there’s no evidence of an inherent difference in skill between male and female fund managers, only the “better performing female fund managers are able to survive. Those that do tend to have more trouble attracting assets, says the research, “possibly because investors do not view women as typical hedge fund managers”.

However, the analysis suggested that 21.5% of employees in hedge funds as a whole were female. However, more women worked in marketing roles than in portfolio management roles, it says.

“Coupled with their prevalence in marketing roles at hedge funds, and consistent with our discussions with a fund of funds manager, it may be the case that more women are interested in the relationship side of hedge funds than the investment side,” says the research.

In an interesting twist, the study also examined how female hedge fund managers were represented in the media. It found 102 articles on the subject – 47 mentioned how women outperform men, 36 were on the absence of women in the industry and 25 were talking about children, divorce, appearance or sexism.

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What do finance professionals across the world want from their employers? The answer partly depends on where they live, according to the 2016 eFinancialCareers ‘Ideal Employer’ rankings.

We asked more than 6,500 people working in finance in the US, UK and Asia (Hong Kong and Singapore), to rate each of the 18 criteria in the chart below out seven in terms of importance (with one being not important and seven being very important) when considering their ideal employer. The percentages relate to respondents who gave those criteria a high mark of either six or seven.

While many of the criteria boast similar percentages across markets – the desire to have a ‘positive culture’ is important everywhere, for example – the results also reveal some interesting regional differences.

Belying the widespread public perception in the West that finance professionals are motivated primarily by money, survey respondents in the US and UK (83% and 84% respectively) voted for ‘challenging/interesting work’ as their number-one most important criteria for an ideal employer. The proportion slumps to 71% in Asia, where financiers are less worried about whether stimulating tasks come across their desks.

Although more than 80% of people in all markets voted for ‘competitive salary’ as important, only in Asia does it actually top the rankings. Talent shortages in Hong Kong and Singapore have recently enabled many candidates there to negotiate high pay rises when changing companies, helping to perpetuate a salary-driven job market.

Finance professionals globally aren’t as concerned about their bonuses as they are about their base pay. This is particularly so in the UK, where only 60% of respondents cited ‘competitive bonuses’ as important when considering their ideal employer, suggesting that EU bonus cap may be making UK banking professionals more circumspect in their expectations. The British take a similarly pragmatic view to ‘attractive benefits’, with just half of respondents voting them important – compared to 67% and 59% in the US and Asia respectively.

Despite the fact that European banks are the ones doing most of the current cost cutting, it’s American voters who are most inclined to fret about the stability and future direction of the firms they aspire to work for. 73% and 71% of them believe ‘strong executive leadership’ and ‘financial performance’ are important – 10 and 11 percentage points higher than the respective UK results for the same categories.

If you thought financial professionals in Asia were more accepting of the industry’s long working hours, our survey results suggest otherwise. 58% of them want to work for an employer with ‘manageable working hours’ – a higher percentage than both the US and UK.

However, there are some things that finance professionals appear indifferent to whatever their location. Surprisingly, given banks’ recent efforts to promote diversity and flexible working, these criteria have low importance rankings across all three markets.

View the complete 2016 eFinancialCareers Ideal Employer Rankings

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Barclays, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, UBS and now Credit Suisse – fast-tracking analysts to associates after two (rather than three) years has become the thing to do.

Associate is fast becoming the new ‘assistant vice president’ – an important sounding title to polish your resume and appear more experienced than you actually are.

What, exactly, is Credit Suisse doing? It’s rolling out a programme already in place in the U.S to its EMEA investment banking juniors, which allows top-performing analysts to move up to associates after two years, and therefore potentially attain VP level in 5 ½ rather than 6 ½ years.

This is a direct copy of what Goldman Sachs rolled out in September. Barclays also promoted its 2013 analyst class to associates in December – six months earlier than usual – and Deutsche Bank did the same during the summer. Citi has been promoting second year analysts straight into associate role since 2014 and also bumping up first year analysts to analyst 2 after just six months. UBS has had a similar process in place for years.

Add in the fact that HSBC’s salary freeze doesn’t apply to juniors and it seems that analysts and associates are still hot property in banking. Strange, then, that some banks have started laying them off.

Separately, bond desks have some unwanted guests – equities traders. New heads of various banks’ markets desks – including Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank – have an equities background, and fixed income traders are none-too-happy.

On a bond blog run by former Goldman Sachs executive Chris White called Friday Newsletter, veteran bond traders have been questioning the wisdom of installing equity guys at the top.

“Don’t know if anyone has been paying attention, but the track record of FX and equity leadership in [non-Treasury] fixed income markets has been nothing short of laughable,” one wrote.

Meanwhile:

A bank-by-bank guide to how long it takes to make it to MD (Financial News)

Fidelity has hired 3,000 people…in technology and client services (Financial Times)

Citadel, which was one of the only firms to say it was expanding in fixed income, is actually cutting staff (WSJ)

“More than 17,000 people work at J.P. Morgan in the U.K. and our firm operates from London across the EU single market. So we strongly support the Prime Minister’s efforts with the EU right now.” (WSJ)

Mike Corbat was handed a 27% pay rise this year (Bloomberg)

Tom King is quitting Barclays in two weeks (Financial Times)

The man drafted into improve relations between Credit Suisse’s wealth management division and investment bank has left (Bloomberg)

Bitcoin helps pay for pot (Extract)

Haitong Securities, which is building its City operations, continues to hire (Financial News)

Goldman Sachs employees have already lost $500m in stock options this year (WSJ)

Expensive ‘power’ suits actually boost performance (Bloomberg)

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Point 72 Asset Management, Steve Cohen’s family office and a hedge fund that still employs some 960 people, is doing some big hiring in London. In a change of strategy, it’s also opening the door to former UK employees ousted in the wake of its London office closure in 2013.

Conveniently, some senior investment professionals who used to work for what was SAC Capital Advisors in London have just left their jobs.

Arjun Menon, a former partner at SAC Capital who joined Moore Capital as a portfolio manager for its long short equities portfolio in February 2014, has now left. Meanwhile, Mauro Pizzi, who joined Bluecrest Capital Management as a partner on its equity long short portfolio in December 2013, has also departed this month.

There’s no guarantee that they’ll turn up at Point 72 again, of course, but the timing of their departure is strangely convenient. Point 72 is doing some big hiring in London – building its St James Square office up to 70 people and adding 15 investment professionals over the course of 2016.

Doug Haynes, president of Point 72 who initially joined as head of human capital, said previously that it for some previous employees in London it has “opened the door for them to come back”. Usually, once an employee leaves the company, that door is closed.

The big question right now is whether Point 72 will start accepting external capital again and return to being a hedge fund proper, rather than a family office. Haynes said this week that it would only do so if it was necessary to meet its long-term goals. The key right now is hiring though: “We are not capital constrained – we are talent constrained,” he said.

Menon started out as a healthcare investment banker at Morgan Stanley before moving across to its private equity division. He joined KKR in 2009 and moved across to SAC in May 2011 to run its global IPO and capital markets investments.

Pizzo worked for Lehman Brothers until he joined GLG Partners in 2002. He launched his own hedge fund, Urwick Capital in 2004 before joining Fenician Capital Management as a partner. He signed up to SAC in February 2011.

Photo: karenfoleyphotography/iStock/Thinkstock

‘Juniorisation’ is the new thing in investment banking. From M&A teams, to research and now bond desks, experienced and expensive employees are being replaced by hot young things.

Yes, investment banks are losing a lot of experience, and industry bodies are up in arms, but the a new emphasis has been placed on promoting and retaining talented juniors at the expense of more experienced candidates.

Who are these talented traders being fast-tracked to senior roles and making waves at the big banks, and what can you do to emulate their success? Based on a combination of our own research and those featured on other rankings, here’s our pick of who you need to know.

Rani Nazim, fixed income trading, Morgan Stanley

To make managing director at Morgan Stanley as a fixed income trader at a time when the bank is cutting 25% of its fixed income team takes some talent. Nazim started her career at Morgan Stanley in 2004 trading credit in Hong Kong and later moved across to investment grade bonds and credit default swaps in New York. Nazim is 33.

Andrew Silverman, distressed debt trading, Goldman Sachs

Silverman is a Harvard graduate a reportedly a mathematical genius who has been fast-tracked through the ranks at Goldman Sachs. He spent a he went from associate to VP in less than a year and somehow made it to managing director in 2014, after being recognised as one of the top distressed credit traders out there. He was 28.

Dan Avery, index trading, Goldman Sachs

Avery joined Goldman Sachs as a graduate seven years ago from Oxford University. This year, at the tender age of 28, he was promoted to managing director. This was the youngest person promoted in a class that comprise one-third millennials.

Simon Drake, convertibles trading, J.P. Morgan

Drake has only been trading convertibles at J.P. Morgan since May last year, having previously focused on credit for the nine years he’s been working at the bank. However, Forbes has him down as one of the bond traders to watch. At 29, Drake is still a vice president, but is making waves.

Darren Dixon, Latin America structured credit trading, Goldman Sachs

At 29, Dixon was another young trader to make it to managing director in Goldman Sachs’ 2015 promotion round. Dixon is head of Latin America Structured credit trading. He held this role as a VP and appears to have by-passed director level to go straight to MD. He graduated from the College of William and Mary in Virginia in 2008 and went straight into Goldman – originally focusing on principal funding and investments.

Nila Das, mortgage bond trading, Citi

Das is just 27 and only joined Citi in 2013, but Forbes says that she’s ‘running the bank’s secondary trading in agency collateralized mortgage obligations’. She’s another example of a trader with a lot of responsibility without the job title to match – she’s still a VP at Citi.

Rany Moubarak, rates structuring, Morgan Stanley

Mourbarak only started his career at Morgan Stanley in 2007, initially focused on fixed income structuring in London, before moving to Dubai and then Hong Kong in 2013, where he’s currently head of rates structuring for APAC. He was bumped up to managing director in Morgan Stanley’s latest round of promotions.

Kunal Shah, emerging markets trading, Goldman Sachs

No list of hot young traders is complete without including Kunal Shah. He’s now 32, but he’s already a partner at Goldman Sachs and was made managing director at 27. Shah joined Goldman straight out of Cambridge University and was initially prop trading on its macro desk – something banned by regulators under Dodd-Frank – and Goldman moved him across to its emerging markets desk in 2007, where he’s been since.

Sam Berberian, high yield credit trading, Goldman Sachs

Goldman has a track-record of promoting young traders quickly, and 30-year-old Berberian is another who was promoted to managing director this year. He joined Goldman Sachs straight out of MIT, where he studied Mechanical Engineering and Business Management.

Jason Lin, rates trading, HSBC

Lin’s first role was as an intern at Lehman Brothers just before its collapse in 2008, but he started his full-time career as a G10 options trader at Daiwa Capital Markets in London. He moved to HSBC in 2011, and now describes himself as the primary trader for its G7 Cross-CCY, JPY IRS, JGB trading desk in Hong Kong.

Philipp De Cassan, rates trading, Nomura

Highlighted by Financial News in its 40 under 40 trader rankings, de Cassan has managed to rise through the ranks quickly since joining Nomura in 2011. He’s currently 31, and was hired into the Japanese bank to run its euro swaps desk. He was a VP when he joined, but was promoted to executive director in 2012 and managing director in 2015. He’s now head of Euro Linear trading, a role he took up in August.

Jonathan Birnbaum, credit trading, Morgan Stanley

Birnhaum is 29 and has recently moved away from a pure trading role to take the role of US credit trading COO. He’s still a vice president, but Birnhaum is managing a team of 100 people and made the cut on Forbes’ 30 under 30 trader rankings. He has a bachelors degree from MIT and an executive MBA from Columbia. He started out as a database engineer for the SEC in 2006.

Lear Janiv, CVA trading, Goldman Sachs

Another to make the list because of his relatively rapid rise up the ranks at Goldman Sachs. At just 30, he was promoted to managing director at the U.S bank this year, having worked in its London office since graduating with a degree in Astrophysics from Princeton.

Adam Richmond, head of US credit strategy, Morgan Stanley

Richmond started at Morgan Stanley after completing his MBA at Chicago Booth in 2006. His rise over the past ten years has been comparatively rapid, and he was promoted to managing director in the 2016 class. He also has a degree in Economics from Harvard.

Roland Jeurissen, FX options trading, Citigroup

At 32, Jeurissen is another trader highlighted by Financial News. He’s currently in charge of one of the biggest currency trading books at Citi, which in turn is on of the largest players in FX. He has global responsibility for trading books including euro-dollar, euro-sterling and dollar-swiss.

Jon Deane, commodities trading, J.P. Morgan

Deane has been a managing director at J.P. Morgan since 2013 and is currently head of Asia-Pacific commodities trading in Singapore, having moved across from trading agricultural derivatives in London. Not bad for someone who started out in 2005. He has a bachelors degree in Finance from the University of Sydney.

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While financial services firms cut front office and support jobs, compliance remains a stalwart of expansion. With scrutiny from regulators – not to mention legal and reputational risk – at an all-time high, banks, asset managers, broker-dealers and other financial institutions are expanding their compliance teams.

Goldman Sachs, for one, added nearly 3,000 people to its net headcount in 2015, an 8% increase on 2014, as part of the firm’s “significant investment in regulatory compliance,” according to Goldman CFO Harvey Schwartz.

“This is a great time to be in compliance, no matter what part of the spectrum [of financial services] you’re in,” said Amy Lynch, the president of FrontLine Compliance, a strategic consultancy. “Regulation and compliance are suddenly everyday terms, not four letter words.”

Getting your foot in the door

The demand for air-tight compliance is so high that it can be hard for hiring managers to find the people they are looking for with the right skill set.

That’s great news for experienced compliance officers, but how do you break into compliance in the first place?

Compliance is unlike accounting in the sense that there isn’t a straightforward career path that most people follow successfully.

“If you want to be an accountant or auditor, you major in accounting, you go to a career day at your college, and you meet with recruiters from the Big 4,” said Jack Kelly, managing director of the Compliance Search Group. “Compliance has been around for so long but its importance has increased dramatically of late.

“It’s not a direct line like other careers – it’s often haphazard in terms of how people get into it,” he said. “People work as a stock broker or an operations specialist then move into a compliance role.”

Getting a compliance qualification doesn’t necessarily mean you get into compliance. There are a lot out there including Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP), the National Society of Compliance Professionals (NSCP) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) Institute at Wharton’s Certified Regulatory and Compliance Professional (CRCP) designation. However, figures from our resume database suggest that a lot of compliance professionals in the U.S. still opt to pursue a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) or Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) program instead of a specialist qualification.

Get a good undergraduate degree, skip the law degree

A lot of people think automatically about a legal background, but a J.D. is really not necessary for a compliance role at a bank or other financial services firm.

Even at the entry level, compliance specialists don’t just memorize regulations, policies and procedures and go over documentation – compliance roles are far more quantitative and complex than they used to be.

“I don’t believe we’ve produced enough qualified human beings to fill all of the compliance opportunities at banks going forward,” said Carol Hartman, executive vice president of recruitment firm DHR International. “It’s a big growth area, so raising your hand and saying you’re interested in a compliance role would be enough to attract the attention of recruiters.”

In terms of qualifications, rather than a law degree, Hartman believes that a Bachelor’s in mathematics, economics or decision sciences, taking a few accounting courses along the way, would be helpful for aspiring compliance professionals.

“For compliance at a bank, an undergraduate degree is plenty for an entry level job,” she said. “A lot of people have gotten into compliance from back-office support roles, which is a great way to get into that sort of work, doing operations, controls or back-office support at a broker-dealer or bank.’

Lynch agrees that an accounting or law degree is not necessary, certainly not for entry-level compliance positions. She recommends a Bachelor’s degree in general business management.

Our stats support the fact that the majority of compliance professionals only have a bachelors degree. Only 13% have a Masters, while just over 4% possess a law degree. MBA was the second most prominent level of education, with 18% of compliance professionals possessing one.

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Two years ago, I quit investment banking. I had known for a long time that I needed to leave. I loved the thrill of the deal, but the unrelenting stress of the process was wearing me down. I should have realized that something was wrong before my third trip to the Emergency Room.

The first trip was for a debilitating migraine that left me curled up in a fetal position in the back of a cab – stress. The next visit followed two all-nighters when my entire left side went numb – exhaustion. Lucky three almost didn’t happen. After waking up on the floor of an office hallway, having passed out and hit my head around 3am when no one else was around, I first slowly crawled back to my desk to send off one last email – stress, exhaustion and foolishness.

Why didn’t I stop after that first trip to the ER? Well, the compensation was fantastic (certainly more than was required to live comfortable), and yet I had no personal time to enjoy it. Many friends were starting families, but I had houseplants dying from neglect.

It wasn’t an easy decision. Even after I had admitted to myself that I needed to move on, it took another two years and multiple good faith attempts before I finally packed my box of belongings and ended my decade-long banking career.

Two years may make me seem pathetically indecisive, but quitting can be extremely difficult. After years of pushing down a particular path, turning around is no small feat. Sunk costs be damned. All of those hours invested are impossible to ignore.

And then there’s the uncertainty. After ten years in investment banking, I had a hard time imagining that I could do anything else. I had other interests (at least I hoped I still did), but I had never determined how they could be turned into viable career options.

What’s more, after working for ten years to build a career and a reputation, did I really want to start over? Wouldn’t it be easier to shut up, put my head down and continue clawing along the same, well-defined path from analyst to associate to vice president to director?

Tipping point

Those were the considerations that clouded my thoughts for two years until fatigue pushed me over the tipping point. Everything finally ended not in a dramatic declaration but rather during a calm discussion with my boss. He knew it was coming.

Defying conventional wisdom, I quit without having a new position lined up. I’m grateful for this fact. In investment banking, when every waking moment is dedicated to the job, there’s precious little time to consider any alternatives. And if you do find yourself with an idle moment, it is impossible to be objective with stressful deadlines clouding rational thought.

I needed time away from the industry to consider what else might be feasible – to give other ideas a fair shot. At first, I thought I would ultimately play it safe, landing in something familiar like corporate development. But with each passing day, my banking career further behind me, I expanded my horizons.

I soon realized that I no longer had anything holding me back. When I left investment banking, I had closed (if not locked) the door behind me. Finance is a fickle industry. It doesn’t take long before you become disconnected with the markets. Client relationships quickly turn stale.

No excuses

Returning was highly unlikely. So for the first time in ten years, there were no excuses. When the time finally came to move on, the decision was amazingly easy. Just a few months after leaving Investment Banking, I enrolled in culinary school. I would come to learn that this perfect fit had been obvious to everyone but me for years. I never looked back.

For those considering an exit from finance, I wish I could say that quitting was the unqualified key to happiness. It’s not. There are some extremely difficult, extremely personal considerations that everyone has to weigh. Any decision requires a compromise. Money, power, free time, health, family… you can’t have them all in limitless quantities. Some sacrifices are necessary.

For those in finance, one of the most challenging areas of compromise is compensation. Anyone considering quitting worries that no other industry pays as well. Unfortunately, they’re right. Surprise, surprise – a chef does not get paid like an investment banker.

Even after years of public scrutiny and pull-backs in compensation, there are few industries that pay as well. Absent strong entrepreneurial drive and a lot of luck, if money is your goal, there’s nowhere you can do better. Then again, a chef does not get calls at 10pm on a Friday looking for financial model updates before morning. Again, it’s a compromise.

After a few years in banking, compensation becomes less and less about making a living. At some point it becomes more like a score. That annual bonus will never be enough if it’s not more than what the next guy made. But how much do you need live comfortably? Moving to a new job with a pay cut in exchange for new found free time and reduced stress might be an amazing deal.

If you can come to terms with the pay issues, there’s still the fear of the unknown. And rightly so. Starting a completely new career is risky. After all, just because you were an amazing investment banker does not mean that you are good at everything (although we would like to think we are). Even if it’s your passion, you may end up being a lousy chef.

No turning back

When you leave a job in finance, you need to be prepared to leave that job forever. If you can’t accept that reality, then you probably aren’t ready to leave in the first place. Seats fill quickly. After a few months out of a job, you can rest assured that no one is waiting for your return.

That’s probably a good thing. Starting a new job is always stressful, and once it’s gone, it can be easy to long for the old, familiar (albeit miserable) routine you were so recently desperate to escape.

Even if some doors close behind you, that’s not to say that there aren’t countless options in finance that remain. It’s a broad industry. And while you may never get back on the path to managing director at your former investment bank, something new like working in corporate development for a former client might end up being a perfect fit.

Quit or stay, there’s one undeniable truth. No job will ever be perfect. A dream job is still a job, and even the best positions come with bad days and unique challenges. Annoying personalities, incompetent co-workers unrealistic expectations, poor communication… these aren’t features of finance. They’re facts of life.

But if you’ve been honest with yourself and weighed what is important to you, even these unavoidable irritations can be tolerated. If you’re in the right job, you can laugh them off. If you can only scream, take it as a sign.

Mark Franczyk is a former investment banker of ten-years. After becoming a vice president, he finally decided to leave Finance, attended culinary school and became a pastry chef in New York City.

It’s no secret that young bankers are queuing up to move into private equity, but if they want to secure a job at Blackstone they’re in for a culture shock. While junior bankers are indoctrinated into a hierarchical structure and beholden to associates and MDs alike, Blackstone employees are will be thrown into deals from the get-go.

Even more importantly, according to Robert Ramsauer, senior managing director at Blackstone in the UK, you’ve got to be liked by the whole team – and this means a rigorous interview process.

“Candidates typically go through a dozen interviews, with analysts through to senior managing directors, so that everyone feels comfortable with the new hire,” he says. “We get a lot of CVs for each entry level job. What we look for is a top education, and internships in the financial world – whether that’s private equity or investment banking – and how they’ll fit into the environment.”

Blackstone was the top-ranked private equity firm in the eFinancialCareers 2016 Ideal Employer rankings, which polled over 6,500 finance professionals globally on the companies they’d like to work for.

Across the private equity industry, typically one in 300 applications is eventually offered an entry level job. Most juniors switch to the buy-side after a couple of years in investment banking, but Blackstone is one of an increasing band of large private equity firms to recruit graduates. Globally, it takes on around 80 analysts each year.

What does it take to get in? Like most private equity firms, Blackstone vets candidates based on the university they went to, the technical skills they have and evidence that the applicant is an elite among their peers. But with such a high volume of applications, softer factors inevitably come into play and there’s a real focus on ‘cultural fit’.

Raphael De Botton, managing director at Blackstone, admits that there’s a “little bit of luck” involved in the final selection process.

“We have 25 people working in private equity in London and you spend a lot of time together,” he says. “Therefore, the recruitment process is focused a lot on the cultural fit. We want people who have technical skills, who are proactive and able to go into complex business deals at a time of strategic change, but our recruits have to fit in with the rest of the team.”

The ‘beer test’ is a classic criteria that’s applied to potential entry-level recruits to private equity in a tie-break scenario. Recruiters in the sector tell us that the one thing that sways the hiring decision is if senior people in the business can see themselves sitting in a bar with the candidate for a few hours – or whiling away a few hours on a long-haul flight.

Moez Gharbi, an associate in private equity at Blackstone, joined the company through its graduate programme in 2012 and has just been promoted from analyst. The recruitment process, he admits, was tough.

He was studying at HEC School of Management in Paris, with a secondment to MIT, and had to fit more than 10 interviews in London during this time. He’d already interned at Lazard, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and had multiple offers on the table by the time Blackstone came calling.

Choosing private equity over investment banking – where a number of his university friends ended up – was relatively straightforward, he says.

“A lot of my classmates went into finance without thinking too hard about what they really wanted to do,” he says. “On my end, investment banking internships provided the experience I needed to build the maturity for working in private equity straight out of university.”

The turning point at Blackstone

Blackstone’s recruitment process for analysts may be tough, but getting into the company is no guarantee that you’ll stick around. The firm prides itself on its retention rates, says Ramsauer: “Most of our senior management team joined the firm as analysts or associates”.

However, moving up from analyst to associate is the crunch point in your career at Blackstone – or a “significant hurdle”, according to Ramsauer. Many don’t make it, but those who do tend to kick-start their private equity career.

“There are a number of reasons people don’t make it to associate, but often it’s about having the maturity to manage down as well as up,” he says. “Associates are both more exposed to clients, but they also have to begin to manage people. What’s more, even juniors – which are knee-deep in the financial analytics – are expected to have an opinion on a deal.”

Pay and workloads at Blackstone

Blackstone has around 2,200 employees and last year allocated $1.8bn to compensation – an 8% reduction on 2014. Within private equity, however, compensation was flat at $280.2m. It doesn’t break out employees by division.

It was perceived as being a generous payer by respondents to our survey. 82% of respondents said they’d expect a generous salary and bonus to work at Blackstone. Of the top 20 companies in the ranking, only Goldman Sachs – the overall winner – scored higher.

However, just 16% of respondents who voted for Blackstone said that manageable working hours would be a strength. Private equity requires a lot of travel, and the hours are not perceived to be exactly easy, but it’s supposedly a change of pace from the 80+ hours required of investment banking juniors.

“You work hard, but there’s no face time culture. If you’re in the office at 1am it’s because it’s a busy time and the whole team is working towards a common goal,” says Gharbi.

Investment banks have focused on both fast-tracking their juniors, and making the work more interesting for analysts, who have typically spent long hours poring laboriously over spreadsheets.

82% of people in our survey who wanted to work for Blackstone said that they expected interesting or challenging work. This beat all the investment banks in our rankings and tied with Google.

Gharbi believes that the benefit of working at Blackstone is the variety of work and the level of responsibility given to analysts and associates at an early stage.

“You are expected to manage people both internally and externally early on in your career although you will always find the senior help that you need to make the right decisions,” he says. “Because the team setup is small, your work always has an impact on the decision making process and you ought yourself to have an opinion on the investments you work on.”

Another downside for Blackstone in our survey was the issue of diversity. Just 23% of respondents perceived this to be a strength, which was significantly lower than investment banks in the rankings.

Anna Mignot, senior vice president, human resources at Blackstone believes this perception is misplaced.

“We focus on attracting, retaining and developing the very best talent, both for the firm and for each individual role,” she says. “We recognize the value that diversity of thought brings, and consider it critical to our thorough and debate-driven investment process,” she says.

View the complete 2016 Ideal Employer Rankings

As we’ve noted before, J.P. Morgan has been performing various contortions to attract technologists to go and work there: there are the ‘drawable surfaces’ and blue scooters at 5 Manhattan West in New York, there’s the $48m revamp of its ‘campus’ at Bournemouth in the UK, and there’s a palpable attempt at propagating the notion that working for J.P. Morgan is a bit like working for Google – minus the internet balloons and contact lenses that monitor blood sugar.

Now we know why: J.P. Morgan has been hiring a lot of technologists. It needs to be as appealing to them as possible.

In her presentation during J.P. Morgan’s investor day yesterday, J.P. Morgan CFO Marianne Lake said the US bank now employs 40,000 technologists. That’s an increase of 10,000 in two years (in a 2013 investor letter, JPM said it employed 30,000 technologists). 18,000 of those 40,000 are developers, said Lake.

Where are all these tech people? J.P. Morgan reportedly employs around 4,500 of them in Europe, of whom 1,000 are in Bournemouth and 800 are in Glasgow. In the US, J.P. Morgan Chase is building“tech hubs for millennial staffers,” including Manhattan West and Delaware. Most of the new technology staff are likely to be in Asia though, where J.P. Morgan already has a ‘global centre for IT excellence’ in Singapore and plans to hire “a few thousand extra technologists” over the next two years.

Separately, Goldman Sachs staff may want to drop their egg white omelettes for tofu and nut roast. Yesterday, the bank invited Russell Simons, a millionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist, to give a talk on resilience to its staff. Simons founded Def Jam Recordings in the 1980s, but is now busy promoting his book, ‘The Happy Vegan’, which advocates the virtues of a plant-based diet.

Meanwhile:

Sales and trading revenues at J.P. Morgan are down 20% year-on-year so far in 2016. (Bloomberg)

Jamie Dimon has already made $2.3m on those JPM shares he bought a few weeks ago. (WSJ)

The start to 2015 is a tough comparison period for markets revenues because J.P. Morgan saw an increase in flows during that period after the Swiss National Bank decided to unpeg the franc. (Business Insider)

Credit Suisse is making in total around 200 redundancies in London this week, of which just under half will be in its global markets division, according to a source. Among the more high profile names put at risk is Greg Arkus, head of sovereign, supranational and agency debt capital markets and syndicate. (Reuters)

ING bank will likely layoff a number of London staff members if the United Kingdom decides to withdraw from the European Union. (NLTimes)

Credit Suisse hired Steven King from Morgan Stanley to drive its sales of algorithmic trading services in the Asia-Pacific region. (Bloomberg)

Standard Chartered could claw back bonuses from up to 150 senior staff after slumping to its first annual loss since 1989. (Reuters)

There will be no more fixed pay allowances at Standard Chartered in London. (Marketwatch)

Fergus Edwards, a super-senior syndicate banker at Mitsubishi UFJ in London, is leaving. (Global Capital)

Morgan Stanley has hired Jako van der Walt from J.P. Morgan to lead its investment banking business for South Africa, rejoining the firm he left about 10 years ago. (Bloomberg)

The code names for Deutsche Boerse and LSE during their putative merger talks are Delta and Luna. (Reuters)

Steven Bommarito, the head of Credit Suisse Group AG’s credit risk review team for the Americas, has died aged 45. (Bloomberg)

Hot hedge funds that are hiring now. (Bloomberg)

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Photo credit: right before he started giggling by sharyn morrow is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

With 2016 trading revenues plunging (they’re down 20% year-on-year at J.P. Morgan) and European banks caught in an urgent need to cut costs, it’s hardly surprising that some banks are targeting their most senior and most expensive staff for layoffs.

Search firm Michelangelo claimed last week that 70% of the credit traders losing their jobs in London had more than ten years’ experience. A quick look at the names coming out of Barclays recently confirms this to be the case.

The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Register shows Barclays parting company with another six staff in the UK over the past two weeks, all of them at director level and above. They include: Sylvain Lebre, director and head of credit index options trading, Nicholas Stockdale, head of the origination and CAPEX financing solutions group, David Bhagat, director and head of Japanese equity sales, Subash Chulani, a managing director in Asian equity sales, Hamish Crumley, head of global emerging markets sales trading, and Deborah Rees, head of emerging European sales.

Barclays’ redundancies relating to emerging markets and Asia aren’t exactly surprising. The bank is refocusing its business on its key markets of the UK and the US and is seriously trimming its Asian equities business. However, the lack of junior exits in both areas is notable. Either Barclays is clearing out the senior ranks first, or it’s reassigning cheaper junior staff to other areas and dispensing with less flexible directors.

At Credit Suisse, the departures are more evenly dispersed across the ranks. Recent exits include UK head Garrett Curran, who’s departure to “pursue other interests” (he’s creating a Kensington ‘mega mansion’, which was flagged by Bloomberg last month). However, they also include Christine Lauterwasser, a VP in projects and analytics. Maciej Dyl, an associate in the European energy investment banking group, and Shailen Pau, a trader under investigation for the manipulation of agency bonds.

While senior staff seem most vulnerable to European banks’ prolonged cost-cutting, the implication from the latest round of exits is that no one’s safe – especially at Credit Suisse, where Tidjane Thiam has promised to “step up cost cutting” in the light of a “particularly challenging environment.”

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