eFinancialCareersEnglish (UK) – eFinancialCareers

Back in the day, you’d end up in wealth management because of the people you know. If you were lucky, and had rich connections that you could persuade to invest their assets with your employer, then you had a chance of longevity and a lucrative career in the industry.

Craig Pfeiffer, the president and CEO of the Money Management Institute (MMI), is on a mission to change the ‘sink or swim’ tradition in U.S. wealth management. The industry is facing a talent crisis – there’s way too much grey hair and not enough new blood going into the industry. Morgan Stanley was the latest large bank sign up to a deal cutting back on the use of sign-on bonuses to entice brokers, such is the tendency for financial advisory firms to poach the best people with the biggest books of business from their rivals.

Young people are turned off by the industry, says Pfeiffer. “Their reference points and inputs are parents, teachers and Hollywood, from Bernie Madoff to The Wolf of Wall Street and the TV show Billions, which are exaggerated examples,” Pfeiffer said.

Pfeiffer suggests that the wealth management industry should shift to a “learn by watching success” model, like doctors, lawyers, teachers and apprentice-oriented industries have, rather than the traditional “learn by making mistakes” model of giving new recruits a desk and a phone and wishing them luck, which inevitably leads to a high failure rate.

“It is a tough learning curve in wealth management; however, medical school and law school are both pretty tough, but they have done things to enable success, whereas we as an industry have traditionally thrown them into the deep end of the pool and waited to see who can figure out to swim,” Pfeiffer said.

Pfeiffer has been around the block and back again on Wall Street. He started out on the 1970s at small regional firms that went through a series of mergers and acquisitions to form Shearson Loeb Rhoades, later Citigroup and eventually Morgan Stanley Smith Barney. When he left in 2015, he was vice chairman and managing director with leadership responsibility for 18,000 financial advisers located across 800 offices globally. He joined MMI that year.

Wealth management used to be a second career, with most candidates applying for their first job in the industry in their late twenties or early thirties. Now a higher percentage of early-career-stage professionals are in their early to mid-twenties and are in need of more training and mentorship.

Pfeiffer insists that the industry is evolving. “There is a definitive hierarchy of roles within advisory teams and a structured roadmap with continuous learning and advancement, enhanced by role-modeling and mentoring,” he said. “In their new employee training programs, firms should emphasize soft skills and chemistry with clients, focusing on their goals, emotions and risk tolerances versus investment products, features and benefits.”

MMI is partnering with the Envestnet Institute On Campus program, which offers on-campus guest lecturing and online courses that provide an insight into the wealth management industry.

In addition, Pfeiffer feels that wealth management firms should take a cue from the top professional services and management consulting firms in taking a longer-term view of talent development, seeing it as an investment rather than an expense.

“We’ve had a short term view on ROI, whereas when Big Four partners are aging and those firms experience natural attrition, they hire recent college grads and make a long-term investment and nurture them over time,” he said. “There will be all new partners at Deloitte, PwC and McKinsey in 10-to-15 years, which is a longer horizon. That is cultural to those firms, but it is not culturally ingrained in the wealth management industry.”

Pfeiffer recommends giving entry-level hires broad exposure to various areas of the business so they can figure out what interests them most and what their skill set is the best fit for.

“Most wealth management firms don’t have rotations, but if people got to see different things and were exposed to more aspects of the business early on, then more people would gravitate toward their favorite areas, and I know that would lead to better retention rates,” he said.
Follow @danbutchrwrites

Photo credit: Kladyk/GettyImages
““

It’s hard to get promoted in banking. As a recent study by financial consulting firm Quinlan Associates made clear, most bankers get stuck at around vice president (VP) level. Plenty of them leave. Who and what is stopping them from getting ahead? The Wall Street Journal might accidentally have identified the culprits.

In its latest article on quants on Wall Street, the Journal looks at the people who aren’t the quants – the older, less numerate generation who got in before a PhD (or at least a Master’s) in mathematics was a help. It discovers that not only are they not quants, they’re jocks – the antithesis of quants. And the new generation of mathematical geniuses is their nemesis.

The jocks are former athletes. As little as a decade ago, the people doing the hiring on Wall Street thought these athletic types were the ideal. The jocks had strong enough stomachs for risk-taking and a good temperament for winning clients’ trust and business. Former football, lacrosse, hockey, wrestling, tennis, soccer and crew stars jostled for position on trading floors. Some worked their way up the ladder. For example, former investment bank CEOs John Mack, Henry Paulson and Alan Schwartz were all ex-athletes. It turns out that there are so many former wrestlers on Wall Street there’s even an ex-wrestlers’ ‘meet-up.’

Now the quants are resurgent and the jocks are out of favor. The jocks are not happy. “Athletes are better equipped at knowing you’re not always going to win,” a former co-captain of the Columbia University wrestling team who’s spent over a decade in equity sales, tells the Journal. “In sales, you’re going to get a lot of doors slammed in your face. It’s how you bounce back from those losses that define us.”

The Journal doesn’t explicitly blame the jocks for obstructing the quants, but the generational gap is all too clear. The cerebral athletes are being pitted against the physical athletes and – for the moment – the physical athletes are still in the top positions. As sales jobs are automated along with compliance and risk systems, quants are likely to win-out. Disgruntled jocks can only complain about their vanquishers in their sports meet-ups. But banks may not want to do away with the jocks altogether. The ex-athletes possess discipline and quick thinking. They also have years of experience of the markets, while the AI systems built by quants are still unproven.

Separately, executing fake trades and sharing confidential information with traders at other banks are quick ways to self-sabotage your trading career. A regulator accused FX traders at BNP Paribas of doing just that and adjusting prices based on the inside knowledge.

The New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) found that a trader located in the New York branch masterminded several schemes to manipulate prices and spreads in several currencies, according to The Trade.

A group chat with a “cartel” of other traders allegedly made plans to manipulate the price of the South African rand during New York trading hours to reap higher profits.

DFS accused BNP Paribas of paying little to no attention to the supervision of its FX trading business, allowing its traders to violate New York State laws for several years. It fined the bank $350m for failing to manage its FX trading teams who were manipulating FX rates, executing fake trades and sharing confidential information.

Meanwhile:

John Gallo, the head of U.S. fixed income sales at Deutsche Bank, is preparing to leave the bank after just 20 months in the role. (Business Insider)

Citi retained its place at the top of the global foreign exchange markets ranking, controlling 10.74% of the overall market, a fall from nearly 13% in the previous year, while J.P. Morgan placed second with 10.34% of the market. (Business Insider)

BlackRock has boosted its assets under management to a record $5.4 trillion thanks in part to quant programs. (WSJ)

Wall Street professionals commuting from the suburbs to Manhattan need to prepare for a “summer of hell.” (Bloomberg)

This new fund of private equity funds is hiring in New York. (FINalternatives)

The US Department of Justice has charged partners and analysts at the hedge fund Deerfield Capital Management with insider trading. (New York Times)

Many a hedge fund manager has been burned by trying to predict the impact of politics on the markets. (New York Times)

Financial technology startups are calling themselves “regtech,” not fintech, to convince banks their products are must-have. (Financial News)

Wealth management firms say they’ll need approximately four years on average to comply with the new MiFID II requirements. (The Market Mogul)

If the clearing of euro-denominated derivatives moves from the City to the continent post-Brexit, Aberdeen and others would follow suit. (Financial News)

MBA students doing investment banking internships, beware the overconfidence that can often cause you to squander opportunities. (FT)

Air rage is related to status anxiety. (The Guardian)

Photo credit: llhedgehogll/GettyImages

““

Sean George would like you to know, in a casual sort of way, that he knows a lot of people in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). The softly spoken American, and 21-year Wall Street veteran, could – if it came to it – probably knock you down.

“We battle intellectually on Wall Street – there are plenty of keyboard bullies. I don’t talk tough, but I quietly carry a heavy stick,” he says. “I’m a happy go lucky guy, I’m always laughing. The fact that I like to kick people in the head during my spare time surprises my colleagues.”

George has held various senior roles on Wall Street. He was global co-head of credit default swaps (CDS) at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in New York, and led the North American CDS business of both Deutsche Bank and Jefferies. This month, after spending two years heading up Jefferies’ fixed income team for the Nordic region in London, George has called it quits on investment banking and decided moved to Sweden to become chief investment officer at fund manager Granit Fonder.

It has around $300m in assets under management, and the plan is for George to launch his hedge fund Granit Global Credit Opportunity with around $100m. Granit Fonder is still small – with around eight employees – but has just hired Ulf G. Erlandsson, previously a senior portfolio manager at the SEK334bn ($38.3bn) Swedish National Pension Fund AP4, as head of fixed income. His fund should launch with “hundreds of millions”, says George.

Since 1993, George also been a mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter, hanging out on the UFC scene. Over the past 24 years he’s competed in 11 Brazilian jiu-jitsu, boxing and Thai boxing fights. The high point of his fighting career was when he debuted in a Muay Thai bout – a brutal combat sport that allows the kicking, kneeing and elbowing of your opponent – during the summer of 2012 in New York.

“The guy headbutted me in the first two seconds and split my eyebrow open. I had to lie to the doctors and say I could see out of the eye, but I was half blind,” he says. “It was a mental battle as well as a tough fight, which went right to the end. I lost by split decision.”

Losing on your debut might seem like an odd highlight, but George says that battling through his injury “won the hearts and minds of the crowd, and allowed me to learn a lot about myself”. While he was in hospital getting his eye stitched up, the U.S Muay Thai champion turned up and handed over his championship belt he won that night because, says George, “He said I deserved it after being robbed by the judges”.

In 2013, George fought his last fight sanctioned fight in Bangkok, Thailand and knocked out a more experienced opponent in a minute and a half, he says.

George owned his own MMA gym during his time in New York, but spent his time in London sparring in the Mixed Martial Arts Clinic in Shoreditch, rubbing shoulders with UFC stars likes Joseph Duffy, Darren the Dentist, and UK Muay Thai Champion Shane O’Neill. In Sweden, he trains at the Five Stars Muay Thai and Allstars MMA gym where Alexander “the Mauler” Gustafsson is their star fighter.

These days, at 44-years-old, George says that he just uses MMA as a way to keep fit. “Some people like hitting the treadmill, I like to fight,” he says.

George also spent the bulk of his fighting career competing in the 70kg category, and says as he’s approaching his mid-40s, making weight is a “constant battle”. Instead, he contents himself taking on fighters 20 years his junior.

“I’m a tough guy to move around, so a lot of the 25-year-olds like to spar with me,” he says. “It’s good for them, but I walk like I’m 90-years-old for days after. The recovery time is too long – that’s why I hung up my gloves.”

Follow @paultclarke

Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

Image: Getty Images

““

If you’re a 40-something salesperson or trader fearful of losing your job, don’t be. You might spend a 15 months tending the garden or playing golf or running a pub, but they’ll want you back one day.

Rates trading is a case in point. Research firm Coalition calculates that banks’ revenues from trading G10 rates products fell 51% between the first quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2014. By early 2015 senior rates salespeople were as popular as a meat sausage at a vegan picnic. Banks like Credit Suisse set about culling their rates desks; directors and managing directors flooded onto the market.

Two years later, times have changed. Coalition says G10 rates revenues rose 26% last year. Most banks reported higher revenues from their rates desks again in the first quarter of this year, and those that didn’t (like Barclays) are trying to do something about it. The unwanted experienced rates professionals are all the rage again.

Credit Suisse’s cast-offs are a case in point. Almost all have found new positions in banks. Mark Tieranan, the former head of rates sales moved quickly to Deutsche. Adam Bryant, Ben Harvey and others went to HSBC. Mark Mueller and others went to UBS. Only a handful have remained aloof from the banking market.- Ernest van Vredenburch, the former head of EMEA macro sales at Credit Suisse, joined Quant Insight, a hedge fund, in February, as did Huw Roberts, a former director in rates sales; Sergio Puglisi, the former head of South European sales at CS joined brokerage firm MINT and is now doing an MBA.

With Credit Suisse’s rates sales team a microcosm of the market as a whole, headhunters say senior rates talent is now hard to find. “There’s just no free capacity any more,” says one London headhunter, speaking off the record. “If you want to hire a good person, you can’t pick them up from out of the market – this is why most of the recent hiring has been bank to bank.”

Accordingly, as UBS looks at adding to the rates business it decimated in 2012, it’s hiring out of Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs, in turn is said to have hired Cosimo Codacci-Pisanelli from Barclays as it looks to fill holes in London. Buybacks are becoming common: with Barclays and others hiring, no one wants to lose the staff they’ve already got. “The teams are so much smaller that there’s no ability to absorb a change in business any more,” says a NY headhunter, also speaking off the record.

Rates professionals’ reprieve should give hope to traders and salespeople in other asset classes. – Particularly as it’s taken place against at a background of ‘electronification.’ Between 2012 and 2015, the proportion of standard interest rate swaps traded electronically went from around 20% of the market to around 70% according to the Bank for International Settlements. This hasn’t dissuaded banks from stocking up on experienced salespeople as rates revenues rise again. – You might fall out of fashion in finance for a while, but you won’t necessarily fall out of fashion forever.

Follow @MadameButcher
Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

“”
;

Investor relations is an increasingly common escape route for both equity researchers seeking a new path, and M&A bankers looking for a change. But switching out of investment banking doesn’t mean that you’re cast into a career hinterland, never to return.

Case in point is Maren Winnick. She left her job as a vice president in M&A shareholder advisory at Goldman Sachs in March last year to head up corporate finance and investor relations at biotech firm Moderna Therapeutics in March last year.

She has just joined Evercore as a managing director within its investment bank in New York.

The boutique investment bank has been hiring over the past six months and, of all the small players gaining ground on the bulge brackets, has made the most ground. Evercore was 10^th in the Q1 global M&A league tables with $42.5bn worth of deals, according to Dealogic, up from 25^th at the same point last year. This is primarily due to gains in the U.S – in Q117 Evercore was 9^th by deal volume in North America, up from 25^th in Q1 2016.

Winnick spent eight years at Goldman Sachs in both M&A and equity capital markets roles, having joined in 2008 after an MBA from Columbia Business School.

She’s not the only Golmanite to leave the bank for a senior role at smaller firm in recent months. Matthew Borsch, its lead analyst for the healthcare services sector, has just joined BMO Capital Markets as a managing director and senior research analyst for healthcare.

Borsch joined Goldman in February 2001 after four years working as a director of business development at healthcare firm Telesis Medical Management.

Follow @paultclarke

Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

Image: Getty Images

““

The June 2017 sitting of the CFA Institute’s exams is fast approaching. If you’re studying for them, good luck. You know you’ll need it: the CFA exams are notoriously hard and for Levels One and Two at least, most people fail. Last year’s miserable pass rates are show in the table below.

Level One has the lowest rate of success. Of the huge 59,627 people who sat the first rung of the CFA exams last year, 33,820 people failed. That’s a lot of disappointment. Given that the CFA Institute advises 300 hours of study per exam, that’s also 10m hours of study time wasted (assuming the candidates who failed actually put the hours in, which isn’t always the case).

To maximize your chances of passing CFA Level One, you need to do some mock tests. At this stage, successful candidates say you need to be doing a lot of mock tests under timed conditions. But when you score yourself afterwards, how will you know whether you’ve done well enough to pass the real thing?

This is the problem: you won’t.

The CFA Institute, which masterminds the entire process, is notoriously coy when it comes to explaining what constitutes a pass and what doesn’t.

To pass, candidates need to meet a minimum ‘net passing score.’ What is that minimum net passing score ? No one knows. It’s never given and it varies year-on-year according to how hard the paper was and how well everyone does in the exams.

When it’s working out the minimum passing score, the CFA Institute uses something known as the ‘Angoff Standard Setting Method’ (explained here) to determine the pass rate. This has something to do with a set of CFA Charterholders sitting down and working out how difficult the questions really are and how easy it ought to be to pass.

To confuse matters further, because the marks allocated to different topics vary (click here to see the allocation for June 2016), strong performance in one topic won’t necessarily compensate for weak performance in another.

If you fail the coming exams, you might therefore, wonder why.

So, what’s the minimum score you need to pass?

Based on results posted in various online forums, we’ve identified the candidates who’ve passed recent Level 1 exams with the weakest scores. This is, seemingly, the minimum you’ll need to get through:

1. You can pass with less than 50% in four subjects (Derivatives, Economics, Portfolio Management, and Quantitative Methods), with 51% to 70% in Alternative Investments, and with more than 70% in Corporate Finance, Equity Instruments, Ethical and Professional Standards, Financial Reporting and Analysis, and Fixed Income.

2. You can pass with Financial Reporting and Analysis under 50%, Economics and Portfolio Management over 70%, and everything else (seven other subjects) between 51% and 70%.

3. You can pass with less than 50% in Derivatives and more than 70% in Corporate Finance and Equity Investments, and between 51% and 70% in the other seven subjects.

4. You can pass with less than 50% in Quantitative Methods, Derivatives, Financial Reporting and Analysis, as long as you have more than 70% in Economics, Quantitative Methods, and Equity Instruments, and 51% to 70% in Corporate Finance, Ethical and Professional Standards, Fixed Income, and Portfolio Management.

5. You can pass with less than 50% in Alternative Investments, Derivatives and Quantitative Methods, so long as you have 50% to 70% in Economics, Equity Instruments, Financial Reporting and Analysis and Portfolio Management, AND more than 70% in Ethical and Professional Standards, Fixed Income and Corporate Finance.

So this, roughly, is the minimum passing score…

In other words, you don’t have to get more than 70% in everything to pass. You don’t even need to get more than 51% in everything to pass. It looks a lot like you can get less than 50% in three (or maybe four) topics, but you will probably need to counterbalance this with more than 70% in at least three subjects and with 51% to 70% in the rest.

The ethics adjustment

Lastly, if you’re going to try super-hard for any of the subject areas, you might want to try very hard in ethics. For the past 11 years, the CFA Institute has implemented a so-called “ethics adjustment” when scoring exams, described on its website as follows:

‘What is the “ethics adjustment”?

The Board of Governors instituted a policy to place particular emphasis on ethics. Starting with the 1996 exams, the performance on the ethics section became a factor in the pass/fail decision for candidates whose total scores bordered the minimum passing score. The ethics adjustment can have a positive or negative impact on these candidates’ final results.

CFA Institute has a policy of not releasing either the minimum passing score or individual candidate scores. Consequently, CFA Institute does not release specific information about the ethics adjustment or the candidates who were affected. The adjustment has had a net positive effect on candidate scores (and thus pass rates) in most exam sessions. The published pass rates always take into account the ethics adjustment for borderline candidates.’

Good luck!

Follow @MadameButcher

“”

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Title your CV with your target role

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

3. Make a ‘career break sandwich’

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

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

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

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

4. Talk about your achievements, not your responsibilities

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

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

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

5. Sell your breaks

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

6. Mind your language

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

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

7. Don’t say the F word (at first)

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

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

Follow @MadameButcher
Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

“”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow @paultclarke

Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

Image: Getty Images

““

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Wall Street professionals have left financial services altogether

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

“Fewer people are pursuing a longer-term career in financial services – after getting a few years of experience on Wall Street they are moving into other fields,” said Judson. “They may be moving to technology firms but they are not coders or programmers. People who have been bankers or fundamental analysts or research analysts on the buy side are moving into sales and marketing, financial and strategy roles.”
Follow @danbutchrwrites

Photo credit: robertcicchetti/GettyImages
““

If you want a senior banking job in Europe right now, you’ll probably need to come to London to find it. Come 2019 that could all change. After Brexit, it’s starting to look like analysts, associates and VPs could be in London and MDs could be located in Paris, Frankfurt and Dublin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow @MadameButcher
Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

““

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow @paultclarke

Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

Image: Getty Images

““

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Literary genius Marcel Proust kept in close contact with his banker and made aggressive bets as an investor. (MarginalRevolution)
Follow @danbutchrwrites

Photo credit: Ladd Co., The Shaw Brothers, Warner Bros. & Blade Runner Partnership
““

Two decades ago, data seemed fairly finite. There was macroeconomic data, like GDP figures and there was microeconomic data, like company reports. If you were cutting edge, you might have traded against meteorological data.

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

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

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

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

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

1. Accern

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

2. Alexandria

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

3. Alphamatician

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

4. Audit Analytics

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

5. Brave New Coin

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

6. Brickstream

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

7. Dataminr

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

8. Dataprovider.com

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

9. DataSift

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

10. Descartes Labs

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

11. Discern

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

12. Eagle Alpha

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

13. EIDOSearch

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

14. Estimize

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

15. Factset Revere

What? A database of supply chain relationships

16. GDELT Project

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

17. Genscape

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

18. Heckyl

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

19. Inferess

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

20. InfoTrie

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

21. iSentium

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

22. Knowsis

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

23. Lexalytics

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

24. MarketPsych

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

25. Markit Securities Finance

What? Global securities financing data.

26. MatterMark

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

27. Premise

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

28. Quandl

What? Financial, economic and alternative data.

29. Quant Connect

What? Huge amount of data relating to past trades.

30. Quantcube

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

31. Pricestats

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

32. Ravenpack

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

33. RelateTheNews

What? Real-time analysis of text data.

34. Repustate

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

35. Return Path

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

36. Sentify

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

37. Sentiment Trader

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

38. Social Market Analytics

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

39. Superfly insights

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

40. TheySay

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

41. Tick Data

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

42. YipitData

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

43. Yodlee

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

Different types of data and their history:

data history

Follow @MadameButcher
Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

““

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

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

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

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

Credit Suisse confirmed Crofton’s arrival.

Follow @MadameButcher
Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

“”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit Suisse declined to comment.

Follow @paultclarke

Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

Image: Getty Images

““

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

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

Failing to complete the intern project assigned to you

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

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

Failing to play politics

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

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

Hooking up at the intern parties

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

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

Failing to observe security procedures

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

Talking too much too soon

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

Expressing your own opinions

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

Forgetting to familiarize yourself with basics before the internship begins

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

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

Getting the coffee run wrong

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

Not being the first person on the desk

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

Sleeping in the toilets

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

Over-promising and under-delivering

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

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

Wearing ostentatious jewelry or clothing

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

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

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

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

Failing to connect with anyone

An intern who didn’t get an offer told us the personal connection was where he went wrong: “90% of the interns are capable, so ultimately it’s all about finding a team you can click with. Unless you’re a complete genius, the team aren’t going to take you unless you fit in. ”

Forgetting people’s names

Forgetting names is a no-no. “At the end of the first week you need to know the names of everyone on your team and the surrounding teams,” says one VP.

Follow @MadameButcher

Investment banks are technology firms. So says Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs and Marianne Lake at J.P. Morgan. Both banks have thousands of technologists and have prioritised IT hiring over most other divisions. Across the street, IT specialists with deep knowledge of programming languages are in demand.

We conducted asked banking technology recruiters name which programming languages are most in demand in the banking sector. Here’s what they said.

Java

Java has been the most sought after programming language for years on Wall Street.

“Java developers are needed for anything from low latency execution and order management systems to in-house risk and valuation platforms,” said Jared Butler, head of financial technology recruitment for North America at Selby Jennings. Java is also really well-suited for data simulations and modeling, added John Reed, senior executive director for Robert Half Technology.

Also, with the importance of being able to have user-friendly, fast-loading and secure websites, languages like Java and Javascript, which can be used in front-end web design, will be critical moving forward, said Gina Schiller, vice president at Jay Gaines & Company.

The reason for the all the fervor around Java is two-fold. There’s a high demand for the skillset along with a dearth of qualified candidates. Late last year, our resume database contained only seven candidates for every job that required the skill, the lowest ratio among all major programming languages.

Reed said that Java developers can demand up to a 10% premium on salary compared to others in the market.

Python

Python has come a long way since it was first used in banking via Bank of America’s Quartz program and J.P. Morgan’s Athena system. Python is great for creating analytic tools and quant models – critical tools that contribute to investment banks’ and hedge funds’ trading strategies, according to Schiller.

In addition, Python is becoming better known for being easier to use and faster to program than the traditional languages, said Butler, who offered up a number of reasons why it could replace the aforementioned languages in popularity, particularly in investment banking.

“Firstly, programmers are able to do as much with 10 lines of Python code as they are with 20 lines of C++ , and with a much lower margin for error,” he said. “Given the increase in regulations/ best practices, you can see the appeal in using it from this perspective.”

Plus, as technologists crave greater exposure to the business side of banking, Python has become more popular. It enables programmers to better collaborate on projects with quants, researchers and analysts, Butler said.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch and J.P. Morgan are still leading the charge in terms of recruiting Python developers. “Bank of America and J.P. Morgan, who largely build most of their trading systems in Python and are actively hiring on the street, are always on the lookout for Python developers, but other banks and financial firms, in particular fintechs, are starting to look for more and more programmers who can code in Python,” said Nick Vermeire, a senior technical recruiter at Pencom Systems.

C++/C#

“C++ continues to be the go-to language for high volume/high frequency trading, simply because it’s the most efficient tool to build an extensively optimized backtester and execution system in order to process the high volumes of data,” said Butler.

Schiller agreed, adding that C++ is also often used for building applications running on many banks’ legacy systems. “Due to the high cost of moving to new technologies there will continue to be significant demand for those who can program in languages compatible with the legacy environment,” she said.

Like Java, C# can be used in a variety of projects, particularly data simulations and modeling. It had the second lowest ratio of candidates to jobs in our database, giving qualified job seekers plenty of leverage when it comes to pay. Reed said that C# developers can also demand a 9% to 10% bump in pay over colleagues with expertise in other languages. SQL is the third language that tends to offer terrific bargaining power, he said.

“C# is still in use but now pretty much only for quanty, low-latency things,” said Christian Glover Wilson, vice president of technology and strategy at Tigerspike.

The rest

Other languages that got some votes include SQL, PHP and ETL.

“We are seeing strategic hires from associate to executive level for candidates carrying an array of skills, from older ETL technologies such as Informatica to more modern big data-related tools like Hadoop tech stack, HBase, HDFS, MapReduce, Pig, Hive, Impala, Flume and Cloud,” Butler said. “ETL technologies continues to be important for successful data warehousing and the fat-cutting financial data used by investment bank trading arms globally.”

On the other hand, demand for Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is waning, while HTML5 is on the upswing, as are Hadoop, Cassandra and Scala.

“There is a lot demand for big data and data-processing technologies such as Hadoop, Cassandra and Scala, and we’re seeing more and more banks adopt this,” Vermeire said. “C++ and C# tend to be staple development languages, but there has been perhaps less appetite for front-end Microsoft development – WPF – and more demand for HTML5 skills.”

Vermeire seconded that.

“We’ve also seen a huge surge in demand for big data technologies as companies are dealing with massive amounts of increasing data on a daily basis,” he said. “Very often these are required as supplementary technologies in addition to core programming languages such as Java or Python. “The most in-demand big data technologies are Cassandra, Cassandra, Spark and Hadoop.”

Follow @danbutchrwrites

““

Goldman Sachs is aware of its weakness. After a miserable first quarter in its fixed income trading business, following on from a miserable 2016, it’s been assessing the issue and is trying to deal with it.

This was the message from Goldman president David Solomon and Goldman CFO Marty Chavez at Deutsche Bank’s global financial services conference yesterday. The two men implied that things are changing in Goldman’s fixed income trading business and that there are new areas of focus for the bank as a whole.

Goldman Sachs wants a new set of salespeople

The first thing Goldman wants is a new set of trading clients. – The old ones aren’t working any more.

Goldman already blamed its recent fixed income trading miss on low volatility and a focus on institutional instead of corporate clients.

Corporate clients (companies) are good news in all markets. They are more likely to trade continuously as they hedge against exchange rate changes that will influence the cost of raw materials, for example. Institutional clients (hedge funds and asset managers) are fussy and more likely to sit on the sidelines. They prefer to trade volatile markets driven by a theme. It’s these markets that Goldman specializes in. – As Solomon said previously of Goldman’s poor first quarter: “Our business is levered to times when clients have a lot of conviction and one of the things that happened in the first quarter was that conviction ebbed.”

Unfortunately, these conviction markets beloved of Goldman’s clients aren’t much in evidence right now. Goldman isn’t the only one suffering from their absence. – As Marianne Lake, CFO of J.P. Morgan, said yesterday: “Low rates, a more cautious outlook on rates, low volatility have led to low client flows and a generally quiet, subdued and challenging trading environment.” However, Goldman may be suffering more than the rest: as Bloomberg’s Gadfly column noted in April, 22% of Goldman’s trading business comes from hedge funds, compared to just 16% at Citigroup. If anyone’s going to sit on the sidelines in markets like these, it’s wary hedge funds.

Solomon suggested yesterday that Goldman’s over-exposure to hedge fund clients is being rectified: “I think it’s well known we’ve had very, very good market share with hedge funds…it’s obvious we have to adjust. And so that’s why bigger focus on asset managers, bigger focus on corporates,” he told conference attendees.

Goldman isn’t the only one chasing corporate accounts. Deutsche is doing the same under its latest strategy unveiled in March. Goldman is at a disadvantage: unlike Deutsche and other banks with an established corporate client base, it doesn’t have a big commercial lending business.

This new focus on corporates and institutional asset managers might be one reason Goldman’s already parted company with many of its established fixed income salespeople, several of whom were focused on hedge fund clients and are off to UBS. It also implies the firm will be interested in a different kind of salesperson in future: hedge fund salespeople are out, corporate salespeople and salespeople working with pension investors are in.

Of course, Goldman’s hedge fund clients will start trading again if volatility and conviction return to the markets. An unexpected win for Jeremy Corbyn in the UK’s general election on June 8th would be bad for the pockets of individual bankers and for Goldman as a whole as taxes rise, but it could be just what Goldman’s fixed income trading business needs.

Goldman Sachs wants quants and data analysts and technologists

The other people on Goldman’s shopping list are the quants, the data analysts and the technologists beloved of every bank out there. Chavez – a quant himself – said the firm’s competitive advantage comes from the, “strength that we have traditionally in data, in deterioration analysis of that data and in engineering consistent, front, middle and back office experience our clients.” Solomon said Goldman has, “upside opportunity,” in quantitative equities trading and that it plans to continue investing in this “space” in future.

Follow @MadameButcher
Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

““

For the first seven years of his career Rohan Wilson only knew one thing: derivatives trading. By 2014, however, he decided it was time for a change.

“I was stuck in a niche that was heading in the wrong direction. Advancing in my role was getting difficult as there were far fewer derivatives openings than in 2007,” he says.

Wilson wanted to move into risk management, a job function that was growing not contracting.

“The technical nature of the role and its increasing importance to all areas of financial services meant working in risk had always appealed, but initially I wasn’t sure how I’d get my foot in the door,” says Wilson.

To give himself the broader financial skills he needed to transition into risk management, Wilson enrolled in the Masters in Finance programme at London Business School. He chose to study part-time (LBS also offers a full-time MiF).

“I wasn’t interested in just being a manager, so I didn’t want to do an MBA. Then I looked at the makeup of previous classes and immediately recognised that LBS attracts very high quality people to its Masters in Finance,” says Wilson.

He describes the degree as the “bridge” between his past and current careers. Wilson now works for risk management consultancy Avantage Reply in London – and it was his experience on the LBS programme that got him there.

“It’s a holistic learning experience at LBS,” says Wilson. “You get new skills and knowledge not just from the world-class faculty, but also from your classmates, alumni, guest speakers and career advisors.”

Wilson, for example, used the extensive LBS alumni network (which extends to more than 42,000 people globally) to arrange meetings with about 20 risk managers and find out what it’s really like working in their field.

“This is especially important when making a career change. Speaking with LBS alumni gave me more in-depth information more quickly than through my own research,” he says.

Wilson says the LBS faculty are “very credible” because they bring both academic and sector expertise into the classroom. “They can tell anecdotes about working in the industry. Anyone can read from a text book, but to have actual experience is what sparks students’ interest,” he adds.

Unsurprisingly, given his career aspirations, Wilson chose credit risk as one of his elective modules during his Masters in Finance, which he completed last year. “LBS lets you tailor the programme to meet your needs. In my current role I’m using the understanding I gained from the risk course while consulting for credit departments of investment banks.”

Other modules helped Wilson in different ways. “Financial engineering gave me fluency in advanced quantitative methods. I’m now part of a quantitative working group at Avantage Reply and I can handle more technical projects than I could before the training.”

The practitioner course taught by Lyndon Nelson, deputy CEO of the Prudential Regulation Authority, was among the highlights of the MiF, says Wilson. “He gave me real insight into regulatory thinking at the highest level. This helps immeasurably in my job when I’m advising regulators, investment banks and global custodians.”

Wilson also attended LBS Finance@Work panel discussions involving senior speakers from global banks. “Now that I’m assisting these same banks in my consulting work, I’m doing so with more insight, having already spoken with and gone to lectures by some of their leaders.”

The “amazing diversity” of his classmates enhanced Wilson’s experience of the LBS programme. “At LBS there’s a great variety of ages. There were MDs at banks in my cohort. And people came from across the spectrum of finance – from investment banks to central banks,” he says.

The 2015 Masters in Finance intake at LBS was made up of 50 nationalities. “We had someone from Uzbekistan who’d been working in Madagascar, for example. I got to interact with people I wouldn’t otherwise get to meet.”

This class diversity made for more stimulating conversations when Wilson worked in case-study groups, a key part of the LBS programme experience. “These discussions opened my mind to new ideas about finance because I heard so many different perspectives.”

His close interaction with fellow students at LBS is now paying dividends for Wilson in his risk consultancy job. “As a derivatives trader I was operating in quite an aggressive and male-dominated environment. But as a consultant, I’m adapting to the needs of a more varied client base,” he says.

“Having worked well with a diverse group of people during the Masters, I can now better understand where my clients are coming from. I can appreciate the perspective of someone in wealth management, for example,” he adds.

If there’s one word that sums up Wilson’s experience of the LBS programme, he says it’s “confidence”.

“I’ve now got more of it,” he explains. “In my consulting role, I can talk to anyone in finance – from private equity to M&A — and broadly know what they do and what trends affect their work. And after meeting so many managers on the MiF, I’m used to speaking to very senior people and not being intimidated.”

Wilson originally wanted a risk role at a bank, but he says LBS put him on the risk consultancy path.

“I went to an autumn recruitment event at the school and the careers advisor said I should speak to Avantage Reply. And when I got an interview with them, I was even able to talk to LBS alumni who’d worked in the company. I came well prepared,” says Wilson.

Being an LBS MiF student helped prove to his new employer that he was “serious about making a big career change”.

“I was at a leading business school dedicating time and resources to my career. And the programme experience was giving me much wider skills than I’d had in derivatives,” says Wilson. “LBS made me a better candidate and as a result I’m now in a job that I find more challenging and more interesting.”

Image credit: cirano83, Getty
““

Investment banks and Google want the same staff. They’re both after the quantitative people who can write code to analyze reams of data and figure out ways of using that to make money. Google is winning.

The technology firm’s superior appeal is encapsulated by its plan for a new London premises. Bloomberg reports that Google has submitted a new set of plans for its London headquarters at King’s Cross. The architect-designed building, which will be slightly higher than the Shard Tower, will have: a running track or “trim trail” on the roof (next to the wildflower roof garden), a three lane swimming pool, massage rooms, and a games area for basketball, soccer or badminton.

Banks’ offices look mean by comparison. At both J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, a key selling point of the offices housing technologists is the facility to….write on anything. J.P. Morgan offers this at 5 Manhattan West, its growing hipster technologist paradise in New York City. Goldman Sachs offers it in its office housing technologists working on its Marcus technology product in Dallas. In both cases, writing on walls (and furniture in the case of J.P. Morgan) is touted as a really great and special thing. “You can write on almost every surface that you see,” Gavin Michael, head of digital at JPMorgan Chase, effused last year, “- It’s about really being to encourage that collaboration.”

Maybe banks know something we don’t? Maybe top technologists prioritize drawing on walls and furniture above all else? If so, they’ll flock to Goldman and JPM. If not, there’s always the wildflower garden and pool at Google.

Separately, beware the interviews with the semi-sadistic finance fitness enthusiasts. These are an actual thing and the Wall Street Journal has taken the time to document some of them. There’s John Osbon , a former managing director at Credit Suisse turned fund manager in Boston, who says he used to play basketball games with aspiring hires wherein he would yank their shirts or tread on their feet: ““They were all fair fouls, and I didn’t hurt anyone. You have to take someone down to size.”

There’s also Strauss Zelnick, the 55 year-old founder of private equity firm Zelnick Media, who likes to take new hires to boxing gyms and for cardiovascular workouts. One 24 year-old says he nearly threw up. “Sometimes you dread it, but I’ve never actually canceled…”

Meanwhile:

One popular item of youthful office furniture is the Swing Table by Duffy of London. (BBC)

Shares at Goldman Sachs fell another 3.3% yesterday. They’re now down 16.5% on March. (Financial Times)

ING is moving 43 trading jobs from London to Amsterdam. (Bloomberg)

Deutsche Bank wants 50 new wealth managers in Asia. (Bloomberg)

“If you really want to understand what’s behind the success of London, it’s that the city is a powerful magnet for international talent. It’s all based on people.” (Bloomberg)

“Financial hardship at the Bank of Engand”. (Bloomberg)

Get a blood transfusion from a teen. (CNBC)

“There aren’t many that go from child poverty into Oxford… those that do might be disproportionately likely to end up in middling careers.” (Stumbling and Mumbling)

The unhappiness of software developers. (Cornell University)

87% of Goldman Sachs employees began job with plans to take down company from inside. (The Onion)

Today’s decision is a setback for the environment and for the U.S.’s leadership position in the world. #ParisAgreement

— Lloyd Blankfein (@lloydblankfein) June 1, 2017

Follow @MadameButcher
Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com