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Nicholas Moore, a former senior vice president at Jefferies, has joined Stifel Financial as a managing director in its healthcare investment banking team.

Named as one of the 40 under 40 rising stars of investment banking in 2013 by Financial News, Moore comes with more than 11 years of experience in the field. Initially, he trained as a surgeon at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Harvard Medical School, but left the medical profession after working two years at Addenbrooke’s Hospital to join Morgan Stanley in 2006.

At Morgan Stanley, he started as an analyst and covered healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors for three years. In 2009, he became an associate at the firm, focussing on healthcare services first, but eventually moving on to cover equity capital markets across different regions.

In February 2011, Moore followed Morgan Stanley’s global head of metals and mining Peter Bacchus to Jefferies. He joined as an associate overseeing European equity capital markets, and within a year he was promoted to vice president’s position. He rose to become senior vice president in December 2014, following successful deals such as £1.6 billion capital restructuring of Thomas Cook, stake sales in UK estate agent Countrywide, and Zoetis $2.6 bn IPO by Pfizer.

Based in London, Moore is now back to healthcare services sector at Stifel. The US-based firm has been in the UK for at least 16 years. Given it’s still small, it falls outside the Financial Conduct’s Authority’s edicts on pay. It’s, therefore, free to pay large bonuses that are entirely comprised of cash. This, together with the MD promotion, may have been part of its appeal for Moore. Stifel has been growing its investment banking presence in London over the past two years. In April 2017 it hired Michael Hart from EY as an MD on its industrials team. In January 2017, it hired Sascha Kroissenbrunner as head of European industrials from Houlihan Lokey.

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Who are the up and coming movers and shakers in Goldman Sachs’ investment banking division (IBD)? Partners obviously lead the way, but you shouldn’t overlook the bankers who are several steps away from becoming managing directors.

Every December, Goldman announces which associates have earned a promotion to vice president. Here are examples of recently promoted VPs in the U.S. who are making a play to put themselves on the track to eventually join the ranks of Goldman MDs.

The newest class of Goldman Sachs VPs

Carolyn McGuigan interned at EY and then joined the Big Four professional services firm as an assurance associate after graduation. She joined Goldman as a senior analyst in late 2013 and was promoted to Associate in early 2015 – it’s taken her four years to reach VP.

Stephanie Stadig worked her way up from analyst to associate on the private equity fund accounting team within Goldman’s finance division while studying at NYU part-time to get her Master’s degree. In 2014, she shifted gears, making an internal move to the fund management group within Goldman’s merchant banking division, where she worked for three and a half years as an associate before earning her recent promotion to VP.

After graduating from Duke University in 2007, Chauncey Nartey entered the Teach for America program, working as a history teach in Philadelphia, and stayed in the education field until 2015, when he joined Goldman as an associate. Earning a promotion to VP in just two years without a previous banking background is quite impressive.

Working as a summer analyst at Deutsche Bank helped Al Diaz land an energy analyst position at GE Capital, where he worked for almost two years before jumping to Fifth Street Management’s middle-market leveraged buyout lending and equity co-investment business as an associate. He then became a senior associate in the sponsor finance group at American Capital before joining Goldman’s private credit group. It only took him a year to earn the promotion to VP.

Neha Mishra worked at Accenture and EY before becoming an investment banking associate at NBK Capital. She decided to get her MBA at UPenn’s Wharton, during which time she worked as a summer associate at Goldman. After graduating in 2014, she became a full-time associate at the firm specializing in technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) investment banking.

After interning at GM Asset Management and Goldman, Lalit Gurnani got his B.A. in neuroscience at Columbia University, then joined GS as an analyst. He worked in the firmwide strategy group and then the office of the chairman before making the switch to TMT investment banking, moving from New York to the San Francisco office. It’s taken him five and a half years to reach VP.

After graduating from Vanderbilt University, Rob Shearer joined Goldman as a strategic relationship management analyst and then, after two and a half years, jumped over to the IBD, where he worked as an analyst for two more years before earning a promotion to associate. In all, it took him eight years to climb the ladder to VP.

Tomislav Kostadinov, CPA, interned at AIG Advisor Group and then joined Schwartz & Co. as an auditor after graduating from Adelphi University. He joined Goldman as a senior analyst in 2013 and earned a promotion to associate in 2015 – it’s taken him a little over four years to make VP.

Seamus Egan worked as a senior associate in the financial services audit group at KPMG Ireland before moving to Boston to work at a consultancy with Big Four clients. In 2015, he joined Goldman’s New York headquarters as an associate focused on financial analysis and divisional reporting on equities and fixed income, currencies and commodities (FICC) within the securities division. It took him less than two and a half years to make it to VP.

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Like Goldman Sachs, Citi, Morgan Stanley, Nomura and others, J.P. Morgan is expected to shift some trading staff to Frankfurt in preparation for life after Brexit. In November, it rented office space to house up to 200 staff in the new TanusTurm skyscraper there. To accompany this expansion, J.P.M has quietly designed a website proclaiming Frankfurt’s charms. Key among them is sausage.

J.P. Morgan isn’t new to Frankfurt. The bank has been in Germany for over 650 years and already employs over 450 people there. The bank’s existing Frankfurt operations appear, however, restricted to investment banking and asset management staff. If J.P.M wants to attract new trading talent to Frankfurt it may need to raise its game.

This could be a challenge. As Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein noted in November, senior American bankers in particular have an aversion to Frankfurt. For this reason, Blankfein said Goldman is opening new European offices in Frankfurt and Paris.

J.P. Morgan’s site pitches Frankfurt as an attractive and cosmopolitan place to be. It notes that the city is well-connected (‘You can fly to over 260 destinations in over 110 countries from Frankfurt airport”) and is host to book and auto fairs. It relies heavily, however, on photographic evidence of Frankfurt’s charms: under “lifestyle,” there’s nothing but a photograph of Frankfurt’s old town; under “famous for,” there’s a photo of the financial district; and under “food and drink,” there’s a photo of several sausages.

Whether this will cut it with skeptical traders and U.S, bankers remains to be seen. After all, while Frankfurt has sausage, Paris has a reputation for being the culinary capital of the world.

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MiFID II is here. It’s been a long time coming: in the past two years, I haven’t attended a meeting without the infamous acronym being mentioned. So far, it’s a bit of a damp squib – but this is mostly because the dark pool limits will now only come into effect in March. It’s only a matter of time.

As everyone in the industry knows, MiFID II is a far, far bigger deal than MiFID I. The effects of MiFID I were mainly restricted to the buy-side and electronic trading desks. MiFID II is all-encompassing. The clear winners are the consultants and the law firms, who have milked these regulations for all they’re worth. Compliance staff have also done well, although Credit Suisse’s recent promise to slash its numbers suggests the compliance party could be coming to an end at one bank at least.

The heaviest price for MiFID II will be paid by those of us working in sales trading, research sales, and research. With everything now having to be “valued” a lot of previously free things like “market colour” won’t be free any more. In the world of MiFID II, market colour will be classified as research and as such will have to be paid for. If you’re a salesperson this has huge implications: you can’t have a conversation with your client in which you offer an opinion about the market unless they pay you for it. And if they won’t pay you for it and you can’t offer an opinion, then what kind of salesperson are you?

As MiFID II takes hold, 2018 will therefore be the year of the “unsubscribe”. In much the same way as people have occasional purges of their emails to avoid receiving newsletters from any and every company they’ve interacted with, 2018 will be the year in which the buy-side will submit to a huge unsubscribe effort to cut costs. Greenwich Associates already suggest that European fund managers have cut external research budgets by 20% for 2018 and there are predictions that buy-side firms will prefer to deal only with a few market leaders when they trade.

This means consolidation. And it means job losses. This industry will need fewer people. Buy-side clients will be increasingly picky about what they pay for and the value it delivers – they will unsubscribe a lot. At the same time, it seems likely that buy-side traders will end up with more work than ever – especially if they can both execute trades and provide market colour to portfolio managers. In this sense, the buy-side trader could be about to become more important than before. Then again, they could simply find themselves deluged with admin work as they try assessing the actual value they’re getting from the research they pay for. Buy-side traders who aren’t up to these new tasks will be in trouble.

The real challenge though is clearly for the under-performing research analysts of this world. As everyone knows, their days are numbered.

And yet MiFID II’s very complexity may mean it doesn’t last long. The regulations are so complicated as to be unviable. As 2018 progresses and the real implications of MiFID II become apparent (getting rid of broker crossing networks iwill reduce liquidity, paying for research will erode buy-side profitability), it seems likely that we will revert to a souped-up version of MiFID I in the form of a MiFID III.

By 2021, I predict therefore that banks will be hiring research analysts again, that sales traders will be back to providing colour (and will therefore be needed in greater numbers) and that some features of crossing networks will be seen as a good thing. Compliance may never come back as those roles are replaced by artificial intelligence, but who’s complaining about that? In the meantime, there’s always the option of trading Bitcoin – which is far less regulated and becoming quite the thing.

Rowan Sidelsky is the pseudonym of an electronic trading salesman at a U.S. bank in London.

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As artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) experts displace traditional fundamental investment professionals as the most sought-after people in hedge funds, a new group holds the keys to the industry’s future. AI and related technologies are being used to find the fastest and best way to execute trades, to place bets on market momentum and to scan online documents and financial reports for trading signals, among a wide range of other applications.

We’ve assembled a list of some of the current top AI and ML professionals working in hedge funds. Let us know if you think we’ve left anyone out via the comments box at the bottom of the page. The list below is not in ranked order.

1. Nick Granger of Man AHL

A former equity derivatives strategist at J.P. Morgan with a Ph.D. in mathematical logic, Granger joined Man AHL in 2008. Now a senior portfolio manager, he was the one who decided to take the firm’s AI trading algorithms out of testing and into production. He kept giving the AI system more and more money from a portfolio he was managing, and the program was profitable. Granger built up the firm’s confidence in the technology.

Bloomberg reported that by 2015, AI was contributing roughly half the profits in one of Man’s biggest funds, the AHL Dimension Programme that now manages $5.1bn, even though AI had control over only a small proportion of overall assets.

2. John Alberg of Euclidean Technologies

John Alberg, co-founder of hedge fund firm Euclidean Technologies, collaborated with Zachary Lipton, a computer scientist at Amazon’s AI lab, to discover a new way to use AI to pick stocks over longer periods than the typical machine-driven approaches favored by Wall Street. Their technique generated 17.1% annualized returns compared with 14.4% using a standard statistical model, according to a paper they presented at the 2017 Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference.

3. Babak Hodjat of Sentient Technologies

Babak Hodjat, co-founder of Sentient Technologies, an AI startup with a hedge-fund arm, says that machine-learning techniques are prone to “overfit” – that is, finding peculiar patterns in the specific data they are trained on that do not hold up in the chaotic markets.

Even so, the firm’s Sentient Investment Management division develops and applies quantitative trading and investment strategies using AI, constantly aiming to evolve and optimize its investment strategies visa deep learning and large-scale distributed computing.

4. David Andre of Cerebellum Capital

Andre earned B.S. and B.A. degrees from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in AI from the University of California, Berkeley, where he specialized in statistical machine learning, robotics, reinforcement learning, evolutionary computation and parallel processing.

He is the CEO and director of Cerebellum Capital, a hedge fund firm with a software system based on techniques from statistical machine learning that continuously designs, executes and improves its investment programs.

The firm’s website explains: “The system is responsible for constantly creating its own new models for how the markets will move, testing those models, refining them, and learning trading strategies that take advantage of these predictive models.”

5. Yoshinori Nomura of Simplex Asset Management

Yoshinori Nomura joined Japan-based Simplex Asset Management a director after working at Accenture and Citigroup Global Markets. He has a master’s degree in physics from Waseda University in Tokyo. His strategy blends elements of quantitative analysis and AI.

The Simplex fund analyzes huge amounts of data to make buy-sell decisions using ML software that focuses on indicators of momentum and trend deviation, focusing on futures on the Topix index. If Nomura’s program works as designed, its predictive power should improve over time.

6. Matthew Granade of Point72

Granade is a managing director and the chief market intelligence office Point72 Asset Management who is in charge of Point72 Ventures, which funds and helps to develop early-stage fintech and AI start-ups, and the firm’s data science unit, Aperio. Previously he worked at McKinsey and was the co-head of research at Bridgewater Associates before co-founding Domino Data Lab.

7. Vasant Dhar of SCT Capital Management

The director of the Ph.D. program in data science at New York University, Dhar is also an entrepreneur in the field of finance. In 1998, he founded SCT Capital Management, a hedge fund that uses machine learning to make investment decisions without human intervention, and co-founded Deep Blue Analytics, a consulting company that applies data analysis to commercial problems in 2012.

8. Manoj Narang of MANA Partners

Narang is co-founder, CEO and chief investment strategist of MANA Partners, a New York hedge fund firm that raised $1bn prior to its January 2017 launch. The fund combines traditional quantitative investing – statistical arbitrage – with AI-powered high-frequency trading.

9. Joel Nathanial Bloch of Trinnacle Capital Management

Joel Nathaniel Bloch is co-founder of New York-based Trinnacle Capital Management, which analyzes big data via AI. The class-A-shares of their Trinnacle Master Fund returned 10.6% from inception in November 2016 through the end of April last year, according to Bloomberg.

10. Michi Botlo of QuantBot Technologies

Botlo, the co-founder and CEO of Quantbot Technologies, which is backed by the Schonfeld Group, is a nuclear physicist who helped establish electronic-trading platforms as a managing director at Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch. He tries to lure disgruntled portfolio managers and algorithmic traders from biggest firms via its Quantbot Multi-Manager (QMM) program, which “caters to those with experience trading and generating PnL based on fully-automatic systematic trading.”

11. Richard Craib of Numerai

Richard Craib is the founder of Numerai, a hedge fund built by an open-source network of data scientists. He describes his firm as “a global artificial intelligence tournament to solve the stock market.”

12. John Fawcett of Quantopian

Known as Fawce, the founder and CEO of Quantopian wrote a manifesto proclaiming that the crowdsourced hedge fund firm’s “mission is to attract the world’s algorithmic and financial talent [who] share code, know-how, and data. Quantopian sets the tone by providing open-sourced code, discussing our techniques, and supplying the historical data needed for algorithmic investing.”

Hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen has bought in to the tune of $252m.
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Making the transition from Level I to Level II of the CFA Exams is undoubtedly a tough challenge, but one that is manageable.

One of the big dilemmas for Level I candidates who have studied the December exam is when to start studying for Level II. They have the nail-biting wait for their results, which don’t come out until mid to late January, so the earliest they can sign up for Level II is the end of this month, which reduces study time.

“If you look at the pass rate for June 2017, Level I had a 43% pass rate, compared with 47% for level II. It’s a higher pass rate than level I, but you’ve got to bear in mind that by definition Level II candidates have already sat and passed Level I. So we’ve said goodbye to 57% of candidates at Level I, now we’re seeing a further 53% fail at level II. So it’s a significant challenge, but one we are ready for” says Jonathan Bone, CFA Course Programme Director at Kaplan Financial.

This is why Kaplan has decided to give candidates a step up with its free taster to Level II of their JumpStart programme.

The JumpStart trial package offers ideal preparation to candidates, and anyone else interested in Level II, so they can get stuck into their studies early without incurring any costs. You can attend a free class and have access to study materials. It’s easy to sign up for the JumpStart package right now.

This is what you’ll receive:

An free evening class on January 16^th at Kaplan in Moorgate, tailored to the 20I8 exam
Level II Schweser, Notebook one (ebook)
Week one of the Level II Schweser online class
Schweser online class recordings
Full access to Level II Schweser Pro Qbank^TM for online question practice

Access to online materials expires on the 2nd February, still plenty of time to see if you are up for the Level II challenge.

“They are getting all the materials that our candidates would be studying from in the first month of Level II,” saysl. “The online and live classes give them a chance to learn about and discuss study techniques and the technical material.” says Bone

The Challenge for Level II candidates

He cites three key reasons why a Level II exam is a different challenge than Level I:

1) Candidates are going to step up in the technical nature of the material.

2) The exam format. Level I is stand-alone multiple questions (1,140 in total). When they get to Level II it changes to an item set format. These pose a bigger challenge.

3) The syllabus weightings are variable at Level II, rather than set. For example, in Level I economics is 10% (24 questions), but when you get to Level II, it is 5-10%. So, you don’t know how much each subject will be represented in the exam.

Effectively, Level I is really a foundation of the CFA. It is designed to bring all candidates together – regardless of their previous studies – up to a core level of basic financial knowledge. Once you get to Level II, the technical focus changes to specific fields, such as the sell side and asset valuations.

“Candidates may have encountered some of the Level I material elsewhere in prior studies, but when they get to Level II that’s not the case. They’re a lot less familiar with the content, which is automatically going to increase the required study hours,” warns Bone.

“There’s a possibility that some candidates who make it through the Level I exam having studied less than the recommended 300 hours, assume they can do the same for Level II, so leave their studies until later.”

Another technical point, Bone raises, is that Level II is more mathematical because it focuses on asset valuations and pricing. He points out that candidates have particular trouble with derivatives – forwards, futures, options and swaps etc.

“Fixed income is another challenging area, which is echoed by the CFA’s own data. They’ll be looking at things like binomial interest rate trees, bonds with embedded options and credit analysis. So hard core technical content,” explains Bone. “And they’ve still got their old friend financial reporting analysis, which can cause problems at Level I and II. So they need to put in more study hours, which is where the JumpStart package proves invaluable.”

How to ensure you make a smooth transition to Level II

Having access to the Level II Schweser Pro QBank is particularly helpful, as question practice is without doubt the most effective way of developing a technical understanding of a topic and it aids recall, says Bone.

“Another great tip is to practice Interrogative reading. If you read a couple of pages of a technical journal then try to recall what you read a couple of weeks later it’s hard to remember even the topic, let alone the fine detail,” says Bone. “So it’s much better to simply read a couple of pages of the study material (Schweser study notes or CFA’s own material), close the book, and then recite what you’ve just read, but in your own words. This immediately demonstrates you’ve got a technical understanding. If you can’t do it, then it shows you didn’t understand the topic.”

Getting your head round all the revision techniques and technical material is a challenge, but Kaplan’s friendly team of expert staff and high quality study courses will help you all the way. Signing up to the JumpStart trial package is a no brainer.

“Even if candidates aren’t successful with their Level I exams, they get a taste of where their studies are going,” adds Bone. “And it’s free. So, no harm, no foul.”

To sign up to the Kaplan JumpStart study package please visit here

The fintech fanatics were just the low-hanging fruit – now cryptocurrencies appear to be winning over an unlikely new set of fans: senior investment bankers.

First comes the news that Jamie Dimon actually “regrets” calling the Bitcoin a “fraud” last year.

Meanwhile, ex-Goldman Sachs partner Mike Novograt, has announced that he is building a new investment bank, Galaxy Digital LP, focused on cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based ventures. He plans to raise $200m and list the firm’s shares, though a holding company, on Canada’s TSX Venture Exchange.

Fancy working for a cryptobank? Novograt’s “full service” firm will be active – and presumably hiring – in four fields: trading, principal investing, asset management and advisory. But you might want to get your resume in quickly. Shares in Galaxy Digital are expected to be trading by the end of March and staff who are on board by then might potentially reap the largest rewards of a successful listing.

Galaxy already boasts a few heavy-hitters in its management ranks: Richard Tavoso, who ran global arbitrage at RBC Capital Markets; Christopher Ferraro, formerly with HPS Investment Partners; and David Namdar, who previously worked for Millennium Partners and UBS.

Chairman and CEO Novograt was at Goldman from 1989 to 2002 and made partner in 1998. He spent much of his career there outside the US, in positions such as president of Goldman Sachs Latin America and the head of fixed income, currencies and commodities risk in Asia. Novograt, who bought Robert De Niro’s $12.25 Manhattan apartment in 2006 and was declared a billionaire by Forbes the following year, was latterly a principal at Fortress Investment Group.

He now wants Galaxy to become the “Goldman Sachs of crypto”, according to a source quoted by Bloomberg. But don’t get too excited. He had previously planned to fulfil his crypto ambitions by raising a $500m hedge fund, but shelved the idea in December.

Separately, a new court case has provided some insights into how much managing directors at Barclays get paid. David Fotheringhame is suing the bank in London for unfair dismissal after he was fired in 2015 following an order from the Department of Financial Services, New York’s banking regulator. It’s hard to blame Fotheringhame for wanting his old job back: the MD earned £1.2m ($1.6m) in 2014 as head of automated flow trading for electronic fixed-income, currencies and commodities.

Meanwhile:

This is when Wall Street banks will pay their bonuses. (Business Insider)

A five-step guide to unravelling the riddle of Deutsche Bank’s bonuses. (Bloomberg)

Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat works in a “no-frills cubicle crammed with a conference table and bereft of doors or walls”. (Institutional Investor)

Bankers from Citi, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank are heading to Saudi Arabia as pitching battle begins for what could be the world’s largest IPO. (Reuters)

Here’s what’s stopping banks becoming more diverse. (Financial News)

The PE firm you’ve never heard of now employs 100 people in the U.S. (Bloomberg)

The future Bank of England boss: here are the (potential) candidates. (Reuters)

Terra Firma has hired former Standard Chartered veteran Vivek Ahuja for an expanded CFO role. (Financial News)

The four-year money-losing run of a John Paulson hedge fund. (Bloomberg)

Ex-UBS trader launches £8m London ‘wine club’. (Business Insider)

How your smartphone ruins your partner’s job. (Quartz)

Get better at work by sorting out your home life first. (HBR)

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Image credit: Getty

Balyasny Asset Management isn’t stopping, not just yet. The expansionary hedge fund has just made its first 2018 hire from Citadel, it’s preferred hunting ground for the last couple of years.

The London office of the Chicago-based $12.1bn hedge fund has brought on board Xavier Martini, a portfolio manager at Citadel for the last six years. He specializes in macro and relative value funds, as well as G10 and bonds among other things, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Balyasny has doubled its UK headcount since 2016 and has been hiring from Citadel in both the UK and the U.S., In November 2017, the firm recruited Sebastiaan De Boe as a portfolio manager, who had spent the past four years as an analyst on Citadel’s equities team in London. Earlier last year, Amol Pai, a fixed-income trader at Citadel in New York, and Brian Ruddick, an equities analyst, joined the firm. Similarly, in 2016, Balyasny hired Mark Shalhoub, an industrials portfolio manager at Citadel in New York, and Ismet Yashar, a senior associate at Citadel’s London office.

Balyasny was founded in 2001 by Dmitry Balyasny. It doubled its assets under management in 2016 to around $12.1bn, which spurred some big hiring globally. Throughout 2016, Balyasny increased its number of employees by 86%. In April 2017, the firm stated that it was taking an ‘Amazon’ approach in its build-out of staff, hiring portfolio managers and analysts across a diverse range of strategies to ensure that it’s not over-exposed to any one investment trend.

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If you’re looking for a front office finance career with a good effort/reward ratio, you probably don’t want a research job in an investment bank. Nor do you want to be a fund manager for a hedge fund. The optimum role looks like something in origination or syndication.

So says new research from real time pay benchmarking firm Emolument.com. Emolument asked a selection of front office bankers by age whether they were satisfied with their work-life balance and compared this to their total compensation (salary plus bonus). The results, shown in the charts below, are telling.

Firstly, there’s no free lunch for the highest paid people in finance. The highest paying careers – in M&A and leveraged finance – are also the most demanding. While you may earn £3.8m before tax during a 15 year M&A career, you will also be expected to work very long hours. Highly paid M&A/lev finance bankers are therefore the least satisfied with their work-life balance.

Similarly, high-earning traders and structurers are comparatively unhappy with the extent to which work dominates their lives.

By comparison, originators and syndication professionals (who bring in equity and debt capital markets deals and loans and then help distribute the resulting products to investors) are the anomaly. They’re not only very well paid, but have very chilled lives: just 22% are unsatisfied with their work life balance. The only other people who are nearly as chilled are long only asset managers – and they earn 20% less over the course of their careers.

Perversely, some of the least remunerative front office finance jobs are also the most successful. Equity researchers in investment banks earn around £1m less than M&A and leveraged finance professionals over the course of their careers, but have to work as hard. On this basis, research is to be avoided – particularly as roles are likely to be come more demanding (although may end up paying more) under MiFID II.

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Toronto based investment bank RBC Capital Markets has hired Stavros Tsibiridis, a mergers and acquisitions (M&A) veteran with more than 20 years of experience.

Tsibiridis worked as a managing director, M&A at Wells Fargo for six and half years, before leaving it for RBC Capital. Prior to Wells Fargo, he served as a managing director, M&A at Citadel Securities and Citigroup for one and ten years respectively. He was also a vice president, M&A for two years at J. P. Morgan, which he joined in 1997.

Based out of New York, Tsibiridis has joined RBC Capital as a managing director in M&A at a time when the firm is struggling to grow its U.S. M&A presence. Although RBC Capital Markets ranked first for M&A advisory revenues in Canada for 2017 according to Dealogic, it didn’t even make it to the U.S. top ten firms in the category.

When RBC announced its fourth quarter results last year, it said it plans to “expand and strengthen” client relationships in the U.S., which is its, “priority growth market.” In an interview last May, Blair Fleming head of RBC Capital Markets in the U.S. and head of U.S. investment banking, said the bank has a, “a very deliberate and straightforward strategy” to grow its U.S. operation. At that point, Fleming said RBC had already hired 10 U.S. banking MDs in 2017 and that this followed 14 hires the previous year.

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While most banks haven’t yet announced their 2017 bonus payouts or fourth-quarter results, those announcements are coming soon to Wall Street. Some bankers are looking forward to cashing what they assume will be a hefty check, while others are filled with trepidation, interpreting the tea leaves to mean that they are in for a major disappointment.

Based on what we know as of this moment, here are the bonuses that are likely to be smaller than Wall Street professionals hoped for. Unless you’re a top-notch individual performer or your bank really turned things around for the better in the fourth quarter, temper your bonus expectations if you fall into any of these categories.

Fixed income salespeople and traders across the board

Johnson Associates predicted in November that low levels of market volatility and client activity would contribute to underwhelming sales and trading results, causing 2017 fixed income bonuses to sink between -5% and -10% year-over-year and equities incentives to be flat to down -5%.

Rates traders at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and J.P. Morgan

Rates traders’ bonus pool at Bank of America Corp is likely to slump more than -10%, while bonuses for those teams at J.P. Morgan – the biggest trading bank in the world – are set for -5% declines, according to Bloomberg.

Macro traders at European banks in the U.S.

Meanwhile, some fear that European banks such as Deutsche (where the bonus pool has shrunk by about 11% annually since at least 2009), Credit Suisse (which reorganized its derivatives desk amid a broader restructuring) and Barclays (we’ll get to it in a minute) hired too many rates traders last year and that will cause the bonus pool to be diluted. Bloomberg reported that some will cut bonuses by as much as -25% year-over-year and other may hand out “doughnuts,” industry slang for a zero payout, to FICC traders.

Macro traders at those firms can only hope for a better year in 2018 as the Fed raises rates and volatility increases at some point.

New York-based Barclays investment bankers with mediocre performance

Barclays’s top investment banker, Tim Throsby, is sharpening divisions in bonuses this year, boosting pay for top performers while cutting it for those in the bottom half, according to Bloomberg.

The bonus pool for Barclays’s senior managers is set to shrink after pretax profit fell -7% at the corporate and investment bank in the first nine months of 2017. To exacerbate the issue, a post-Brexit drop in the value of the pound made paying U.S.-based employees more expensive for British banks, and the new Republican tax bill is going to hit New Yorkers especially hard.

Citi bankers

Profits at Citi’s institutional clients group (ICG, its investment bank) were up 24% year-on-year in the first nine months and 15% in the third quarter of 2017. However, Citi’s investment bank has one of the lowest cost ratios in the industry and CEO Mike Corbat has a reputation for clutching the purse strings tightly. They say a tiger never changes his stripes, but who knows? Maybe Corbat will be in a generous mood if the bank’s 4Q results are a pleasant surprise.
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It has begun: U.S. investment banks are advertising all sorts of jobs in Frankfurt. However, they’re mostly for the middle rather than the front office.

Morgan Stanley is advertising 19 vacancies in Frankfurt. JP Morgan is advertising 15. Goldman Sachs is advertising nine, and Citi is advertising seven – not including internships and graduate positions.

Most of the advertisements are for regulatory, compliance and legal positions as banks seek to establish new legal entities in Germany. J.P. Morgan, for example, is looking for a regulatory reporting associate to help deal with Brexit-related tasks, plus a “legal entity risk vice president.” Goldman Sachs is looking for a “regulatory controller,” a “regulatory affairs analyst,” and a VP to work on German operational risk in fixed income currencies and commodities trading (until now undertaken in London). Morgan Stanley has six risk vacancies in Frankfurt, three of which are at executive director level.

The vacancies suggest U.S. banks are starting 2018 by putting the foundations in place for their expansion in Frankfurt ahead of Brexit. As we reported yesterday, J.P. Morgan now has a website extolling the virtues of Frankfurt and highlighting the availability of sausages in the German city. Goldman Sachs, Citi, Morgan Stanley, and J.P. Morgan have all indicated that they will have trading operations in Frankfurt after Brexit.

Martin Hellmich, Professor at the Frankfurt School for Finance & Management, says the raft of risk and regulatory jobs is entirely predictable and that roles in these areas would likely increase irrespective of Brexit thanks to the amendment to the Minimum Requirements for Risk Management (MaRisk) of the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin). This means banks need to provide risk management data electronically, which should in turn create more IT jobs.

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Right now, cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether are all the rage. Despite public skepticism from some senior Wall Street executives – I’m looking at you, Jamie Dimon – many banks are interested in hiring people with expertise in blockchain, the distributed ledger technology (DLT) that enables cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, recordkeeping and other functions.

The following are open jobs at Wall Street banks that require some level of knowledge of blockchain.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch blockchain jobs

Bank of America Merrill Lynch is looking to hire merchant engagement leads at its San Francisco and Wilmington, Delaware, offices, as well as its Charlotte, North Carolina, headquarters. To get the role, you must have at least 10 years of relevant experience, and an MBA is preferred (although not required). Candidates must have “deep understanding” of core payment systems and emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain, as well as fraud prevention and authentication methods.

BAML is also seeking attorneys who specialize in global trade and supply chain finance in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Charlotte. The role supports that group’s product, sales, operations, contract management and marketing teams, as well as risk management and compliance. You must have at least five years of experience working at a law firm with financial services clients or as in-house counsel, including experience with corporate finance, secured lending, securitization and trade finance. Candidates must be able to facilitate product development and implementation by researching and providing advice on new technologies such as blockchain.

Citi blockchain jobs

Citi wants to hire a global digital strategy vice president and an SVP at its New York HQ to work on business strategy, planning and administration. The roles are akin to internal consultants that support all of Citi’s businesses and functions and reports into the CTO. A big part of the job is to give a boost to the bank’s digital capabilities by driving the development, adoption and coordination of blockchain, AI, identity protection, open banking and data analytics across the firm. The VP candidate must have between five and 10 years of experience in corporate strategy or strategic consulting, while the SVP must have at least 10.

Citi is interviewing for an Institutional Client Group (ICG) fixed income compliance officer in New York. You should have either in-business or product compliance work experience with fixed income products, securities, foreign exchange and swaps/derivatives. Nice-to-haves (but not must-haves) include Finra Series 7, 63, 24 and 79 registrations, either an MBA or a JD and knowledge of big data, fintech and blockchain technologies.

Citi’s Buffalo, New York, office wants to hire an IS continuity of business (CoB) and controls senior analyst to manage applications technology resiliency and testing deliverables for Citi’s ICG. The role also includes assessment of technology resiliency aspects of emerging technologies such as cloud computing, virtualization, robotic process automation (RPA) and blockchain.

Citi also wants to hire cyber risk assurance analysts in Irving, Texas, and Jacksonville, Florida, with required travel to the Tampa and New York offices. The role is part of the build-out of the bank’s new second-line cyber risk management function across all products, business lines and regions. You need at least three years of experience in IT risk management, cyber security, information security or a related audit function. The hiring manager looks for credentials such as the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Certified Information Security Manager (CISM) and Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) certifications. You need to have knowledge of emerging technologies such as the cloud, IoT, data analytics, machine learning and blockchain/cryptocurrencies/DLT.

J.P. Morgan blockchain jobs

Despite the doubts of its chairman/CEO, J.P. Morgan is “embarking on a transformation into the high-tech future of institutional trading by incorporating emerging technologies such as blockchain, data science, machine learning, and cyber-security” into its products and services, and it is hiring accordingly.

The markets execution team within J.P. Morgan’s corporate and investment bank (CIB) in New York is looking to hire a senior product designer/UX architect and a senior visual designer (SVD) for interactive products. For either role, you must have at least five years of relevant experience. SVDs are responsible for the bank’s bespoke, multi-channel applications, leading the design effort that incorporates the latest technological trends such as data science, blockchain and new application frameworks.

The CIO, Treasury and corporate (CTC) risk team at J.P. Morgan HQ in New York wants to hire a VP of liquidity risk oversight (LRO) and an executive director-level head of North America intraday liquidity risk. The former must have at least five years of risk-management experience while the latter must have at least seven and will report directly to the chief risk officer. In addition to monitoring and reporting intraday liquidity positions risk limits and indicators across wholesale and retail businesses, both roles involve partnering on new business and risk initiatives, including blockchain.

J.P. Morgan is also seeking to hire a senior design technologist lead at its San Francisco office. To be considered, you have to be a full-stack developer who can create mobile apps, websites, UI frameworks, custom APIs and their backend support systems. You must be able to code in various programming languages, including Javascript, Java, Objective-C, Swift, HTML, CSS, SQL, Mongo, Redis, Go and PHP. It’s a major plus for candidates to have experience with emerging technologies such as blockchain, augmented reality (AR), api.ai, gamification, machine learning and cloud computing.
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J.P. Morgan’s London-based banking analysts. led by top-ranked analyst Kian Abouhossein just issued their predictions for banks’ revenues in 2018. If they’re right, this isn’t going to be a blowout year – but nor is it going to be that bad either.

Needless to say, some banks and some divisions within those banks are expected to fare better than others. Here’s the short version of their forecasts..

1. Broadly speaking, you want to work in fixed income, currencies and commodities (FICC) trading

2. Specifically, you want to work in macro rather than credit trading

Within FICC, macro (rates and FX) traders are expected to see the biggest uplift. This is partly the result of macro traders’ weak 2017, but rising revenues should at least justify last year’s rush of macro hiring.

By comparison, J.P.M is predicting that credit trading revenues will fall in 2018.

3. In equities you want to work in equity derivatives

While cash equities revenues stand to be impacted by the partially delayed MiFID II regulations, J.P.M’s analysts are predicting a pickup in equity derivatives revenues as volatility rises. This should help equities divisions at Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank.

4. Now might be a good time to join Credit Suisse

If you want to join a European bank, you might want to make it Credit Suisse. J.P. Morgan’s analysts have Credit Suisse stock as their top European investment banking pick. Following last November’s Credit Suisse investor day, they say the Swiss bank offers a combination of lower costs and improvements in the strategic resolution unit housing the bank’s toxic assets.

Of course, lower costs aren’t necessarily good news for employees – particularly if you work in compliance and control, where CS plans to slash staff.

5. Now is definitely a good time to join Goldman Sachs

Lastly, J.P. Morgan’s banking analysts are big believers in Goldman Sachs.

Following co-COO Harvey Schwartz’ presentation of Goldman’s turnaround strategy in September 2017, the analysts think things are looking up at the rival bank. “We believe GS has a bottom-up strategy to capture some of the FICC opportunities and [that] management is very committed to delivery,” they write. Markets should be kinder to Goldman too: rising volatility is expected to flatter the firm’s revenues in 2018. So too is a turnaround in the commodities business and, “ongoing best-in-class cost management.”

6. Deutsche Bank may be best avoided

If Goldman and Credit Suisse are looking good for 2018, Deutsche Bank remains a wild card. J.P.M’s analysts note that the bank has a limited track record of generating positive operating leverage and that it’s return on equity remains below its cost of equity.

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If you took some time off work over Christmas and New Year and recently came back again, you might be feeling the ‘transition.’ That hiatus may have given you cause to reflect and to ponder upon the big questions in life. Now, imagine you were off for six months, and you had a brush with death during that time.

This was the experience of Inigo Fraser-Jenkins, an ex-Lehman Brothers and Nomura banker who’s global head of quantitative strategy and European equity strategy MD at Bernstein Research. Fraser-Jenkins reportedly just returned to work after six months out receiving chemotherapy and radiation for cancer of the lymphatic system. Now he’s back, and he has a few issues.

Those issues are expressed in a 4,000 word note to clients questioning the purpose of his job, how finance creates inequality, and whether his is an industry with a future.

“In this industry, we all spend an awful lot of time staring at spreadsheets scrolled across screens or endure wasted evenings sitting exhausted in departure lounges at random airports,” observes Fraser-Jenkins. “One can do that for years of course and even though it is a cliché to say it, a profoundly personal shock is often needed to make one assess whether one on balance actually enjoys doing it.” He comments too that people in finance need to recognize the changed social and political climate and to accept that their share of wages has expanded vastly [and possibly unsustainably]. And that artificial intelligence might displace analysts who currently build financial models in Excel.

Ultimately, though, Fraser-Jenkins overcomes his return-to-work crisis and suggests finance jobs are worth it. He suggests that capital allocation – choosing the most valid use of accumulated money – can have a social function if done right. He also suggest that finance employees have a future in trying to offset systemic threats and bubbles. So that’s ok then – but it was a close run thing.

Separately, despite that bullish strategy presentation from Barclays’ investment bank CEO Tim Throsby last September, the Financial Times says there are mutterings about “significant cuts” at the bank in the weeks to come. The whispers follow a report in November that Barclays is planning to cut bonuses for half its bankers this year and claims that fewer than expected people have left the British bank because it’s seen as a way of staying in London after Brexit. The return on equity at Barclays’ investment bank was just 5.9% in the third quarter – well below its cost of capital.

Meanwhile:

Maybe only 5,000 London financial services jobs will be lost because of Brexit. (Reuters)

U.S. banks, including Goldman Sachs, are meeting British prime minister Theresa May to discuss Brexit on Thursday. (Irish Independent)

Frankfurt fancy apartments are in short supply: the Grand Tower near the Messeturm, which is still under construction, is almost sold out: 401 of the 412 apartments have gone. (FAZ)

Lazard keeps hiring senior M&A bankers in Paris. (Reuters)

Average pay fell 30% at hedge fund Lansdowne Partners in the year ending March 2017. (Financial News)

LIBOR trader didn’t understand LIBOR. (Bloomberg)

Hedge fund hires career change poker player for trading research and strategy. (Bloomberg)

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Morgan Stanley is understood to be announcing bonuses to managing directors today, making it one of the first U.S. banks to do so. However, while insiders say there’s good news for people working in the U.S. bank’s investment banking division (IBD), around 10 people working in the U.S. bank’s London equities business are said to have been let go.

Morgan Stanley didn’t immediately comment on the layoffs, which are understood to have affected both salespeople and traders in cash equities. In the first three quarters of 2017 equities sales and trading revenues at Morgan Stanley were up nearly 13%. However, salespeople in particular stand to be affected by the implementation of MiFID II, under which conversations with clients who are not paying for research stand to become chargeable.

Morgan Stanley’s cuts in European equities follow rumours that J.P. Morgan’s U.S equities bonus pool is down 10% for 2017.

However, investment bankers at U.S. banks in Europe are expected to fare well in the coming payouts. The bonus pool for Morgan Stanley’s European investment banking division (IBD) is said by senior insiders to be up 8% on last year, while the IBD bonus pool at Citi, which announces next week, is said to be up by close to 9%.

Most U.S. investment banks will announce their bonuses for 2017 this week or next. J.P. Morgan reports its fourth quarter results tomorrow, with Citi reporting next Tuesday, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America reporting next Wednesday and Morgan Stanley reporting next Thursday. European banks typically announce later, starting in late January and continuing into February.

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Hoping for a new front-office banking job this year? Banks are already lining people up to fill holes in their various U.S. offices. These are the Wall Street bankers and traders who will be busy hiring across the U.S. in 2018.

1. Dave Friedland of Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs tapped partner Dave Friedland as the global head of financial and strategic investor mergers and acquisitions in New York. He is currently the head of M&A for the real estate and consumer retail groups and co-chairs the global fairness committee.

Friedland is replacing Stephanie Cohen, who is moving over to become the bank’s chief strategy officer.

David Kamo, who joined the firm in 2016 from Credit Suisse and is also based in New York, is now the head of the Americas division.

2. Chris Cormier of UBS

UBS hired Chris Cormier as the Americas head of technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) equity capital markets from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, where he has held a similar position since 2015. Cormier, who will start at UBS’s New York office in March, previously worked at Deutsche Bank for a decade as the Americas head of technology ECM.

3-6. Sarah Salih, Thad Davis, Jonathan Tretler and Chris Rosello of HSBC

HSBC recently hired three senior New York-based investment bankers.

Sarah Salih, previously at Deutsche Bank, joined HSBC as an MD and the head of the financial institutions group (FIG) for North America.

Ex-Jefferies and UBS banker Thad Davis is now an MD and the head of healthcare for North America at HSBC.

HBSC brought on Jonathan Tretler, formerly with RBC, as an MD and the head of consumer and retail for North America.

In addition, HSBC USA hired Chris Rosello as the U.S. head of public affairs in Washington, D.C., responsible for leading the bank’s public policy activities and government relations. Most recently, he was a senior vice president of federal government affairs at Wells Fargo.

7. Marx Bowens of Barclays

Marx Bowens joined Macro, Barclays’s foreign-exchange trading arm, as an MD and senior U.S. government bond trader in New York. Most recently, he was the executive chairman and chief operating officer of XG Industries, a nanotechnology company. Prior to that, he worked at Mariner Investment Group, CRT Capital Group and RBS.

8. Rick FlorJancic of Wells Fargo Securities

Wells Fargo Securities brought on Rick FlorJancic as a Chicago-based managing director and the head of Midwest investment banking, overseeing 20 wholesale banking offices in 10 states across the Midwest region of the U.S. Previously he worked at J.P. Morgan, where he was a managing director and the head of the Midwest regional investment banking coverage.

9. Andrew Apthorpe of Cantor Fitzgerald

Cantor Fitzgerald has appointed Andrew Apthorpe as the global head of equity-linked origination from RBC Capital Markets, where he was the global co-head of convertible bonds and equity-linked origination. Prior to that, he worked in convertible origination for 12 years at Deutsche Bank.

10. Nathan Pund of Houlihan Lokey

Houlihan Lokey hired Nathan Pund as a managing director in its Dallas office to focus on the active lifestyle sector within the bank’s consumer group. Previously he was an MD in the middle-market group at Lazard and, prior to that, D.A. Davidson, which acquired Silver Steep Partners, the boutique investment banking firm that Pund co-founded in 2005.

11. Brennan Smith of Perella Weinberg Partners

Perella Weinberg Partners added Brennan Smith as a partner in the mergers-and-acquisitions advisory business to lead the firm’s brand-new Chicago office. He is tasked with building a team of M&A advisory bankers and expanding PWP’s client coverage in the Midwest region of the U.S. Previously he was an MD in the global industrials group and the head of Midwest industrials at Citi, as well as co-head of the bank’s Chicago office. He joined Citi predecessor Salomon Brothers 1995 and, prior to that, he worked at Continental Bank and Bank of America.

12. Brian Boyle of Raymond James

Brian Boyle was hired by Raymond James Financial as a Chicago-based managing director and the head of the firm’s food/beverage and agribusiness practices within the investment banking division. Previously he worked at PwC, D.A. Davidson & Co., McGladrey Capital Markets and Lehman Brothers.
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““

2017 wasn’t a great year for some macro hedge funds: Brevan Howard’s flagship macro fund lost 5.4% and Caxton Global Macro dropped over 13.4%. This isn’t dissuading some funds from building in the area in 2018.

Hassim Osman Dhoda, a former senior trader at Moore Capital in London is building a new global macro fund (Soloda Investment Advisors) in the City this year. He will be competing for talent with Colin Lancaster at Citadel, who is understood to be building a new macro team of up to 20 people.

Citadel announced its recruitment of Lancaster from Balyasny Europe Asset Management, where he was head of global macro strategies, last July. At the time, he was said to be joining Citadel “later in the year” and building a new macro trading unit by bringing in portfolio managers and analysts.

Lancaster is already at Citadel – although he has yet to be registered with the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority. Citadel has made one recent fixed income hire – Andrew Bound, a former Tudor Capital macro trader who left at the end of November. Bound isn’t understood to be joining Lancaster’s team, however.

Citadel LLP has 93 registered employees in London, according to the Financial Conduct Authority Register. The fund’s most recent accounts, for the year ended 31 December 2016, show it employing 196 people in London in total, up from 151 the previous year. Average compensation per head for the year was £505k.

This isn’t the first time Citadel has moved into macro trading. In 2008 it hired Kaveh Alamouti from Moore Capital plus his team of three traders. Alamouti retired in 2014 and that fund was unwound.

““

It’s divorce season. As any press officer for any marital law firm will tell you, January is when marriages sadly come unraveled after the stress of Christmas. People in banking and finance are no more likely to get divorced than others (divorce is most prevalent among dancers and choreographers, bartenders, and massage therapists), but banking jobs do involve particular stressors in the form of the notoriously long working hours and demanding roles.

A study published last year by academics at the Western Carolina University, published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology addresses the issue of how to stay married when you have a stressful job and are part of a dual working household. The answer is simple: if you don’t want work stresses to overflow into your marriage, you need to be politically astute at work.

The academics studied 278 couples. The women were aged 44 on average, the men aged 48. Both worked full time.

For each gender, the academics found that the satisfaction of the spouse was directly related to the other spouse’s “political skills” in the workplace. Political skills were defined as the ability to, “build diverse social networks and leverage them within the organization,” as well as a facility for “apparent sincerity” (‘the ability to appear genuine and sincere despite your inward feelings’). – In other words, being able to get colleagues to do what you want.

When it came to preventing work stresses overflowing into their marriages, the researchers found that men and women used these skills to different ends. Men used them to offset “role overload,” or having too much to do and insufficient time in which to do it. Women used them to offset, “role conflict”, or being asked to do incompatible things by different people. When each partner applied their political skills to this gender-specific category of job stress, the spouse was happier. Wives were especially happy when they had politically astute husbands who used their charms in the workplace to avoid being fraught and overworked in the home.

The couples in question weren’t bankers and spousal satisfaction has also been found to be positively correlated to income, so it could be argued that 40-something bankers can assuage spousal gripes simple by spending on weekend treats. Then again, why risk it? If you can keep a marriage steady simply by building networks with your colleagues, life is likely to be a lot easier – and cheaper.

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It’s been a confusing week for anyone trying to assess Brexit’s impact on London’s banking jobs. First came the trading update from recruitment firm Michael Page, where revenues from placing staff into UK financial services roles rose 4% year-on-year last quarter Then came a statement from Jeremy Browne, the City of London’s UK envoy, suggesting that Brexit job fears had been overdone and that between 5,000 and 13,000 jobs will go (instead of 75,000, as previously predicted by Oliver Wyman). And then came a report from recruitment firm Morgan McKinley claiming that London finance job vacancies fell 37% year-on-year in December, plus a Cambridge study warning that 87,000 fewer jobs will be created in London in the event of a “hard Brexit”.

Which, if any, is correct? While the forward-looking Cambridge study is dealing in potentialities, recruiters on the ground in London question Morgan McKinley’s historic figures for December: when it comes to front office recruitment, at least, they say they’re far busier than they were last year.

“We’re unequivocally busy,” says Adam Cairns, managing director at recruitment firm Arkesden Partners, which places investment banking division (IBD) professionals in the City of London. In January 2017 hiring was on hold after the Brexit referendum, says Cairns. This January, he says line managers have decided hiring can’t wait: “The market picked up around November last year and we’ve been very busy ever since. CEOs want to do deals and there’s strong demand for associates and vice president to join banking teams, particularly in European banks which were less active last year.”

It’s an observation echoed by other corporate finance recruiters. “We’re incredibly busier. Boutiques are very busy hiring, but banks are back in the market too,” says Logan Naidu at Dartmouth Partners. Recruiters in sales and trading are similarly bullish. “This year is going to be a busy one,” forecasts Christian Robbins at macro-focused fixed income recruitment firm Tradestone. “The macro and economic environments are positive and banks are still looking to add staff ahead of rate increases and a return to volatility.”

What, then, explains Morgan McKinley’s 37% December drop in job openings? “Maybe they’re talking about middle and back office jobs,” says one recruiter. “We certainly haven’t seen this kind of fall in the front office.”

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