So you want one of those graduate jobs at Brevan Howard?

Brevan Howard is hiring graduates. So says Bloomberg, which claims the hedge fund has set up something that sounds a lot like a graduate training program in the interest of ‘grooming managers in house’ rather than poaching the best traders from investment banks.

So far so exciting. Brevan Howard is one of the world’s top hedge funds. With offices in Jersey, Geneva, London, New York and Hong Kong, around $27bn in assets under management and a reputation for paying very generously indeed, it’s one of the more aspirational places to work. If you can get in from the bottom, so much the better.

Actually, though, Brevan Howard’s ‘new’ graduate program doesn’t seem that new after all. Brevan Howard didn’t respond to a request to comment for this article, but there are all sorts of people working there already who claim to be on a graduate program, most of whom started in 2012 and 2013.

If you’re not dissuaded by the lack of newness, these people do at least offer an indication of who Brevan Howard hires at graduate level. Bloomberg simply reports that it’s after, ’employees in computer-based strategies and trading assistants.’

Here’s who we think Brevan Howard likes:

1. People with internship experience at other funds and first class degrees 

Take Tom Stevens, who joined Brevan Howard as a graduate trainee in November 2013. When he arrived at Brevan, Tom had already interned at Odey Asset Management and Moor Park Capital Partners (as well as HSBC and Moelis & Co and Octopus Investments). He also came equipped with a first class degree in economics from the University of Manchester.

2. People with PhDs from Imperial and obscure modelling experience

We’ve remarked upon Brevan Howard’s eagerness to hire from London’s Imperial College before. This doesn’t seem to have dimmed. Another current graduate trainee and quantitative analyst is James Solano. Solano completed a PhD on, ‘Numerical Modelling of Melt Segregation in and around Sill Intrusions’ at Imperial in 2011. He spent seven months working for NASA (‘developing models of asteriod development and evolution’) and Galson Sciences (‘developing models of radionuclide transport and nuclear criticality during geological disposal’) before joining Brevan.

3. People educated at Oxford and Cambridge with PhDs in quantum entanglement 

Another contemporary Brevan trainee is Stuart Broadfoot. Broadfoot joined the fund in August 2013. He has a PhD in quantum entanglement from Oxford. He has a masters degree in mathematics from Cambridge. He has authored a paper on the, ‘Optical excitation of zigzag carbon nanotubes with photons guided in nanofibres.’

4. People with PhDs in elementary particle physics and first class degrees 

There’s a pattern here… If you want to get in on Brevan’s graduate program, it’s going to help if you’ve got a theoretical physics-based PhD and a top maths qualification. Take Benjamin Watt, he too joined in 2013. He too has both.

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