Hi all, After several years (>10yrs) as prop trader on my own capital I would be very happy to work with bigger assets within a nice team. Question : is it easy to find this sort of position in a HF or a fund? Thanks for your help. Cheers F.
Hi, There are a few firms around that do a sort of half prop/half salaried fund role. If you have a decent track record most places would be interested. They don't really advertise that much though so might be worth talking to a respected recruitment company to see if they have any contacts. A friend of mine has been offered such a role recently. As for full on salaried trader at a fund. In my experience they are quite hard to get as an experienced trader as a lot of funds are actually quite boutique and have one or two main decision makers (that set up the fund) and the rest just order fillers/juniors.
There seems to very much be a pipeline for this kind of thing, i.e. technical undergrad from a top school, you do your time as an analyst at an IB, working 80 hour weeks burning up spreadsheets and making copies, get an MBA from a top school, get an associates role post-mba, probably sell-side if you didn't work buy-side before, then move up from there. I can tell you that even trying to skip the first part and go from top-school MBA to associate is much harder than you'd think, most of the handful of career switchers from my GSB class didn't get hedge fund jobs and either skipped finance altogether or had to do an IB stint first. None of this makes any sense to me (no I wasn't one of those who tried, finance associate jobs are misery!), but there seems to be this relentless focus on "paying your dues" above all. If you are willing to deal with a cult-ish group, you might try looking at Bridgewater, they always seem to have lots of jobs open.