Does anyone know anything about these guys? I'm looking for a different career path as a prop/ex-floor trader. Are these guys worth pursuing?
Not right now. They lost a ton of money from energy trading when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. Don't tell anybody this but it might help to be a "bible-banger" if you apply there.
Well I believe they lost like 100mill. Considering they are 3bill in size I am going to guess they will survive. They are as hard to get into as the other top notch hedge funds (aka ridiculously hard).
Yea. The HF was founded by the son of Joe Ritchie I think. J. R. is the brother of Mark Ritchie aka God in the Pits author.
Actually the Senior and Mark are still quite active in running the day to day Ritchie operations. As for their Katrina losses, all the pieces I have heard is that the media reports are quite exaggreated (not surprisingly), they lost less than $100M, not a big deal. Ritchie has a huge campus in Geneva, IL, it is quite a sight. As for getting a job there, they hire mostly from the local Chicago based talents, especially those with successes at some of the well known firms, like CRT (obviously), Stafford, Hull, SIG, etc. And they hire quite a lot of the grads from the UofChicago Masters in Financial Math program, almost every year.
That Uchicago program is surely something. MDs from SAC, citadel etc sitting on their advisory board. http://www-finmath.uchicago.edu/new/msfm/prospective/ourprogram_facres.php http://www-finmath.uchicago.edu/new/msfm/prospective/ourprogram_advisory.php
What a roster! But don't you really think that if they all got together and formed a hedge fund, it would be another "Long-Term Capital Management" scenario?
Actually their roster is substantially weaker than LTCMs, keep in mind that LTCM have a former vice chairman of the fed reserve (david mullins), and two nobel prize winners. I don't quite see the same star level at either UofC or Columbia's program, there are no John Bates Clark medal winners in either of them. Heh. Also, having know some of the people @ UofC's advisory board directly, they are all substantially younger than the early generation Quants. I will never forget something that a manager of a fairly large PE fund told me (all the way back in 2000), "if you are still working for an investment bank after 40, that means you are poor".