From where I type in the Mainland 400k GBP will buy you at best a kitchen and bathroom (good neighborhood in a tier 1 city ). If U want to look posh and buy an imported car, as lots and lots of people do in those areas, a car that might cost 60k in the US, oups, you only have left for the kitchen. The guy has probably as aspiration to live in a Tier 1 city, opportunities are plentiful though for locals with experience in finance overseas afaik, not sure how the legal issues in UK would be seen by Mainland china employers or business partners. He sure must be ruminating on why he first flew to HK rather than the Mainland.
Even most PMs get shafted a lot of times. Former SAC and now Point72 employed and now employs PMs that earn a pretty negligible sum perhaps 5% or less off generated profit. A few months of losses however gets them shit canned. Same story in Asia with BAM in HK. Very few get paid 10% or more off generated Pnl, even in family offices where invested capital comes from the principals themselve.
Don't confuse what some banks advertise to get quant candidates on the phone vs what is contained in the hard print in the end. 500k base is something hardly any quant gets paid unless you are an absolute superstar. In London avg quant base is perhaps 150k pounds. 200k-250k in NYC. Those figures are for experienced quants with at least 5-7 year positive track records. Those guys are expected to generate strategies that generate at least 15-30 mil per year. That is on average a 1%-2% profit participation while 90% of the IP was generate by such individual. That in my book is an absolute shit deal
Was my thought as well. Why did he ever fly to HK instead of catching one of the half to dozen daily flights to the mainland out of London?
@GRULSTMRNN Shanghai/Chengdu when I'm in the mainland. I know for a fact the guy can buy a place in Tier 2(2bed) and have plenty left over and just coast if he in fact has any cash remaining. @luisHK Nobody knows what the guy wants, maybe he wants to be a mover in a Tier 1 city and go big again then sure, he's not set. If he wants the simple life, then if he has a few 100K pounds left, he's set in China. Maybe it's the crowd that ET draws, but there's a good amount of people out there who given a number even a modest sum would take it and walk, never looking back. His flight to HK as I surmise has to do with his ex-wife as I mentioned in my 1st post in this thread. Poor bastard, didn't see that one coming.
In fairness, I've yet to see a PM contract that paid less than 12% on the systematic side and once you start playing with higher Sharpes you get to pretty high payouts (e.g. Jump pays 35% on matrix). On the discretionary side you do see contracts that go down as low as 8% (also, I've never heard lower), but you have way more leeway with risk. I would say a median PM get's paid 14% of his revenue after expenses (of course, there are multiple ways for the fund to shaft you and they do). I don't want to contradict you, but it's unlikely. P72 (just like Millennium etc) is a multi-manager shop, so while PM contracts are strict in terms of risk metrics, the payouts are reasonable. A usual payout for a multi-manager PM is 15%, with 5%/5% drawdown metric (i.e. first down 5% from HWM you get the risk cut in half and next 5% you're out). As you are making money, you get more leeway, at some places that's formulaic (e.g. they add X cents to your drawdown limit for each dollar you make) and at some places that's up to the management.
Would you mind walking us through the math? When a fund at max collects 20% profit share and pisses away 15% on a pm bonus profit share where does that leave the fund. Keep in mind that nowadays profit sharee are far lower than 20%. Management fees generally pay for overall overheads. But in this calculation the pay of all the other staffers is not even included nor the lions share that goes to the main financier. I know of one PM in Lehman prop Asia who was paid 10%, most others got significantly less. The only area I know of where there are higher profit shares is private entities where the financier gets to keep 60 to 70% and pay out off profits can reach up to 30%. But no way 15% bonus shares work in today's profit share squeezed environment.