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Investment banks have got a problem, and they know it. Their problem is that they really like to hire people from elite universities with elite extracurricular activities on their résumés, in whom their current staff can see their younger selves. – But these aren’t necessarily the best people for banks to be hiring. Their best recruits may actually be at third tier universities working part time in places like bubble tea shops.

Students at Baruch College, a public college in City University of New York are a case in point. While banks are out there flaunting their wares to elite students at Wharton, Harvard and MIT, the Wall Street Journal points out that it’s Baruch students who inconveniently keep winning at trading games. For example, last year, Baruch won first, second and third place at MIT’s annual trading face-off. Three months ago, they also won the Rotman International Trading Competition, beating students from Columbia and Carnegie Mellon.

As one Baruch professor points out, his college doesn’t attract typical finance types. – He says Baruch students are more likely to have spent their holidays selling bubble tea than completing internships. However, Baruch has an outstanding finance club which offers its students excellent training for trading careers. Some banks appear to have spotted this secret cache of talent: Goldman Sachs has 300 Baruch alumni currently listed in LinkedIn; ‘white shoe’ Morgan Stanley only has 30+. That’s a shame. Banks that only hire elites are missing out.

Separately, RBC has already hired 10 senior bankers in the U.S. this year. That’s impressive, but less than the 14 it hired by this time last year. The Canadian bank is fussy: “You can’t attain perfection. But I am always amazed by the lack of diligence that some other firms have when it comes to people. We do our diligence,” Blair Fleming, head of RBC Capital Markets in the U.S. tells Business Insider.

Meanwhile:

Not all jobs at Goldman Sachs are for ‘engineers’ and M&A bankers and sales-traders. The firm is also an employer of call center (centre if you’re in the UK) staff working for its Marcus retail banking brand. It seems there are up to 170 people in Goldman’s call center in Salt Lake City. (Salt Lake Tribune)

How to proceed when you lose your job at J.P. Morgan and earn a notorious nickname: learn to code and set up a website exonerating yourself. This is what ‘London Whale’ Bruno Iksil is busy with. (Financial News)

J.P. Morgan’s taken out a lease on a new Dublin office that will double its staff in Ireland to 1,000. (Guardian)

Clearing houses could stay in London after Brexit if they were regulated by the ECB. This kind of arrangement already exists with the U.S. (Bloomberg)

Oliver Wyman thinks Brexit will reduce banks return on equity by 5% in Europe. (Financial Times)

An ex-KKR director just set up a new investment firm called Moonlake Capital in London. (Financial News)

“I was unable to do any work, I had a Transatlantic flight.” (Bloomberg)

Long distance whispering is a thing: You can use ultrasound to beam your words to someone 30m away without anyone hearing what you said. (New Scientist)

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Photo credit: bubble tea – nw 23rd by mike krzeszak is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Get ready Chartered Financial Analyst candidates: fintech has hit the CFA exam, and it will only get bigger.

Machine learning, big data, robo-advisers – all of this is set to become part of the CFA exams from 2019. Currently, fintech is already part of the curriculum – integrated into other sectors of the exam – but it will be a subject in its own right within two years.

Fintech is a broad category, so in describing the landscape the CFA Institute groups it into four topic areas, according to Lisa Plaxco, the head of the CFA Program at the CFA Institute.

“We have a distributed model, so fintech sprinkled throughout the curriculum, rather than conflating different tech advances, we’ve grouped subjects by the topic areas that are most relevant,” she said.

The first category includes financial analysis, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and algorithmic trading.

“As a profession, we’ve been building models since the early 90s, but big data sets are very different from what we’ve studied historically and unstructured data has become more important as well,” Plaxco said.

The second area includes technology’s impact on portfolio management and private wealth management, including the use of roboadvisers.

“That is bigger news for the investment management industry in terms of their job security, but it has less impact on the average investor who is still making pretty simple portfolio management decisions,” Plaxco said. “We are seeing some move toward automation in the institutional space as well.”

The third category deals with how capital flows through the system, including peer-to-peer lending, shadow banking and crowdfunding. The fourth area includes market infrastructure, mobile payments, payment systems, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, blockchain for settlements, high-frequency trading and financial regulators’ use of technology.

“We’re still hearing loud and clear from the practice analysis that we do that how we treat the traditional quantitative material in the exams is still relevant, so this is additive, not replacing that,” said Plaxco.

The objective is to make sure level I candidates have an appreciation of what is fintech, its relevance for their careers, why do we care and how does it fit into market knowledge. Quant methods already appear heavily in level I and also factor into level II but drops out of level III, as the latter is much more about portfolio management and private wealth management. High-frequency and algorithmic trading we added to level II two years ago. Soon, fintech questions will span all three levels of the CFA exam more widely.

For example, the CFA Institute plans to focus on concepts such as co-integration, weighted regression and machine learning algorithms, as well as non-numeric and unstructured data.

“Fintech is already integrated widely into preexisting curriculum topics, but for the major topics where it makes sense, it would be integrated into the curriculum, calling out the fintech elements of trading, private wealth and quantitative methods,” Plaxco said. “For example, covering the criticality not just of building models but doing an assessment of the quality of algorithms, speaking to risks such as data mining and fitting a model that explains the past but does have explanatory power for the future.

In addition to beefing up the questions related to fintech and making its relevance explicit, the CFA will introduce new content with specific information about various fintech categories in a new series of introductory readings focused on increasing professionalism. The earliest it would come into the curriculum is 2019.

“We describe the investment management profession as it exists,” Plaxco said. “We’re not looking to judge whether something is a good trend or a bad trend – we’re not describing one approach as better than another.

“We’re simply recognizing that these types of strategies has risen to a point of prominence that it is appropriate to call them out in the curriculum,” she said.

David Schatsky is a managing director at Deloitte responsible for analyzing emerging technology and business trends such as quantum computing, robot process automation, augmented reality and virtual reality. He said it makes sense that the CFA Institute is placing a greater emphasis on fintech.

“Artificial intelligence is transforming every field, none more so than finance,” Schatsky said. “A growing number of tasks that previously only people could perform are now being done, and done well, by computers.
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Barclays’ build-out of its U.S. trading business has begun. It’s just poached the head of U.S. inflation trading from BNP Paribas to lead its business in New York.

Robert Tzucker has just joined Barclays as head of USD inflation trading after just over three years in a similar role at BNP Paribas.

This is Tzucker’s second spell at Barclays. He originally worked for the bank between August 2003 and April 2009. He started out in fixed income research at Barclays – having just completed an MBA at Carnegie Mellon University – but switched across to trading in 2006.

He’s a specialist in treasury inflation protected securities (TIPS), a derivative product designed to protect against negative affects of inflation, as well as other inflation-linked securities in the U.S. market.

Barclays has been shaking up its markets business. Last week it announced a flurry of new appointments, including installing its new head of the investment bank Tim Throsby at the top of its sales and trading operation, displacing global head of markets, Joe Corcoran.

However, Reuters also said that Barclays is about to starting hiring 50-100 people globally for its markets business with a focus on rates, foreign exchange and equities.

Jes Staley said during that bank’s Q1 investor call that the U.S. rates business was a particular poor performer and we understand that Barclays is keen to improve upon this. Expect more rates hires in New York in the coming weeks.

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Nowadays, most people seem to leave banking to do something more exciting after three years or less. In this sense, Natacha Tannous was a veteran when she quit Goldman this week: she’d been in banking for a full 10 years, eight at Deutsche Bank and two at Goldman Sachs. Now she’s embarked upon a career in sports crowdfunding instead.

Tannous has joined Tifosy, a crowdfunding site which enables users to back professional sports clubs in return for equity, rewards or debt. She’ll be leading the company’s expansion into Germany and France.

Why did she quit investment banking as a whole (and Goldman Sachs in particular) a decade into her career, around the time when she might’ve been within a sniff of making MD? Tannous says she wanted a chance: “I’ve done M&A. I’ve done markets (and trading which is quite the intense side of markets), and I wanted something where I can have a bigger impact than buying and selling paper (stocks).”

At Tifosy, she says she’ll be able to combine her interest in finance with her passion for sport: “It’s ideal.”

Past successes at Tifosy include a £270k investment into an academy for Portsmouth FC and £100k for a charity dedicated to Fulham footballer George Cohen.

While Tannous just quit from the mid-ranks, Goldman is hiring at the bottom. It’s just recruited Jonathan Pullman from BAML as an analyst in its special situations group.

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Photo credit: Exit by Quinn Dombrowski is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Does Barclays have a problem with its equities business? At the very least, the bank’s first quarter results suggest things aren’t going well there: revenues fell 10% compared to the first quarter of 2016, a performance whose misery was exceeded only by equities at Credit Suisse (down 14%) and matched by Deutsche Bank. New investment banking CEO and ex-J.P. Morgan equities man, Tim Throsby, is due to take Barclays’ equities business in hand, particularly in Europe, where Jes Staley noted in February that the bank remains a “new” player with room to grow. But what if Europe isn’t the problem? What if it’s the U.S?

Barclays’ U.S. equities sales and trading business was bolted on from Lehman Brothers when Barclays rescued Lehman in September 2008. Lehman’s equities business was already well developed and for a while, all went well. Then, however, came Antony Jenkins. Jenkins was Barclays’ CEO between 2012 and 2015. During his comparatively short tenure, many of the big-hitting, highly-experienced Lehman equities bankers left. And they’re leaving still.

In the past few months alone, we can report that Barclays’ U.S. equities sales and trading business has lost David Siffringer, its head of U.S. equities distribution, David Bossolina, a managing director in equities sales trading, and Andrew Giobbe from its equities and liquid products sales desks. Bill Hillergass, a Chicago-based MD in single stock equity derivatives trading is also understood to have resigned on Friday afternoon. Siffringer, Bossolina and Hillergass all came from Lehman. Hillergass is off to BAML and Giobbe is off to Citi. The destinations of the others are unclear. They follow the departure of Pascal Bandelier, another ex-Lehman banker who came to Barclays via Morgan Stanley and went to Cantor in April.

2017’s exits are just tip of the iceberg at Barclays, however. The British investment bank also lost swathes of the senior equities staff it acquired from Lehman during Jenkins’ tenure. Barclays insiders say 30+ senior people escaped between 2013 and 2015. The list is huge and includes the likes of Matt Johnson, the former head of U.S. equities, Bill Bell, the former head of U.S. electronic distribution, Stu Linde, the former global head of research, along with Jimmy Gallagher, David Matlow and John Bove, all former senior salespeople. Gallagher, Matlow and others have gone to BMO Capital Markets. Bove and others have gone to Jefferies or Guggenheim. Some are simply sitting out of the market.

What made Jenkins so distasteful? It might’ve been something to do with his retail banking background and overbearing moralizing. It might also have been to do with his decision to focus on advisory and capital markets bankers ahead of salespeople and traders, or his capping of cash bonuses at £140k ($181k) in 2014. Or it might have had nothing to do with Jenkins personally and been related instead to the scandal involving Barclays’ U.S. dark pool, which underpinned its U.S. equities business and was found in 2014 to contain undesirable high speed traders. Either way, Barclays’ U.S. equities bankers weren’t happy – and they voted with their feet. Those who remain blame St. Antony for the dissolution: “Jenkins effectively tried to shut the investment bank down for years,” says one MD. “It’s amazing it’s still standing.”

Barclays’ didn’t immediately respond to a request to comment for this article. The British bank’s U.S. equities business isn’t entirely devoid of Lehman’s heavy hitters today though. LinkedIn suggests it still employs over 350 ex-Lehman staff in its equities division, including Jeffrey Radtke, the global head of program trading and Eric Schlanger, the head of U.S. equities. Nor has Barclays’ global equities business done badly since 2015 when compared to rivals: as the chart below shows, revenues in the business rose 9% between the first quarter of 2013 and the first quarter of 2017, compared to hefty declines at Deutsche and Citi. Only J.P. Morgan did better in this sample, and in Throsby, Barclays now has the architect of J.P.M’s equities success on-board.

Even so, headhunters say the mass departures under Jenkins and ongoing departures this year leave Throsby with some big gaps to fill as he rebuilds the business. That fightback has already begun: Barclays recently hired Andrew Adams from Merrill Lynch for flow sales in its Boston office and additional strategic hires are expected soon. Barclays is also increasing cash bonuses and has done away with cash bonus caps for its managing directors. The rebuild is on. Maybe some of those ex-Lehman bankers might want to reconsider?

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Brexit has not killed front office recruitment in the City of London, but there’s one common theme – people are trying to leave big investment banks.

Banks’ traders are increasingly trying to escape into hedge funds, while M&A professionals are either clawing their way towards private equity or willing to accept jobs at lower tier organisations.

Average applications to hedge fund jobs in London are up by 43% for the first four months of 2017 compared to the same period in 2016, our figures suggest – the largest increase of any sector. In January this year there were 117 people chasing every job, our figures suggest, compared to 65 applications in the first month of 2016.

“A lot of this is wishful thinking,” says Jason Kennedy, head of hedge fund focused headhunters Kennedy Group. “More people are applying from banking, but most of the time hedge funds only hire from other hedge funds. 80% of applications are irrelevant.”

Hedge funds have been struggling – average performance last year was 5.6%, according to Hedge Fund Research, compared to a 12% return on the S&P 500 – but job numbers have largely held up over the course of the past year at an average of 133 open roles per month. Still, our figures also suggest large investment banks are not hiring any more traders. Despite a good first quarter for most investment banks, the number of people applying for each available trading job remains flat on 2016 for the first four months of this year. Meanwhile, in spite of an uptick at the tail end of 2016, there are still fewer trading jobs available now than before the Brexit vote in June last year.

Job numbers in private equity, meanwhile, have barely budged since the beginning of 2016, with over 200 live jobs every month over that period. But average applications per role are up by 13.3% when comparing the first four months of 2017 to the same period last year.

“Brexit has done two things,” says Gail McManus, managing director of Private Equity Recruitment. “It’s made senior people less likely to commit to the UK in the long-term, and consider roles in the EU. And it’s made more people apply for entry level roles from investment banks – even if their chances are not any better.”

In other words, Brexit has made the buy-side even more aspirational – but hedge funds and private equity funds are unwilling to bend on who they take on.

M&A jobs are also more competitive, however, with applications up by 22% year on year. Large investment banks are already starting to shift jobs out of London because of Brexit, and so the big difference in 2017 is the lack of roles within bulge brackets, says Andrew Pringle, director of M&A focused recruiters Circle Square.

“Bankers with experience at top tier banks usually only want to move to other top tier banks,” he says. “Now, the big banks are not hiring, everyone is a lot more flexible. It used to be that only 10% of the applicants were any good. Now, there’s a huge pool of talent on the market.”

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I delivered eight venti unsweetened green iced teas, hold the ice, twice per day. This order fueled the Lehman Brothers credit default swap trading desk in August 2008, and placing it was one of my chief responsibilities as a summer intern. I had a front-row seat for the meltdown forever marked by the firm declaring bankruptcy the following month. Welcome to Wall Street.

How did I go from Wall Street intern and later analyst promoted to associate at J.P. Morgan to associate at McKinsey & Co. and then finally to founder and CEO of my own startup, all before age 30?

1. Confidence

Mastering food and coffee orders is a rite of passage for interns and new analysts across Wall Street. It’s a test for two of the key qualities necessary to survive as a junior trader: attention to detail and humility. I’d later learn that to thrive as a trader – as well as an entrepreneur – those qualities must be mitigated with a hefty dose of confidence.

After my stint at Lehman Brothers, I joined J.P. Morgan as a summer intern on the oil derivatives trading desk, where I later worked full-time as an analyst.

The best traders I worked for at J.P. Morgan were the most proactive. They offered quotes for option prices – unprompted – to search for opportunities or possible pricing inefficiencies versus waiting for customer flow to drive activity. I took the same approach to getting my own trading book after I had survived that first wild year on the desk.

I asked the trader who liked me the most whether I could trade in very small amounts inside his personal portfolio. It was a proof-of-concept or a “minimum viable product,” to borrow language from the world of startups, that helped build his trust in my abilities and allowed me the confidence necessary to justify getting my own risk book, which led to a promotion to associate later that year.

2. Creativity

When I decided to leave trading for a less-specialized path in generalist management consulting at McKinsey, it was important to me that I join the consulting firm as an associate. I wasn’t comfortable with a demotion in title, even though I was changing industries. However, there was no precedent for doing so without a graduate degree.

I applied as an analyst. After receiving an offer, I successfully negotiated my title and salary to associate. After all, “no” is just a starting point for creative negotiation.

3. Challenge

When I was at Mckinsey, I launched an event production company as a “side hustle.” As it began to be successful, I got a taste of entrepreneurship. Every day, I woke up with new business concepts on the brain – all of which relied on technology to achieve scale – but I didn’t know how to code and couldn’t build products on my own.

Instead of seeing my lack of experience as an obstacle, I accepted the challenge to cultivate my skillset: I enrolled in a full-time, four-month web development course at General Assembly. At the end of the course, I was confident in my ability to create the tools necessary to set my ideas in motion.

4. Coaching

Throughout my career, I’ve had challenges such as stress management at work, transitioning to new roles, salary and benefits negotiation, and major industry changes. But founding your own startup is another thing altogether.

When I left McKinsey to start my own business, I knew I needed some guidance. I began to surround myself with startup founders who had a passion and appetite for risk. Through a friend’s referral, I met my career coach. I quickly realized the benefits of having an unbiased, trained expert to clarify my goals, improve my confidence and, later, to navigate the earliest days of launching a startup.

The world of work is changing at a more rapid pace than in any past period and the most successful professionals will increasingly be the most versatile. I see coaching as the best mental-training tool to propel the modern workforce forward to the future.

Anastasia Alt is the founder of Dream Space, a career education, support and advisory service via text messaging and video, and a former associate at both J.P. Morgan and McKinsey & Co.

Photo courtesy of Dream Space
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So, it turns out that the people who want to work for hedge funds don’t mind about allegations of high staff turnover. They don’t mind being continuously rated on their performance via an iPad app. Nor do they mind about the wild eccentricity of their colleagues. They just want to work for big name funds – especially if they have a quantitative bias.

Four out of the ten most popular hedge funds that people want to work for now are quant funds according to respondents to our latest Ideal Employer survey. They are: Two Sigma Investments, AQR Capital Management, Renaissance Technologies and DE Shaw.

The two most popular hedge fund employers in 2017, however are Ken Griffin’s Citadel and Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates. Neither are quant funds per se, but both have a quantitative bent.

Citadel is a multi-strategy fund that invests across fixed income, macro, equities, commmodities, credit and quantitative strategies. With $26bn in assets under management, Griffin’s behemoth offers something for everyone, but it’s Citadel’s quant fund that has raised attention recently. In March, Citadel rehired James Yeh to head its quant unit and reportedly began running a series of “datathon” competitions at 18 universities globally.

Bridgewater’s $160bn in assets under management are invested in a way that most closely resembles a global macro strategy. However, Bridgewater places a huge emphasis on the use of technology and is described as a global macro fund using “quantitative methodologies” by a former employee.

In fifth position, Man Group incorporates the quant fund Man AHL. Further down our list, Brevan Howard is best known for its global macro funds. Bluecrest runs funds across fixed income, credit and emerging markets, and Point72 is fundamentally a long short equities business. Point72 began building a big data investing team back in 2015, however, and now runs a fund titled “Cubist Systematic Strategies” whilst teaching all its junior employees how to code.

Quant funds’ popularity as employers is unlikely to be a coincidence. Point72 and Bluecrest are both closed to outside money, but as a sector, hedge funds using quantitative methodologies were the only ones raising net new capital last year according to Bloomberg. By comparison, event driven funds which trade around particular occurrences like an M&A deal, and long short equity funds which trade the equity markets, both saw large net investor withdrawals. – Aspiring employees can clearly see where the future lies.

On the other hand, people who want to work in hedge funds don’t seem distracted by suggestions of high employee turnover – an accusation that has been levelled at both Citadel and Bridgewater Associates (where 25% of employees don’t last 18 months). Nor do they seem to mind Bridgewater’s singular culture, which is based around founder Ray Dalio’s emphatic belief in “radical transparency” and involves employees continuously rating each other’s values ability and skills on an iPad app. Nor too do they care about the eccentricity of the brilliant minds at Renaissance Capital, where some senior staff reportedly rarely speak.

Instead, our research into the hedge funds people want to work for suggests the big draw – as with banks – is both big money and interesting work. All else is secondary, including flexibility and culture. Perversely, the fund perceived as offering the most in the way of peripheral pleasures – AQR – was also perceived as paying the least and having the least interesting work. And although Bridgewater scored a lot higher than Citadel for its ‘positive vibe’, Dalio might be surprised to find out that radical transparency isn’t the main reason people want to work there.

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View the complete 2017 Ideal Employer Rankings

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As large private banks (from UBS to Julius Baer to Standard Chartered) ratchet up their recruitment in Asia, headhunters say two smaller firms are quietly hiring: Indosuez and CIMB.

The banks have already taken on several senior RMs in recent months and headhunters tip them to hire more people this year.

“Both firms are currently targeting bankers at associate director to executive director level,” says Liu San Li, a former Coutts private banker, now client director in private wealth management at search firm EMA Partners in Singapore.

Crédit Agricole Private Bank rebranded as Indosuez Wealth Management in 2016 and it employed 72 RMs in Asia by the end of that year. It has now hired five RMs since January 2017, the most recent of whom, Ezena Mok, joined from ANZ as a senior director earlier this month.

“It hired quite a few bankers from BNP Paribas in 2010-11, but many of them moved in 2016,” says former Merrill Lynch private banker Rahul Sen, now head of wealth management at search firm The Omerta Group. “Indosuez’s current management in Asia are now geared up to increase wallet share and hire senior bankers who will attract more clients.”

Meanwhile, Malaysian firm CIMB has reportedly recruited seven private bankers in Singapore over the last few weeks.

“CIMB has a strong consumer lending business in Southeast Asia, so it’s natural for it to now try to attract high-net-worth bankers and clients too,” says Sen. “And its existing HNW clients on-shore in Malaysia will have off-shore assets and accounts in Singapore, so hiring in Singapore is an automatic starting point.”

But why join either of these firms, given that both rank outside the top-20 for assets under management in Asia?

“Compared to the big private banks, there’s a leaner structure, much less red tape and less pressure to meet KPIs for AUM and revenue,” says Liu.

Unlike most boutique private banks, CIMB and Indosuez offer clients access to investment banking services within their wider groups. CIMB ranked fourth for Southeast Asia IBD fees in the first quarter, according to Dealogic.

“Indosuez has corporate and investment banking expertise from Credit Agricole. That’s how it can differentiate itself to RMs looking to join,” says Liu.

Neither firm places strict limits on which countries their RMs can cover. “They’re not too fussed about market purity and therefore could attract bankers who need an open-skies policy,” says Sen.

Indosuez will want bankers who can bring in a minimum of $70m in assets per year, he adds.

There are potential downsides to joining these banks, however.

“Indosuez is still not that well-known a name to some Asian clients, while other clients might have qualms about CIMB because it’s a Malaysian bank,” says Liu.

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As you may have read back in February, I’m actively involved in Hong Kong’s fintech scene. Although my job at a start-up didn’t work out last year, I’m now running fintech events and hope to launch my own company in the future.

When I attend fintech gatherings in Hong Kong, however, I usually see a lot of foreigners – most are Western men like me, the majority of whom are over 30.

It’s great that Hong Kong – like other global fintech hubs – is able to attract experienced international talent.

The problem isn’t the amount of of older Western men in the fintech industry – it’s the fact that we don’t have similar numbers of women, younger people, and Hong Kong nationals, for example.

Diversity is important because the fintech sector here is suffering from skills shortages and we need to extend the talent pool.

And it’s also critical because Hong Kong fintech firms serve a diverse range of customers, often across several Asian markets. So they need an equally broad range of ideas from their founders and employees.

Over the last few weeks I decided that rather than just complaining about diversity issues in Hong Kong fintech, I would try to play my small part in helping to address them.

I regularly organise fintech events at Metta, a Hong Kong entrepreneurs’ club and meeting space. And next month (date to be confirmed) I’m running a new one specifically for local and mainland Chinese fintech entrepreneurs under 30.

It will be a workshop where people can talk about their projects and exchange ideas. There’s a well-connected foreign fintech community in Hong Kong and I think local entrepreneurs need to be better connected to it and to each other.

About two weeks ago 20 female entrepreneurs and fintech leaders attended a women in fintech breakfast I ran at Metta – one of the first of its kind in Hong Kong.

Attendees agreed that it’s difficult to hire women into their teams as they typically don’t like going into start-ups. There are not enough women in technology full-stop and the ones that are in the industry need to be educated about job opportunities within fintech start-ups.

So I think we need more of these female-focused forums. And I’m planning another one soon, the TIB (technology, innovation and business) Cafe for Women in Tech, which I hope will serve as a basis for future ideas and initiatives.

I’m also involved in the Technovation Challenge, a competition sponsored by firms such as Google and Oracle, which invites teams of girls from across the globe to solve real-world problems through technology.

This is the first time girls from Hong Kong have taken part. I’ve been mentoring a group of high school students on a project designed to help domestic workers who’ve been abused.

When I was their age, technology to me meant playing Pokémon, but these girls are creating apps, building business models, and pitching in English on stage.

They are amazingly confident and have great problem-solving skills. Hong Kong fintech may not be so diverse now, but I’m optimistic about the future.

Medhy Souidi has a contract position at a bank in Hong Kong. He also speaks at and organises fintech events in the city.

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Image credit: Medhy Souidi

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The chances of making billions at a hedge fund these days are decidedly slim. But maybe, just maybe, the future buy-side billionaires will have been discovered at one of the many hackathons hedge funds are currently using to uncover people who probably wouldn’t have worked on the buy-side otherwise.

Quant hedge funds are it, and there are not enough PhDs to go around, so hedge funds are coming up with more innovative methods to uncover coding talent. These days, they’re also the hedge funds that pay. In the latest hedge fund rich list by Institutional Investor, the bosses of quant hedge funds are beginning to dominate. Top of the list for the second year running was James Simons, who heads up quant fund manager Renaissance Technologies. He made $1.6bn last year. But David Siegel and John Overdeck, co-founders of Two Sigma, were third and fourth, with $750m each and David Shaw, head of D.E. Shaw was 9th with $415m.

This was the worst year for hedge fund compensation since 2005, say the rankings, which are based on a combination of personal fund stakes, management and performance fees. Most traditional funds had a pretty dismal year, but it’s the “missed management fees, over missed incentive fees” that were likely to have impacted earnings, Robert Lee, Texas Tech University’s deputy chief investment officer, told Institutional Investor.

OK, so four out of 10 might not be dominating the rich list, but let’s not forget that tradtional hedge funds are getting more quanty. Citadel, whose chief exec Ken Griffin made $600m last year, has been launching 18 “datathon” competitions globally and has just hired a top quant from UBS and a new head of its quant division James Yeh. Ray Dalio, who came in second with $1.4bn last year, also has a quantitative bent.

Separately, Financial News has unmasked Jes Staley’s latest nemesis – the prankster who sent a series of emails to the Barclays CEO pretending to be the bank’s chairman John Mcfarlane, using the email john.mcfarlane.barclays@gmail. Well, sort of. He’s a 38-year-old web designer from Manchester who requested to keep his identity a secret. His main problem with Barclays was that he believes he was awarded £15,200 in loans through an electronic app without proper checks that he’s now struggling to pay back. He has obsessive-compulsive and delusional disorder as well as a gambling problem and was previously denied a loan of £500 by Barclays, and believes that Staley should step in.

“There was no real malice behind it. I don’t think Jes is a horrible person – far from it. I just think he needed a little bit of a shake-up in terms of looking after the needs of vulnerable customers,” he said.

Meanwhile:

Jean-Francois “JF” Astier is the new head of the global capital markets at Barclays. He’s named his new leadership team (Business Insider)

Andy Lipsky and David Wah are the new head of capital markets at Credit Suisse in the U.S. (Reuters)

Kerwin Clayton and Rohit Chatterji are the new heads of Asia M&A at J.P. Morgan (Reuters)

Tips from Google’s finance manager: “Also, if you have an interest in finance or tech, it’s very important to get comfortable with querying data and using tools like SQL. It’s easier to hit the ground running and make an impact right away when you already know how to access information.” (Google)

Banks need to invest in artificial intelligence, but their DNA is “all wrong” (Quartz)

“Break up the banks? That ain’t going to happen.” (Bloomberg)

Steve Cohen’s unconventional search for talent goes on – he’s just hired Daniel Gwak and Sri Chandrasekar, who worked on CIA-based VC firm In-Q-Tel, to run a big data and machine learning focused investment firm in Palo Alto (Business Insider)

Jamie Dimon gets a grilling over Trump during J.P. Morgan’s annual meeting (Financial Times)

Using AI to uncover ISIS (Motherboard)

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Finance employers are like a possessive partner: if they like you enough and you’re important enough to their world, they won’t want to let you go. An armoury of contractual arrangements will ensure your continued fealty – even after you’ve left.

Non-compete clauses are the worst. The clauses spreading across America that prevent factory workers taking up jobs with rival firms for a few months after they leave, have long been omnipresent in financial services. “Most non-competes in finance range from three months to a year,” says Jason Kennedy at search firm Kennedy Group. “It can be a problem – especially when combined with a high level of deferred bonuses that need to be bought out.”

The masters of possessiveness are the boutiques and the hedge funds. Some boutiques and funds have been known to slap clauses on staff as junior as interns, and for their most senior people the restrictions can last years.

“Some of the longest non-competes I’ve come across are for 18 months,” says David Reynolds, a partner at London-based search firm Scott Reynolds. “If you’re a decent hedge fund with a serious trader, this kind of period is standard.”

Citadel – the hedge fund everyone wants to work for – polices its non-competes with particular vigilance. The fund often imposes one year non-competes on senior trading staff and on very rare occasions will impose a non-compete for two years on top people. It pays them for their pains – in 2009 Citadel was compensating Mikhail Malyshev, the former head of its high frequency trading firm $30k a month for sitting out of the market – but when Malyshev tried setting up his own firm during the non-compete period, Citadel pursued him in court.

Legal retribution and monthly payments aside, headhunters say most big hedge funds make adherence to their punitive clauses well worth your while. “At the end of the non-compete period, hedge funds will often pay all your deferred bonuses in a lump sum,” says Kennedy. This contrasts with banks, where European regulators stipulate that deferred bonuses remain payable on the previous vesting schedule, even after you’ve changed employer.

Not all non-compete clauses are enforceable though. In the UK, hedge fund Brevan Howard famously tried imposing a five year non-compete on star trader Christopher Rokos, forbidding him from setting up a rival firm anytime between 2013 and 2018, Rokos contested the clause in court and went on to launch Rokos Capital Management in 2015. In the U.S., the law governing non-competes varies from state to state. “Carefully worded non-competes can be upheld in New York, but not in California,” says one New York headhunter. In the clauses’ absence, some Silicon Valley technology firms entered an informal pact not to poach each other’s staff. Employees brought a court case accusing Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe of collusion, but the case was defeated in January 2015.

Compared to hedge funds, banks’ restrictive covenants are tame. UK employment lawyer Philip Landau says big banks use a combination of non-compete clauses (specifying that you won’t work for a competitor), non-solicitation clauses (specifying that you won’t approach clients for a competing business), non-dealing clauses (specifying that you won’t have anything whatsoever to do with former clients), and clauses that ban you from soliciting former colleagues. Typically, they only last between three and six months. And they only apply to employees at vice president level and above. “They are all intended to restrict your freedom after you have left the bank,” notes Landau. He advises you check your employment contract before you sign, but if you want to work for a bank there’s not much you can do: these clauses are ubiquitous.

Restricted covenants are only part of the story, however. There are also notice periods. In London, banks’ notice periods are commonly three months, but French bank SocGen imposes a six month notice period to prevent people leaving. Headhunters say the French bank can be flexible: the full six months are only imposed if SocGen is being awkward.

The real fun, however, will come if banks in London shift trading staff to Frankfurt. In Germany, banking employees are governed by bizarre-seeming contracts stating that employees have a three month notice period starting from the nearest end of quarter. “If you resign on the 31st of December, you can start a new job on the first of April,” explains Tim Zühlke at Indigo headhunters in Frankfurt. “But if you resign on the 1st of January, you can’t start a new job until July [three months after the end of that quarter].” Candidates in Germany therefore have to time their resignations carefully and the Frankfurt labour market is far less fluid than London’s as a result.

Zühlke says some finance firms in Frankfurt take this a step further and impose six month notice periods from the nearest quarter’s end, making leaving a banking job in Germany even more onerous. Deutsche Bank has one of the most punitive arrangements for its German employees. At Deutsche in Frankfurt, people are governed by clauses stating that they can only leave three months after the end of the first quarter, or – if they resign after the first quarter’s over – that they have to wait until the end of the full year. “If you resign from Deutsche Bank before April, you’ll only be able to start somewhere else in July – even if you resign in January,” says Zühlke. “But if you resign on the first of May, you won’t be able to start elsewhere until January the following year.”

The contracts are one reason Deutsche’s Frankfurt office won’t be seeing any further staff departures this year, despite last year’s absent performance bonuses. If banks like Goldman Sachs move trading staff to Frankfurt, Zühlke says they’ll need to do something similar: “You need to have these contracts to keep hold of staff here.”

If your finance job moves to Frankfurt post-Brexit, you might want to choose your employer carefully: it’s likely you’ll be a lot more locked into your finance job than you were in London.

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A former Goldman Sachs wunderkind, who retired from the bank three years ago aged 40, has just re-emerged at Rokos Capital Management.

Chris Rokos, the former star trader at Brevan Howard who started Rokos Capital Management in 2015 after a successfully contesting a five-year non-compete clause with his former employer, has just hired former Goldman Sachs managing director Ramnek Matharu.

Rokos was one of the biggest hedge fund launches in recent memory, and it’s getting bigger – it has plans to double the number of portfolio managers to 10 in a “gradual expansion” and could eventually manage $15bn, roughly twice the $6.7bn it has in assets under management now.

So far, Matharu is the only recent recruit. He retired from his role at Goldman Sachs in New York in September 2014 after 13 years at the bank. He worked as head of inflation trading during his time at Goldman and held roles across London, Hong Kong, Tokyo and latterly New York. He joined Rokos on 11 May as a partner, according to filings on the Financial Conduct Authority register.

These days Goldman Sachs promotes a wave of youth to managing director, including millennial traders yet to hit their 30s. But Matharu made MD back in 2006 – pre-crisis hay-days when the need for ‘juniorisation’, replacing expensive senior traders with promising youngsters, was not a common thing. This was just eight years after Matharu graduated with a Masters degree in Maths from Cambridge University and five years after he joined Goldman Sachs.

Rokos has a history of hiring from big banks. Its CEO and chief risk officer, Nicholas Howard, was previously head of sales for EMEA at Barclays, while portfolio manager Stuart Riley was formerly co-head of Asia-Pacific macro trading at Goldman Sachs.

Rokos’ hedge fund rose 20% in its first full year of trading in 2016, according to documents seen by Bloomberg, making it one of the best performing macro funds of the year. But has also lost 4.7% in the first quarter of 2017 as most macro funds struggled.

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The feel good factors are coming thick and fast at Deutsche Bank in London. First came the posters urging employees to share all the positive things they do there, now we understand that a fancy “artisanal” stand has turned up in the lobby of Winchester House.

Deutsche employees who might previously have visited the nearby Cafe Nero will imminently be able to get their caffeine fixes from the hipsterish caffeine purveyor inside their doors. The stand isn’t open yet, but apparently will be “soon”.

Some smell a rat. “This is just another attempt by Cryan to make us feel ok about the bonuses,” says one DB insider. “It’s like, sorry about your bonus – have an expensive coffee instead.” Deutsche is conducting its annual employee satisfaction survey soon, results to which are made public in July. Last year’s survey found that fewer than 50% of staff were proud of working for Deutsche Bank. Following the decision not to pay performance bonuses for 2016, this year’s survey is expected to be worse unless Deutsche bolsters morale through some other means.

The coffee stand may not be the way to do it. One senior trader says the new perk will be ignored by most people on his team. “We have our own coffee place, so basically this is a non-event. Even when it does open, the people here won’t care.”

Another alternative might be to fly traders about by private jet when they attend meetings offsite. Sam Wisnia, the newly promoted head of Deutsche’s rates and FX business did this last year, when he flew some of his team to Washington on a private yet he rented himself. Deutsche’s abstemious CEO John Cryan is against such things, but may need to offer some more impressive inducements if the satisfaction survey is to deliver the results required. “Deutsche is a very sad place right now,” says one VP.

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Five of the biggest U.S. banks – J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Citi – remain among the top firms that people want to work for. The good news is they’re all hiring, but there’s a change.

The caveat is that, in many cases, the jobs are not going to traders and investment bankers, but people with AI/machine-learning skills, data scientists, programmers, and quantitative traders. Investment banks like to say that they’re now technology companies. A BCG report says that the new skills needed across investment banking, hedge funds, mutual funds, information providers and exchanges are machine learning, predictive analytics, cloud computing, robotics and automation.

Here are a few recent engineering hires they’ve made that are emblematic of the current prevailing hiring trends on Wall Street.

J.P. Morgan

J.P. Morgan has 10,000 IT staff attached to its investment bank. Daniel Pinto, the head of the corporate and investment bank (CIB), explained why you should want to work there at J.P. Morgan’s 2017 investor day, indicating that jobs there should be the most enduring of any bank.

J.P. Morgan hired software engineer Nathan Miranda after he graduated with a B.S. in computer science from Fordham University. He interned at Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions and also attended the Juilliard School and Free Code Camp.

Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs says that 25% of its staff work in technology and that a third of its tech vacancies are in the U.S., including 18% in New York, 6% in Jersey City, 5% in Salt Lake City and 4% in Dallas.

In March, Goldman hired Brian Buryak from Deutsche Bank as an ultra-low latency (ULL) senior network engineer and architect. Prior to DB, he worked at UBS, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, TD Securities, Barclays and the CIBC. Last month, the bank rehired Nonso Ogbonna, formerly a vice president of technology infrastructure risk before leaving to become an executive director of global technology at J.P. Morgan. He is now a senior engineer of technology management and strategy.

Morgan Stanley

Working with computers, you have to know the fundamentals: machine architectures of the hardware, data structures, algorithms and operating systems, according to Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of the C++ programming language. An elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering who teaches a computer science course at Columbia University, he is now a New York-based managing director in the technology division of Morgan Stanley, another example of an engineer currently working in banking.

A mysterious desktop engineer who goes only by John Y. on his public profile rejoined Morgan Stanley recently as part of a command center monitoring the migration workflow of the deployment techs in real time. He manages enterprise desktops during migration, which currently includes several Morgan Stanley sites totaling more than 4k users. In addition to his previous stint at the firm, he has worked at Christie’s Auction House of New York, TIAA, Time Warner, Nasdaq and Ares Management.

It’s also just taken on Simon Spenser, who came from a quant trading role at hedge fund Two Sigma and previously worked at D.E. Shaw and Knight Capital Group. He’s an executive director at Morgan Stanley.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Earlier this month, Bank of America Merrill Lynch brought on Chakradhara Konduru, a DevOps and middleware engineer who has experience with cloud computing and automation tools. Previously he worked at Northwestern Mutual, Comcast and Infosys. Last year, the bank hired Yue “Keane” Wu from Goldman Sachs to serve as a senior front-office engineer focused on fixed income, commodities and currencies (FICC) electronic trading. Prior to Goldman, Wu worked at Barclays and Prudential Financial.

Citi

In March, Citi hired Duwarahan Rajendra from AT&T Labs Research as its lead data engineer to head up the analytic data infrastructure implementing machine-learning and deep-learning algorithms. Prior to working at AT&T, he was a data engineer at Logitech and senior software engineer for research and development at various universities, including the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Southern California.

Last year, Citi brought on senior engineers who are experts in Apple’s iOS operating system, including Dave Robertson, formerly with Goldman Sachs and BNP Paribas, and Danny Zlobinsky, previously with iHeartRadio and the New York Times.
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A hard Brexit may be coming, but one U.S. hedge fund hasn’t been put off the London market: Chicago-based Balyasny Asset Management has increased its registered headcount in London by 19% since the result to the referendum was announced.

The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority register reveals that Bayasny now has 56 registered employees in the UK, up from 48 last July. Many of the hires come from leading investment banks.

Balyasny’s most recent recruit, Simon Mangin, joins from Citi, where he was an associate on the investment bank’s TMT team. Earlier this month it registered Daryl Lee, a former FX and rates trader at Morgan Stanley. In April, it hired Robert Banham, an equities trader from rival hedge fund Marshall Wace. In March it hired Mukhtar Garadaghi, an equity researcher, also from Citi. This followed the addition of Jeremy Andre, a Goldman fund derivatives trader in February.

Balyasny didn’t rank in the top ten when we asked people which hedge funds they want to work for, but maybe it should’ve? Founded in 2001 by Dmitry Balyasny, the fund doubled its assets under management last year to around $12.1bn. Headcount globally has increased dramatically in the past two years as Balyasny builds a fund of diverse strategies. Recent recruits in London suggests its not averse to hiring from banks.

Balyasny didn’t immediately respond to a request to comment on his future recruitment intentions. The most recently available accounts for Balyasny Europe are for the year ending December 2015. They show the fund making a £29m profit and paying 37 staff a combined £19m – averaging £513k each. The highest paid person there got £4.2m that year.

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Photo credit: Mayfair by CarSpotter is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Hedge fund are closing at record rates, but Citadel – the $26bn multi-strategy fund run by Kenneth Griffin – is still building its team.

Griffin said earlier this month that Citadel was on the ‘offense’ when it comes to bringing people through the door, and the closure of competitors means that there’s “a lot of really good people we want to bring into Citadel”.

Citadel has been making some big hires this year. In the past two months, it poached portfolio manager Jennifer Pollak from struggling hedge fund Folger Hill Capital Management, Sebastian Barrack as new head of commodities from Macquarie and Eric Felder, the former head of global markets at Barclays, as senior managing director, fundamental strategies. In London, Citadel has been steadily building its headcount throughout 2017, bringing in senior portfolio managers and traders from both investment banks and other hedge funds. Recently, it named Diego Megia, the former head of European rates at RBC Capital Markets, as a senior fixed income portfolio manager.

All of this recruitment is rubbing off – Citadel was the top hedge fund in our 2017 Ideal Employer rankings, knocking Bridgewater Associates off the top spot.

What does it take to get into Citadel? We asked L.J. Brock, chief people officer at the hedge fund who joined in April last year from technology company Red Hat, some questions.

Can you describe the Citadel recruitment process? How many interviews? Who do people interview with?

We have a very intensive and rigorous talent acquisition process. We ensure that our business leaders, recruiters and candidates have an opportunity to assess the probability of a great match between our business needs and the candidate’s capabilities and interests. With regard to number of interviews, we are far more concerned with having quality conversations and interactions, vs. quantity.

What qualities do you look for in a new recruit?

We look for individuals who share our passion for solving challenging problems. Intellectual curiosity, innovative thinking, ability to work on a team and a drive to succeed are all critical factors for anyone to be successful here. The potential and desire to develop and grow into the next opportunity is also something we always look for in great candidates.

What are your hiring priorities for 2017?

Our talent strategies evolve with the needs of our businesses, and we always need great talent to fuel growth. Overall, we continue to hire across each of our core strategies (Equities, Fixed Income and Macro, Commodities, Credit and Quantitative Strategies), but with a strong focus in Equities and Quantitative Strategies.

What advice would you give to someone who has ambitions to work for Citadel?

Apply! We have many great opportunities, but even if there is not a strong match today, we are always keen to build relationships with interesting and talented people. Many of our hires are the result of connections made before the availability of an opening.

How do you retain and motivate your staff once they’re hired?

We give people of all experience levels the opportunity to take on significant responsibility quickly, which we believe motivates them and helps them grow. We are also committed to supporting this growth by providing robust training and development resources that employees can access at all time. Additionally, we constantly evaluate our teams and our talent, and retaining top performers is central to our ability to succeed.

What’s the typical career path at Citadel?

We look for talented people who are self-motivated and believe that there is no limit to their growth potential. For example, Todd Barker, head of Surveyor Capital, joined Citadel with two years of full-time experience. One year after joining, Todd pitched an idea to extend our business and ultimately led the effort, eventually becoming head of one of our largest investment businesses.

How do you feel about the perceived lack of talent on the market for hedge funds now? How are you addressing this?

We are constantly looking for new opportunities to engage with talented candidates, even before they graduate and choose their career paths. For example, we recently launched a series of 18 datathons, which we are holding at top universities in the U.S., UK and Ireland. These competitions are helping us identify talented individuals across STEM disciplines and education levels. Our goal is to develop multi-year relationships with these candidates and show them that Citadel can provide the challenging and rewarding career opportunities they are looking for.

Do you have a graduate programme? If so, can you provide details in terms of number of recruits, recruitment process and what qualities you look for?

We have campus and graduate recruitment programs across a number of our business units and technology functions. Like our lateral recruitment process, we look for intellectual curiosity, innovative thinking, a team orientation, and a strong drive to succeed.

Do you still view investment banks as a valuable source of talent? If so, why?

We often consider investment banking candidates for Associate opportunities, as these candidates often have the transferrable skillsets required for successful careers in investing. Investment banking provides robust technical training, exposure to financial products and fundamental business analysis, as well as the experience of working in a team environment and interacting with leadership.

What advice would you give to early stage career professionals in banking hoping to move from banking to a hedge fund?

Leverage the tools, resources and training available to you in your investment banking program, gain valuable deal experience, and take time to prepare for the interview process. While technical skills are important, successful investors are also intellectually curious and share a passion for public markets and generating investment ideas.

View the complete 2017 Ideal Employer Rankings

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Banks may be shifting some of their technology jobs from Hong Kong to lower-cost markets like India, but there are still plenty of IT roles based in the city.

We’ve looked through careers website of major banks in Hong Kong and identified some of their more interesting tech openings – where you’ll be working on new products or projects, or in teams which are expanding in size.

Goldman Sachs: equities technology, FPGA developer

Here’s your chance to work in cutting-edge trading tech…at Goldman Sachs. The bank’s electronic trading technology team is developing an in-house ultra-low latency product for clients. You’ll “develop complex FPGA solutions for equities trading” and focus on areas such as direct market access, algorithmic trading and smart-order routing. You’ll be a senior FPGA developer with a degree in electronic engineering and experience in low-latency trading.

J.P. Morgan: CIB tech algo developer

JPM is “growing” its risk-algo execution platform for Asian-markets trading – so this is an opportunity to get into an expanding part of the business. You’ll be working with quants and traders to develop, implement, support and maintain the platform. This job requires at least five years’ development experience in “low-latency, real-time, scalable trading” systems, of which three years or more must be in algo strategies, systematic trading, and electronic trading.

Societe Generale: trainee, information security

This is one of the only Hong Kong-based graduate technology jobs you can apply for now at a major bank (and not have to wait until the autumn campus hiring season kicks off). SocGen has no yearly application deadline for its Asian traineeships. You’ll be working on two new SocGen IT initiatives: SIGMA – a global programme to enhance operational security – and the “managerial supervision project”, a review of permanent supervision controls. To get an interview, you’ll need knowledge of IT infrastructure, and a degree in computer science, engineering, information technology (or similar).

UBS: IT software engineer, equity derivatives, trade lifecycle, Java

Banks in Hong Kong may be cutting equities traders, but the’re also investing heavily in trading technology. Credit Suisse wants to double the size of its equities derivatives tech team in Asia, for example. Rival UBS also has several vacancies in the field. This one focuses on developing the systems that manage the post-trade lifecycle of equity derivatives products. As at Credit Suisse, experience in investment banking is desired but not mandatory. UBS wants to hire “smart developers with strong communication and tech skills”.

Standard Chartered: agile senior software engineers

In comparison with Singapore, Stan Chart doesn’t have many technology employees in Hong Kong – so these are rare openings. The bank is hiring “engineers”, but doesn’t say exactly how many it wants. Knowledge of one or two languages won’t cut it, however, because this role is for “polyglot programmers” with skills in “many” of these fields: C, Java, Python, Ruby, Clojure, and Scala. “Successful candidates will participate in evaluating, selecting, developing, and integrating the components of the DevOps and backlog pipelines.”

Morgan Stanley: client-facing senior front-office Java developer

There currently aren’t many tech vacancies at global banks in Hong Kong where you get to work so closely with the front office. This role is in the FX technology team, which provides platforms for trade capture and risk management for Morgan Stanley’s trading desk. You’ll have “hands-on” responsibilities for designing, developing, testing and deploying server-side services and applications. This is a senior role, demanding at least eight years’ experience, leadership expertise, and confidence when “talking to the business”.

BAML: voice recording infrastructure engineer

BAML is fishing from a small candidate pool for this role – it wants expertise in both trading-floor and voice technologies. You’ll be leading global projects, and collaborating with vendors, the front-office, operations and other tech teams to develop and support voice-recording products. The ability to work with compliance and legal is key, as is experience with data network and WORM storage, and with carrier network services.

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Equities sales and trading roles are fast disappearing from banks in Asia, with Hong Kong the worst affected city.

Earlier this month, Credit Suisse reportedly culled about 35 positions from its Asian equities operations after a slump in revenues.Standard Chartered, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, CLSA, Nomura, CIMB and Jefferies have also cut jobs.

If you’ve been laid off from an equities role at one of these firms, it will be exceedingly tough to get a similar job at another large bank.

But you need not stay unemployed for long. Here are some alternative careers for ex-bank equities professionals in Asia.

1. Online research firms

“With the unbundling of investment research, I see opportunities at online research marketplaces,” says Yvette Kwan, a former APAC investment banking COO at UBS, now a partner at Hong Kong finance consultancy Quinlan & Associates. “Working for an ORM offers an interesting option in a newly developing space and leverages your existing relationships with the buy-side.”

2. Wealth management

“Products sales in wealth management is an area where ex-sales and trading staff in Asia could find a new home. They bring a deeper level of product knowledge to the table as wealth management in the region continues to expand and become more sophisticated,” says Kwan.

3. Hedge funds

“I know ex-sales and trading people in Asia who’ve left bulge bracket firms in the last 12 months and are in the process of setting up their own funds, utilising their personal and professional networks to source investors,” says Kwan. “But this option is generally only open to very senior traders with deep pockets and industry ties.”

4. Fintech start-ups

“Sales and trading experience is well received in fintech because start-ups operate in a fast-moving, high-pressure, and performance-driven environment,” says Sonia Palmieri, a former structured products specialist at Credit Suisse, now head of business development at Singapore-based research website Smartkarma. “Their international networks and knowledge of financial markets can’t be replicated by their technology-focused colleagues.”

5. Quant trading

Traders who can also program could be considered for automated or quant trading roles. “The need for traders with skills in signal development, coding and programming in languages like C++ or MATLAB has not gone away,” says Ed Goh, a principal consultant in sales and trading at recruiters Selby Jennings in Singapore. “These technical roles require serious quantitative skills, but boutique shops often offer negotiable profit-share schemes, so there’s a high potential upside.”

6. Electronic execution desks

“Cash equity sales traders who have covered fund managers and are experienced in handing direct-market-access or algorithmic trades could apply to banks whose electronic execution desks also value high-touch client servicing,” says Goh. “Compensation on these desks doesn’t vary too much from the traditional sales and trading teams.”

7. Risk

If you want to stay in banking and don’t mind a dramatic career change then risk is a viable option, albeit one that comes with a pay cut. “Risk, particularly market risk, is a common path for traders now, as is market surveillance,” says ex-Jefferies trader Warwick Pearmund, now an associate director at Harvey Nash Executive Search in Hong Kong. “Risk teams value people who know how trading works and can understand trading logs and charts to dig out discrepancies or potential failures. This skill is harder to teach someone who hasn’t experienced trading first hand.”

8. Ship broking

“Hong Kong has a vibrant shipping business and some of the same fundamental trading skills apply: matching buyers and sellers,” says Neil MacKinnon, an equities consultant at Hong Kong search firm The Lawson Practice and a former salesperson at CIMB Securities. “And it’s a business based on personal relationships, similarly to sales trading. The compensation might not always match equities, but there’s real potential to be paid more.”

9. Custody sales

Equities professionals in Hong Kong could put their sales skills to use in other industries or other parts of the finance sector. “For example, while it would require some training on product knowledge, you could move into custody sales at banks and securities houses such as State Street, Wells Fargo, Citi, and J.P. Morgan,” says Mackinnon.

10. Chinese houses

“It’s no secret that Chinese banks are hiring in Hong Kong, but this all but precludes non-Mandarin speakers. For everyone else it’s musical chairs at the banks, with the number of chairs diminishing at an alarming rate,” says Pearmund.

11. And there’s always…headhunting

“Former traders sometimes make good recruitment people, but this is very much on a case-by-case basis,” says Hong Kong trader-turned-headhunter Matt Hoyle.

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It always had the potential to go wrong. In the same way that Goldman Sachs’ stock – and all the deferred Goldman bonuses denoted in the stock – benefited disproportionately from the Trump boom, Goldman’s stock is now suffering disproportionately from the Trump bust.

Goldman’s stock was down 5.3% on Wednesday, a drop that Marketwatch says was its biggest one day rout since the UK voted to leave the European Union in June 2016. Along with J.P. Morgan, whose stock fell 3.8% yesterday, Goldman contributed to a 20 point fall in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. After driving markets higher, Goldman Sachs is now dragging them back down.

What’s gone wrong? The clear answer is President Donald Trump. While Goldman rode the wave of euphoria surrounding expectations of Trump’s $10 trillion stimulus plan, Trump’s suggested repeal of Dodd Frank legislation, and Trump’s willingness to invite the likes of Gary Cohn into the White House, it’s suffering now that Trump’s intentions might not happen. The immediate catalyst is the surprise sacking former FBI director James Comey . For Goldman, the Trump problems are being compounded by an abysmal first quarter plus record low market volatility – given that banks said poor volatility was responsible for its failings in the first three months of the year.

Yesterday’s decline means Goldman’s stock is off 15% from its March 3rd peak. This is bad news for all the Goldman bankers who were standing on the sidelines and watching the value of their deferred bonuses swell, but are now forced to watch them all shrink again. Goldman firm issued around $2bn of stock bonuses to staff in payment for work done in 2016. The first tranche becomes available in early 2018. Recipients need to hope that Trump’s presidency gets back on track well before then.

Separately, you might think that engaging in the art of mindfulness will make you a more relaxed, pleasant and all-round empathetic person, but you could be wrong. New research suggests that if you’re already a narcissist, mindfulness could make you worse. – Instead of spending your mindful time dwelling on the moment, you’ll simply spend it thinking about how wonderful you are. You’ll emerge less empathetic than ever.

Meanwhile:

BNP Paribas says it will only move 300 (10%) of its jobs out of London after Brexit. It will try to protect its remaining London jobs by “finding new clients [who aren’t based in the EU]. “(Reuters)

Social media is killing volatility (and therefore Goldman Sachs’ trading business): “It’s creating confusion with a lot of false news. Ironically, it’s having a calming effect. If you have all this confusing information, and you don’t know which one is true and which one is false, you say, “OK, the heck with it, I won’t do anything.” (Gadfly)

Goldman Sachs has reinvented itself as a U.S. leveraged loan house: “It has moved into acquisition-financing activities historically dominated by the likes of JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup.” Financial Times)

Deutsche hired Jeffrey Change from UBS as head of U.S. high yield trading. (Businesswire)

Mr. Staley also seems not to have absorbed a central paradox of being chief executive, which is that the more power you have, the more restrained you need to be about using it. (New York Times)

Millennium Management alumni sets up new hedge fund with solid title of Shelter Haven Asset Management. (HFM Global)

Why work for an air-conditioned bank when you could work in the amazing new naturally cooled Apple campus building surrounded by 9,000 trees? (Quartz)

The dangers of drinking 30 cups of coffee in short succession. (Vox)

I always thought earning over £80k would make me rich. (Financial Times)

Bank of America Senior Vice President embezzled $7.2m and bought lavish birthday parties and a motorbike. (Charlotte Observer)

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J.P. Morgan

Goldman Sachs

Morgan Stanley

Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Citi

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Can you describe the Citadel recruitment process? How many interviews? Who do people interview with?

What qualities do you look for in a new recruit?

What are your hiring priorities for 2017?

What advice would you give to someone who has ambitions to work for Citadel?

How do you retain and motivate your staff once they’re hired?

What’s the typical career path at Citadel?

How do you feel about the perceived lack of talent on the market for hedge funds now? How are you addressing this?

Do you have a graduate programme? If so, can you provide details in terms of number of recruits, recruitment process and what qualities you look for?

Do you still view investment banks as a valuable source of talent? If so, why?

What advice would you give to early stage career professionals in banking hoping to move from banking to a hedge fund?

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