- Hedge fund jobs can be some of the most lucrative in finance.
- Hedge funds are asset management firms, but with the freedom to follow more creative investment strategies.
- Hedge funds used to be scrappy outsiders but have become far more institutional.
- Large hedge funds are increasingly running their own graduate recruitment schemes.
What do hedge fund jobs involve?
Hedge funds used to be the Wild West of banking, but have now become far more institutionalized. They’re typically based in different locations to investment banks. In London, Mayfair is hedge fund territory. In the U.S., it’s Chicago or Connecticut, or – increasingly – Miami.
Hedge funds invest money for clients. Their clients used to be wealthy individuals but are now far more likely to include large pension funds too. Unlike so-called “long only” asset management funds, which make money by investing in products that are rising in price, the term “hedge fund,” comes from the fact that hedge funds try to ‘hedge’ their bets – they try to ensure that they can make good returns in any market. This means they seek to make money by investing in things that are falling in price as well as things that are rising. But how do hedge funds make money in a falling market? Well, by “short selling.”
Short selling, or “going short” involves first borrowing shares (or some other security) and then selling them into the market before buying them back again at some point in the future. When hedge fund goes short, it’s betting that the price of the shares will drop before it buys them back again. The profit is the difference between the price it sells the shares at after it borrows them, and the (hopefully) lower price it pays when it buys themb ack before handing the shares back to organizations it borrowed them from.
By using short selling and other techniques to hedge their investments, hedge funds aim to generate super-charged returns for their investors. Long only funds rarely achieve returns of more than 10% when investing in ‘safe’ products like European equities, but top performing hedge funds can achieve returns of 50% (sometimes more!) in a short period of time.
Given that hedge funds have traditionally charged investors a 2% management fee (2% of the funds they invest) and a 20% performance fee (20% of the profits they earn), this can make working for a successful hedge fund very lucrative indeed. Everything is geared towards chasing “alpha” (returns that are above and beyond the “beta” generated by a rising market), so when you work for a hedge fund you are laser-focused on investment performance.
To some extent, all hedge funds are on the lookout for the same thing - financial products that are incorrectly priced. “Hedge funds make money by capitalizing on market inefficiencies, which are always fleeting opportunities,” says Dominique Mielle, a former partner at Canyon Capital, a hedge fund with $25bn in assets under management, writing in her memoir ‘Damsel in Distressed.’ Colin Lancaster, global head of macro & fixed income for hedge fund Schonfeld Strategic Advisors, who’s also written a novel on his time in the industry, says the Holy Grail for hedge funds is “finding an imbalance” and then profiting from it.
What are the different types of hedge fund?
While all hedge funds are chasing imbalances, the imbalances you find will depend on the kind of strategy the hedge fund you work for is pursuing. Some of the main hedge fund strategies are:
Long/short: Long/short hedge fund managers go long some of the time. They also go short some of the time. They go long when they expect the price of a product to rise - and they go short when they expect the price of a product to fall.
Global macro: Global macro funds can go either long or short. They invest to benefit from global macroeconomic trends. Lancaster says global macro hedge fund managers look for imbalances between countries in things like economic growth, interest rates and central bank reactions. They then profit from the moves in that country’s interest rates, or from moves in its foreign exchange, equity, or credit markets.
Arbitrage: Arbitrage-focused hedge funds seek to make the most of price differentials between related securities products. At their simplest, so-called ‘statistical arbitrage’ (Stat Arb) funds put stocks into related pairs. If one pair does well and outperforms the other, it will be sold short (in the expectation that its price will then fall again). The underperforming stock will be bought (in the expectation that its price will rise to meet its pair). Arbitrage funds are often quantitative – they use complicated computer programs to determine what to buy and sell.
Event driven: Event driven hedge funds try to profit from one-off events. For example, when one company decides to buy another, it will usually pay more than the current price for the shares and event driven funds will seek to benefit from this.
Systematic/quantitative: Increasingly, hedge funds are ‘systematic’ - they use high speed computer algorithms to unearth market inefficiencies and to place trades in the brief time period when there’s money to be made before the inefficiency is discovered by other funds in the market. Systematic hedge funds operate across different market strategies.
Multi-strategy hedge funds: A lot of the biggest hedge funds (like Citadel, Millennium, Balyasny, Schonfeld or Point72) are multi-strategy hedge funds: they pursue all the above strategies and more.
Hedge funds also vary by the vast range of products they invest in. For example, there are credit hedge funds (investing in credit), distressed hedge funds (investing in credit which might never be repaid), and emerging markets hedge funds (investing in emerging markets).
Hedge fund jobs are less like the Wild West than they used to be
To the uninitiated, hedge funds have a reputation for being at the edgier end of financial services but over the last two decades they’ve become increasingly like banks, and the biggest ones are the global multi-strategy funds.
These top hedge funds have billions and billions under management - much of it from the pension funds and other institutional investors that like nice safe returns instead of risky mavericks. As Mielle points out, the sheer size of hedge funds, combined with new technology (allowing financial statements to be accessible online), regulations (requiring the same disclosure to all investors), and competition, have eroded many of the market inefficiencies that hedge funds formerly thrived upon.
“In the beginning, hedge funds had a rebellious aspect to them, an anti-establishment mentality, and a certain scrappiness. We wanted to do things differently, discover new investing ways. We wanted to be original, innovators, inventors, explorers. It was about thinking creatively, outside the box,” writes Mielle. “In the industrialization age, we started mutating into the big, stodgy guys ourselves.”
Career paths in hedge funds
If you want to work for a hedge fund, you probably envisage yourself as a trader or portfolio manager. However, like investment banks, hedge funds have teams of support staff working in areas like risk, compliance, technology, and operations. Some of the key jobs in hedge funds include:
Hedge fund analysts and researchers: Analysts spend their days poring over the financials of the companies and financial products hedge funds invest in. They help determine the fund’s investment strategy.
Hedge fund traders: You might think being a trader in a hedge fund is the most exciting job there is. You may well be wrong. Traders in hedge funds are often ‘execution traders’. Execution traders simply push the button, or ‘execute’ trades. They don’t get a chance to devise their own trading strategies, they don’t get a chance to take their own positions on the market. What they do get a chance to become experts in is, ‘market timing’. Execution traders watch the market closely and know when’s the best time to place their trades.
Hedge fund portfolio managers: Portfolio managers are at the top of the hedge fund tree. They listen to what analysts say and decide how to allocate investors’ money to achieve the highest returns. They are in charge of the whole investment portfolio (hence the name). Everyone wants to be a portfolio manager. They also make the most money.
Hedge fund sales and marketing professionals: Hedge fund sales and marketing professionals liaise with investors. They help sell the merits of the fund and persuade investors to hand over their money to be invested. Investor relations professionals fall into this category.
Hedge fund quants: Hedge funds also employ quantitative specialists - all the more so if they’re pursuing a quantitative strategy. These quants develop complex mathematical equations (algorithms) which tell the fund when to trade in order to make the most money using its chosen strategy. Quants who build algorithms work with quant developers - technologists who translate the algorithm into computer software which can implement the algorithm’s strategy.
Hedge fund risk managers and compliance, legal, technology, operations professionals: As hedge funds have become bigger (and more boring), they have accumulated the sort of support structures only previously seen in investment banks. Hedge funds now have risk management, compliance, and operations professionals. These jobs will be similar to banks - except you’ll probably have to be more of a ‘jack of all trades.’ It’s normal for compliance and legal roles to be blended in hedge funds, for example.
What skills will you need for a job in a hedge fund?
Just getting into a hedge fund is difficult. “The bar is exceptionally high,” says Ilana Weinstein, the legendary hedge fund recruiter (and founder of The IDW Group). “There are so few people that can meet that challenge.”
What does it take to get a job with a multistrategy fund? The table stakes are "good intellectual horsepower, work ethic, training, and a history of results," says Weinstein. However, these are only a 'necessary and not a sufficient' condition of getting hired. "The other things we’re really looking for under the hood are insatiable curiosity, self-awareness, a growth mindset, coupled with an intense desire to improve and learn, and passion.”
Specifically, she says, analysts are about: "Idea generation, creativity, independent research, and asking the right questions.” Portfolio managers are about: “Risk management, portfolio construction, hedging, sizing, the ability to build and manage a team.”
If you want an investment role at a top hedge fund, Weinstein says it will help if you come with a record of your own performance. Even better will be, "a spreadsheet showing what you have achieved and what you might have achieved if you had been allowed to do the things you wanted to have done."
The good news is that big hedge funds have become more institutional, they’ve started running their own campus recruitment programs and training graduates of their own. - In the past, they tended only to recruit people who had first trained at an investment bank.
As with investment banking jobs, it helps to start off as an intern. But be warned: winning a place on a hedge fund graduate program or internship is exceptionally tough. Hedge funds hire a lot less people than banks. The hedge funds that hire graduates and interns include:
Citadel, one of the world’s largest hedge funds. Citadel offers full time positions and internships, across trading, quantitative research, operations, and software engineering. Openings are available in in a range of locations, most notably in London, Chicago, New York, Paris, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
Point72 Asset Management runs internships and fulltime graduate programs at the Point72 Academy. The academy hires students in the U.S., APAC, or Europe. The summer internship specifically is an eight-week program offering training by academy staff, coached by investment professionals and mentored by academy graduates. The summer internships act as a gateway to the firm’s fulltime academy associate program.
Millennium Management offers internship programs exclusively for those looking to work in technology infrastructure and technology. However, it does offer a graduate program in investments – involving a year embedded within the equities team of a bank (UBS), after which graduates will return to Millennium as a research analyst on one of its investment teams.
DE Shaw & Co, which is 20% owned by Google’s Eric Schmidt, runs a 10–12-week internship program for undergraduates in a large variety of locations and disciplines. Rival quant fund Two Sigma offers just quantitative research and software engineering internships, based out of New York.
Balyasny Asset Management offers graduate programs and internships across investment and trading, technology and engineering, quant, risk and big data and business and operations. Balyasny’s internships are 8-to-12-weeks long.
There are other internships – these are just some of the biggest. AQR Capital Management, Brevan Howard, Capula, Farallon, Man, Marshall Wace, and others are all known to hire interns and graduates. We have some more detail here.
Which skills will you need for a hedge fund career?
If you want a hedge fund job, you’ll typically need to have an excellent academic record and – if you want to be an analyst or a portfolio manager – you’ll need to be no stranger to very hard work.
“The game has gotten much harder,” says Colin Lancaster. He categories the best people in hedge funds as “exceptional decision markets” who spend hours researching the markets. Mielle says analysts in hedge funds need conviction about their investment ideas – and to be willing to defend them when other analysts or portfolio managers question their validity.
While most hedge funds like people with mathematical and data skills, these aren’t enough on their own. “A widespread misconception about the hedge fund profession is that you must be either a math geek or a sleazy dealmaker to succeed,” says Mielle. In fact, she says being a successful portfolio manager or analyst is also about being able to communicate complex investment ideas, innovative thinking, generating new ideas and having flashes of intuition that can join up the dots. This might be why Citadel says it looks for candidates with sound judgement, good communication skills and “a whatever it takes attitude,” or why Two Sigma says it wants people who are “creative” and have “intellectually curious minds.”
Not all hedge funds demand a specialist degree discipline, but for quantitative positions, applicants will need a degree in a quantitative-related field.While DE Shaw is known for its recruitment of quantitative PhDs and coding talent, it also hires “generalist interns” who’ve graduated in areas like social studies.
Salaries and bonuses in hedge funds
The amount that you earn in a hedge fund will depend upon things like the role you’re doing, the size of the fund you’re working for (its “assets under management”) and the fund’s performance – or the performance of your unit within the fund. Most hedge funds skew pay heavily towards bonuses instead of salaries, meaning that pay can vary considerably by role.
If everything works out, you’ll be paid a lot. The eFinancialCareers salary and bonus survey indicates that hedge fund jobs are some of the best paid in the financial services industry. Juniors working in analyst/research roles can make $390k in total compensation (salary plus bonus).
Partners are at the top of the pay pile in hedge funds: they get a share of the profits made by the fund each year. Funds don’t divulge how much partners are paid globally but Citadel’s London partners received an average of $2.2m each in 2020.
Click here to create a profile on eFinancialCareers. Make yourself visible to recruiters hiring for top jobs in technology and finance.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share?Contact: +447537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail).Telegram: @SarahButcher.Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. Signal also available.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)
