Any thoughts on Fred Alger?

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westcoastbum

I’ve heard good things. Nothing personal or first hand, but the culture there is supposedly very strong and the head honcho is married into the founder’s family I believe. Might be wrong though. Very growth oriented, you hit the nail on the head with sector focus. Overall, seems like a good shop to me. Check glassdoor for comp.

Authored by: Certified Asset Management Professional - 2nd Year AssociateCertified Asset Management Pro

Sequoia

Last I'd checked their performance was iffy

Spoke with someone there a while back who didn't like the culture & was trying to leave

I'd verify all this but didn't paint a good picture esp as they haven't grown AUM at all (actually shrank)

qtb

Most Helpful

Reposting this from another Fred Alger thread:

Proceed with caution at Alger:

Alger has an incredibly high churn rate in the lower and mid level ranks but exit ops are not bad - people regularly leaving for other roles on buyside (most frequently to the major pod-shops but also to other solid l/s HFs and also corp dev outside of finance - activist not an exit op as far as I’m aware) people leave because to many people it is a pretty miserable place to work - there is a good vibe amongst the analysts but the PMs are disorganized, lack a structured investment process, and, worst of all, regularly yell at their analysts as a form of giving feedback (maybe this is common elsewhere on buyside but it seemed like a pretty outdated form of communication to me in this day and age).

Additionally, ‘head honcho’ can be arrogant, insecure, volatile, and narcissistic - e.g. dropping hints about how rich he is when the market is down to give himself a boost and often going on angry rants, laying into a specific analyst publicly on group Zoom calls from one small thing which triggers him which then snowballs into a 5-10 minute yelling monologue against the analyst who had a small error in their comp table or hadn’t updated the model of an unowned name for the quarter etc etc - this is pretty bad for morale at the firm and the other PMs adopt similar communication styles by osmosis.

Overall - this firm is a decent place to train - but statistically you will not find yourself to be super happy after the first year or so, and looking to move elsewhere - that being said, there are occasionally people who stick around but I would say the churn rate is almost as high as in a typical BB IB analyst program (~90% after 3-4 years - disclosure: this might not be totally accurate for IB, happy to be corrected, but is accurate for Alger).

Oh, and comp is also pretty trash.

Authored by: Certified Asset Management Professional - Assistant Portfolio ManagerCertified Asset Management Pro

Big_Muffin

Sounds like this place is hot garbage. Might be ok for banking but high turnover in AM is a HUGE red flag.

jackwestjr

Parts of this are pretty consistent with what I've been told by others in the industry.

Big_Muffin

This is a general comment: If you're getting into the AM world, be careful with "sub-scale" AUM asset managers. The way passive is eating active's lunch (see multiples of publicly traded managers), it's possible only the biggest and strongest will survive the disruption.

rich_toad

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