Anyone know anything about Ned Davis Research?

sjl1009,

They're a macro research shop that leans more into the technical analysis/momentum camp. Much of the research is dry and mediocre and doesn't really appeal to many fund managers on the buyside. There's really no fundamental research that comes from them and the founder keeps riding on stupid cliches like "don't fight the fed" and the "trend is your friend" that has surprisingly made him wildly rich. They do, however, have a pretty solid custom research team, which does stuff like build quantitative portfolio models for their top clients. Plus there is no dress code so you can go to work in your shorts and t-shirt.

But aside from that, the pay is very low and many people complain about the internal politics. When a firm is headquartered in a city (Venice, FL) where the average age of its population is around 70 and there's nothing else to do other than go to the beach or eat at McDonald's, you can't really expect top talent to relocate there, and that's really been NDR's problem. If you're not willing to pay up for the big leagues, you end up filling your starting lineup with minor league players, if you get the drift. Venice can also be a bit seedy as well. The locals will make you feel depressed about working in that city.

Also, from what I've heard, NDR used to be a little more decent of a company to work for until the founder sold it a few years back at a very high sticker price to another company based in London called Euromoney. But since then, they've been struggling to hit their sales growth targets, bonuses and raises have been squashed, and talent in both IT and research has been flying out the door. The sales team has experienced substantial of turnover, and the head of North American sales who was hired the prior year was recently fired. The mood at the firm is rather dour. Only a handful of senior managers and long-serving strategists received handsome multi-million dollar payouts from the ESOP after Euromoney bought the company, so these people are set regardless of what happens to the firm.

Long and short, I would say that in the near term if you do end up going to work there, only do it for the experience and look elsewhere after a few years, because the upside is pretty much non-existent.