Plans B through Z

Some of you may have noticed that the rate at which I post and quality of said posts has declined significantly over the past few months. Grad school has been a beast and recruiting for SA positions absolutely brutal. I have some buddies who've gotten spots in IBD but the picture in S&T seems significantly worse. I've had 3 first-round interviews (2 of them at BBs) but no beans there and it's too early in the process to get feedback. I need an internship to graduate and I'm starting to look far and wide, including at off-cycle internships in my native France and international organizations.

I wanted to ask you guys what backgrounds other than BB S&T you think might set me up to work as a trader/PM at a global macro fund in the future. I know the backgrounds of global macro PMs have been discussed ad infinitum on this website but I've had an absurdly hard time making any headway on getting a job that would even remotely improve my chances.

I'm doing an Msc. Finance that is pretty quantitative but my main strength lies in my writing and qualitative understanding of things. My worst nightmare, however, is becoming a journalist who spends his career writing about a field I never managed to break into. In an ideal world, I would have enough money to trade on my own full-time and live off a small portion of my returns while steadily managing more money and adding a broader palette of trade/investment possibilities to my arsenal. If anyone has any suggestions on getting to a situation like that, I'm all ears.

 

You definitely have options: 1. IMF/World Bank research or economic analyst 2. Try for buyside institutions focused on macro products, or for specific non BB firms which make markets in macro products (Glencore for physical commodities, etc) 3. I'd consider risk a touch business, especially FX or commodities risk management. Barclays for instance has a great Risk Solutions group which is very much front office (look them up here)

 
Best Response
GutShot:
You definitely have options: 2. Try for buyside institutions focused on macro products, or for specific non BB firms which make markets in macro products (Glencore for physical commodities, etc)
...also look at insurance companies like Pru (used to own Bache, not sure now), SunTrust (research) and others: they have investment groups that perform very similar roles to straight laced IB/HF/PE and you can use the experience to get recruited to regular buy/sell groups. I did, and while I'm still not at the job and paygrade I want, it was my only option so I made the best of it: you're positioned better, so you could probably burn through this alternate path in less than a year. They're not as cool ("Hi, I work for an insurance company") but research for TDBank/Pru/Met/NYLife -> IB/PE after a year or two sure as hell beats MO / unrelated work -> ???.

The huge plus side to interviewing / working at these places is that after prepping for IB/PE/HF, you're operating at a much higher level of performance and the competition is usually a joke, but you have to make sure the lack of ambition and polish don't rub off on you.

Good luck

Get busy living
 
GutShot:
3. I'd consider risk a touch business, especially FX or commodities risk management. Barclays for instance has a great Risk Solutions group which is very much front office (look them up here)

The problem with this option is that (in addition to being a tiny group) Risk Solutions Group is part of IBD, so you'd have to get into hired as an IBD SA, then get selected to join RSG for the summer.

 

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