L/S Credit @ AM
Reposting in credit forum for more vis
Hi all I'm currently deciding on a role to leave PC/PE to small AM doing both conventional L/S HY/LL and distressed. Wouldn't categorize this a true distressed/opportunistic HF seat but one that can be both chill AM role and high calorie stressed/distressed if there are opportunities in your coverage area. How would these roles be viewed if I were to ever decide to switch into a true special sits/distressed HF seat in the future?
let's be real. "chill" and "true distressed HF" are antonyms.
you are trying to have your cake and eat it too.
if u go to a sleepy AM seat, u are signaling to the market that you are done grinding. you are choosing comfort.
distressed HFs hire hunters who are in the trenches 24/7, not guys who wanted a better work-life balance.
take the role if you want the lifestyle, but don't delude yourself.
its extremely hard to trade back up once you step down from the main stage.
enjoy the weekends, but accept that ur killer days are likely over
I work at a scaled true distressed HF. These places are surprisingly chill. Sometimes you have a Silver Point or Diameter that are not but there are def more chill funds than you would expect lol
I was also under the impression that most distressed shops have next to no WLB. From your experience, which scaled shops are more chill?
I am interested to see some takes at which shops would be considered chill in distressed, but I can offer my own two cents having worked at both chill and non-chill distressed / restructuring focused shops. I think things ultimately come down to process culture and what the internal deliverable is going to look like...formal IC meetings by design require decks or updated memos which creates work and someone has to do that. For example, I can have a 10 minute call with counsel to discuss a structure or doc change in a transaction, and I can also know pretty immediately in my head what the impact on the deal will look like, but it might take some associate 3-4 hours of their life and several slides to detail the change, lay out the rational, model the pre and post impact, and get it all pretty for an IC. So stuff like that can just by its nature create a lot of working hours. In the same scenario at the "chill" shop I am at, I can just call our CIO and let him know what the lawyers said in a 2 minute call and thats the end of it. Advisors could send us an updated financials deck and I could have a younger guy here cancel his evening plans to go through it, model a better/worse analysis vs. what we have, update the model and F5 the outputs...or I could just flip thru the PDF in bed, have an idea of the takeaways, and revisit it in the morning. The last thing I'll say about grindy places is that I've noticed people LOVE creating fake deadlines for stuff. Reality is, there are very few actual deadlines in this business, even in restructurings. People need to get more comfortable pushing back on "emergency" timelines advisors like to put together, it's annoying.
I get that but I'm more looking at this as bridge to distressed in the future. Don't wanna do DL with some opportunities to do control stuff anymore. Not entirely sleepy they sit on Steercos on occasion and there are dedicated pockets for distressed. I'm not sure I want to spend 100% of my time in distressed/stressed yet since several top funds continue to underperform relative to other asset classes.
What firms would be classified as “chill AM” rather than “true opportunistic credit HF?”
If you have no other option then taking this new seat is going to position you better for credit HF seats than your PE/PC shop. I think bigger question for you is to diligence the PM/track record and make sure it’s absolutely a seat worth leaving your current shop for and not just a subscale fund that will fail in a few years
The other poster talking about “sleepy” seats is talking out of his ass and probably hasn’t worked at an AM on the credit side. There are certainly AM seats that tend to get more active (including several of the large AMs...) and aren’t afraid to drive a process/get big in stressed names.
How small of a firm are we talking about in terms of total AUM/AUM for your strategy?
About 12BN firm AUM, which the strategy uses all of
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