Can MM PMs hire whoever they want?
Hi, sophomore in college here. I’m interested in HF out of undergrad and find the pod model attractive, but was curious if it’s possible to land a role in a pod at big 4 without going through the academy or cap or adjacent undergrad recruiting program. I’m asking partially bc I was not successful in those processes and partially because I’m not interested in pure discretionary L/S or pure quant. I’ve been forming relationships with PMs and was curious if they have the power to hire an analyst out of undergrad if they wanted to? I get that I’d have to play my cards right with them to even be given an opportunity but is it possible to land in their pod through this and not the typical route? Any insight appreciated.
Why don’t you want to join the academy or equivalent. It’s pretty unlikely you’d be hired out of college. You wont have much modeling skills (which is your only value-add in the first couple of months) and you’re not going to be contributing much value in terms of idea generation yet.
I don’t see why a PM wouldn’t be able to do it in theory but I really do question why any of them would want to when there’s 100s of people in the academy or equivalent or with at least 1 year of IB experience that will at least have some sense of what’s going on
Easier approach is just get a job after doing a stint somewhere at an investment bank either in IBD itself or equity research. Anything is possible but focus on percentage plays.
In theory they can, but I’ve largely only seen it happen in macro, where you can value add a lot via some quant skills pretty much from day 1.
Also I generally don’t see why a PM would want to bet PnL/comp on someone that could not get into the aforementioned training programs which are the de facto platforms for talent, they’re risking more for someone who achieved less…if that makes sense. At a bank or graduate program no individual is risking anything on you, but at a pod the PM is taking a personal risk hiring you.
Having said that, my pod has hired someone to work for us out of school, but they had prior L/S experience at one of the aforementioned shops and some sellside experience alongside it and we believed they could add more value, more quickly than the sellsiders we interviewed. And even then, there was some pushback from our pods boss and HR when it came to trying to generate a contract, so it’s not clear cut.
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His best chance is to work in prop trading. They recruit straight from college and teach you how to trade, which is directly transferable to a HF gig
Can they? Ya sure. PMs generally control their fiefdoms but I’d guess that their boss would be really scratching their head.
Will they? Hell no. You have no training, no track record, no actual experience in any finance role. You’d be a significant time suck for the PM and any analyst and time is literally money in this business. Academy or similar analysts are negative EV for a minimum of 6 months and you’d probably be negative EV for closer to a year because while you would know your PM’s process, you wouldn’t have all the base knowledge that makes it valuable.
sorry dude but build those relationships so you can try and cash in after you’ve got the skills to add value early on
This will not happen bc you are useless to a pod straight out of undergrad. Period end of story
Anecdotally, I believe this happened to someone at my school (worked directly at a big 4 out of undergrad and does not have "academy" stuff on his Linkedin - he named the pod.) But he was an absolute beast, triple major 4.0, interned at a top fund junior summer.
this only happens with the quant pods, not with with discretionary L/S pods
What about like "quantamental pods"
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