Aug 25, 2022

CLO/Performing Credit at a Distressed/Credit Fund

Seems that a lot of legacy distressed/mutli-strat/private credit funds have built out well-established CLO platforms. A few questions about working at these relative to more traditional structures:

How does coverage work? Seems like most have the teams in a separate silo of analysts that focus just on the performing strategies, but if there are already analysts covering sectors within the HF what is your value add/unique coverage as the performing analyst?

Is WLB and culture any worse? Is there the assumption that because the other parts of the firm require longer hours that you are supposed to be in the office as well at the more junior/mid levels?

Obviously comp is lower than the other parts of the firm but is comp typically at the higher end of the range compared to other performing roles? If not, what types of funds tend to pay the best?

How important is scale? I.e. a large legacy HF that is just establishing a performing business with only a few CLOs issued and a leaner team vs. one that is more scaled out but has more headcount on the performing side? What would be more preferable?

I know there are a decent amount of posts on this topic but I didn’t find specific answers on these anywhere. I am looking for a new role and seen a few openings within these kinds of structures and am trying to think through the implications.

3 Comments
 

It depends on the asset mix. Anchorage is essentially just a CLO shop now with a small draw down fund attached to it - most of the top HF research people have left over the years, Brigade is primarily a long only HY/CLO firm with a small hedge fund, whereas a place like Goldentree has a large, successful HF and draw down fund business and has more capacity for larger, more seperate teams. King St has a large hedge fund and a seperate CLO team. There is no one size fits all but in most cases the hedge fund (or higher fee product) sector analyst will have first dibs on a name in their sector. There are are lots more places with similar or different structures. They all need to be specifically explored to really understand how things work - Apollo, Ares, Bardin Hill, Canyon, Centerbridge, Diameter, KKR, Marathon, etc. Generally rule of comp expectations less for CLO should equal less hours and better WLB.

 
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