Corporate Access at Sell-side (equity) firm to Equity Research at l/s equity HF

What if you want to switch over to a l/s equity hedge fund, but don't have strong modelling experience? However, you do have corporate access coming from a sell-side firm, i.e. initiating non-deal roadshows?

Can you still transition to a hedge fund analyst role?

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Best Response

I love this selling point of the sell side: "We give you corporate access to management!" Translation from corporate speak: "We do not have a business model, but please pay us anyway."

Access to management? Uhh, so does Google and my phone, bro. It's not like I can't call ANY company in the country and, at a minimum, at least get a call with IR within a week. Anything under $2B in cap and there is a 95% chance I will be able to speak with someone from management. It's just not a selling point.

Most hedge funds don't require really strong modeling skills anyway though, you might want to consider that in your approach. Modeling is mostly a waste of time outside of specific deal modeling that a PE guy or banker would do.

 
RavenousI love this selling point of the sell side: "We give you corporate access to management!" Translation from corporate speak: "We do not have a business model, but please pay us anyway."

Access to management? Uhh, so does Google and my phone, bro. It's not like I can't call ANY company in the country and, at a minimum, at least get a call with IR within a week. Anything under $2B in cap and there is a 95% chance I will be able to speak with someone from management. It's just not a selling point.

Most hedge funds don't require really strong modeling skills anyway though, you might want to consider that in your approach. Modeling is mostly a waste of time outside of specific deal modeling that a PE guy or banker would do.

Oh OK. My impression was that many buyside HF analysts spend most of their time travelling to see factories and other facilities and give a buy/hold/sell recommendation to the HF manager without a lot of time put in models/research reports other than the reports they get from sell-side analysts.

 
TraderDaily][quote=Ravenous Oh OK. My impression was that many buyside HF analysts spend most of their time travelling to see factories and other facilities and give a buy/hold/sell recommendation to the HF manager without a lot of time put in models/research reports other than the reports they get from sell-side analysts.

that is absolutely false. Most buysiders use sell side research reports to just get the basic numbers so they don't have to get them themselves. Not much weight is put on the opinions.

 
bearcats][quote=TraderDaily
Ravenous Oh OK. My impression was that many buyside HF analysts spend most of their time travelling to see factories and other facilities and give a buy/hold/sell recommendation to the HF manager without a lot of time put in models/research reports other than the reports they get from sell-side analysts.

that is absolutely false. Most buysiders use sell side research reports to just get the basic numbers so they don't have to get them themselves. Not much weight is put on the opinions.

So do they spend a lot of time building a lot of their own research reports?

 

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