How did you know you wanted to move from PE to HF?
It sounds great - better hours, only investing work, no transaction process bullshit, not building inane models, no working with sycophant obsequious money leech advisors, get to form theses over years and be opportunistic and not just buy whatever shit comes to market, etc. All sounds good but feel like I still have no idea what a day in the life is like so hard to get conviction around switching. I don't actually follow public markets so not sure if I truly have to be "passionate" about the markets or if I can just treat this like a job like PE and do it dutifully but if it isn't the bees knees, that's ok too. How did you know / get certainty? Do you need to be a markets junkie to work in HF or can it just be a job you work hard at / dutifully?
Comments (15)
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Where can I sign up. I'm sold with the first sentence. What a panacea.
Tagging as I'm interested as well.
Lol i've always wondered the same thing on do we have to be truly "passionate" about markets to work in HF or if we can treat it like we do in IB/PE
Have to be passionate about anything in life if you wanna be good tbh
I don't want to be the best, I just want to have a reasonable career
Then stick with PE. In the public market, either you make money or don't, and you are reminded that fact every second.
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I guess you don't have to be "passionate" about the markets but let's just say you'll be competing against people who do have an interest in learning and analyzing industries/companies.
After a certain point, same for IB/PE. Probably why few people want to be MDs/Partners
It all comes down to the fund strategy - is it long only equities, is it L/S, distressed, macro, FI, etc. IMO a long only fund will suit someone coming from PE background since you still do bottom-up analysis and invest for the long term. The research is more fundamental and straightforward and depending on the strategy ofc, you might not even use derivatives but only take significant positions in companies for which you have high conviciton.
Fair point. I had L/S SM in mind.
The issue is that your longevity in a HF career is closely tied to performance. It's certainly possible to be a great public markets investor without being obsessed with the markets but there's understandably a high correlation. A large long-only fund (Fidelity, T Rowe etc) could be a solid option and has all the qualities you are describing with even better hours and a lot more career stability while still maintaining high comp.
Bump
You don't need to be passionate about it before joining since you won't know. A lot of people just learn to enjoy it because they're competitive. I was never a markets guy but once I joined a HF (PE sucked), I found myself motivated to want to stay on top of everything purely because I want to make money. I can't tell if I'm passionate about markets or passionate about making money only and markets is just the medium to it. Doesn't make a difference though. But it definitely isn't a job where you can check out once you're out of the office. You're constantly thinking about your companies and to be fair it can be pretty interesting.
Does that mean at least 70 hours per week? Including off time spent thinking about coverage and hopping on earnings call or whatever.
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