I landed my dream job at a HF and was axed within a year. Now what?

I’ve been fired. But I was a lotta lucky and made some good career decisions and now have the best job of my career. 
 

Know TONS of people who have left the biz at various stages of their careers. So that’s definitely true. But if you can cut it, it’s a ton of fun and not a bad way to earn a living. 

To answer the two aspects of your question;

-If you are let go outside of taking it as a personal hit (which many people do and you see threads on here), you probably spent year working very hard, gaining new skills and new knowledge so is it a total waste? 

-Fund closes in 4 years...There is many reasons for funds to close outside of everyone sucks and never hire them again so again you gain a lot of skills and most people end up at a new fund anyways if they want. The ones who do not a closure let's them re-evaluate what they want without worrying sacrificing comp or so.

Truly the main scary thing is that there is no "exit option" after working at a HF, as HFPM said the exit is the HF job itself. Its constantly changing and challenging and if fits your personality best job for you.

Thanks for your feedback so far, everyone. We’re always talking about stepping stones to get to our end game: working at a HF. It’s hard to not have a backup plan / exit strategy if things go awry since that’s how we’re basically trained to think.

I agree with you ‘PM in HF - Other’ that the scary thing for me is ‘what comes next if this doesn’t work out?’ I work my @$$ off and so do you guys, but rationally speaking we all know that it’s a low probability / high payoff game, which means that some luck is involved no matter how much skill we have / time we put in, which also means there’s a high opportunity cost for other work / skills that we could acquire elsewhere.

‘HFPM’: thanks for your insight too. I find it reassuring, and I’m sure others will too. I’m assuming you are a HF PM (from your name) … is that the best job of your career that you’re referencing?

This is why you have to have balls of steel if you want to be in this line of work. It's tough as shit out here. 

Some great advice. Adding that yeah, firings / lay offs happen all the time, esp in MM. Lots of folks move around between shops. Tougher to bounce back if you're fired to another job if you're a PM, but much easier as an analyst. 

I don't agree with the "a high number of newbies don't make it past a year" comment. I think that is a lot of fear mongering by the person who told you that. The reality is that everyone on here is smart / competent enough to work at any HF. 

But his comment about average fund life is probably right. All of the funds that my colleagues have worked at are now defunct (many of which were reputable places to work at the time). I also get a lot of resumes across my desk. It's very common to see people change funds, on average, every 2-3 years. I don't think that anyone really holds it against you. The real risk that you need to think about is what the backup option is because stock-picking is not really a transferrable skill set. 

Most click bait title ever, what a douche bag OP is.

Very sad that you have to post inflammatory comments on a Wall Street message board. You won’t go far with that attitude. You’re probably a smart kid so put your brainpower to better use than what you’re doing now.

Here's my experience: Happened to me at a large macro multi-manager as well. Was in a risk taking seat helping manage a large book at a young age. My own notionals were in the several 100 million. Almost all of it directional. 

But we were stopped out in four months. Had to leave the country in 72 hours as I was on a work visa.

Was also dealing with personal issues at the time that made it really, really tough. My mom lost her vision in one eye due to being physically assaulted. 

So I moved back to my mom's house. And stayed there for a year doing nothing figuring out my next steps and trying to get my mojo back. I focused on improving my competency in Machine Learning, and what was then an emerging field of deep learning. Developed novel trading strategies and ML based risk management models. If I look back, I was mostly building the tools that I wish I had as we were getting stopped out. 

This was 5 years ago. I am still a bit scarred by it. For the next two years I would lose my sleep for weeks after visiting any hedge fund office etc, even if meeting a friend.

I would later discover this is fairly common (the sub one year tenure, that is). There is no love loss in the industry. As the Chief Risk Officer told me in my exit meeting "this comes with the territory"...

So you might attract scorn for your tenure when interviewing for roles outside of hedge funds. But for hedge fund roles, especially multi-managers, they will be understanding. 

I'm still extremely passionate/ obsessed about macro/ markets. But I have spent the past few years focused on data science. Many would see this as career drifting. 

I've had many opportunities to return to the buyside. Headhunters ping me all the time. Friends helped open doors. Including bumping into hedge fund founders in the most random ways (dating their daughter on Hinge, then meeting their dad, a very well known "macro legend" that offered to help). 

Doing a lot better now, but still don't have it in me to go through that again. 

Ya pretty much. HF is quite volatile. Job security is obviously bad. 

Mine blew up recently so yeah when your shop blew up (which happens to a lot of HFs) it's kinda suck.

To me, HF is like professional sport, the burden of performance is very real, but if you're talent, it's truly meritocratic.

You perform, then a lot of perks, and if you don't, you'll be gone.