Is joining Point72 social suicide for joining other firms?
Do some hedge fund managers have personal vendettas against Point72/Steve Cohen? If a person has Point72 on their resume early on in their career, is that a flag for other firms...against the morals of the candidate?
Yes. In fact, if you ever get breakfast with any employees from other funds, they are likely to spit into your coffee.
Nobody gives a fuck lol
I've talked to a couple managers who have voiced that point72 is still an outsider and would be hesitant to hire from there, which is why I'm asking
Look as long as you do good work, you won't need to leave and you won't be fired by Bobby Axelrod (sorry, I meant Steven Cohen)
Definitely not. They are a highly reputable firm and hire some of the smartest people, most analysts are able to jump to whichever HF they want after experience at P72
It's not social suicide but it's also not a breeding ground for top analysts
Not sure about that. I've talked to and worked with a few current /former analysts and they're pretty good in my opinion.
Which funds in your opinion produce top notch analysts?
There are a lot of good hedge funds. Baupost, Scopia, Darsana, Viking, Silver Point and many, many more. I'm sure P72 has some very smart people, but if you look at where the top analysts go out of banking it's almost never there.
Wait, are you guys serious? There's only like one handful in the history of hedge funds ever that have a historical performance anywhere near Point72. Steve Cohen is almost always cited in top hedge fund managers of all time. They even have an internal training academy for college graduates where they teach you how to pick stocks.
Cohen teaches his analysts how to violate the securities laws. That’s why his employees are toxic. Nobody wants Cohen stink at their firm.
Point72 doesn’t hire the best. If you have options I don’t think you pick point72.
Are all these comments unique to P72 though? Seems like they are applicable to all platforms (GE/Surveyor/Aptigon, Balyasny, millennium etc)? How is P72 different from all of these?
At the risk of stating common knowledge, read through the history of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_A._Cohen</a">Steven Cohen and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.A.C._Capital_Advisors</a">SAC Capital. Most profitable insider-trading conspiracy in history. Cohen managed to avoid jail, the same can’t be said for his top guys. That’s why OP asks about reputation optics.
I'd look at it this way: p72 opened up to outside investments and quickly raised $4bn (easily could have been double that). If outside investors aren't too concerned, I wouldn't be either. The only guys maybe that could have a blemish would be the ones who were there during the trading scandal.
the multi-mgr funds seem to not get a ton of respect on this board. i think its because they usually take people from sell-side equity research and emphasize deep industry knowledge which is less aligned with an investment banking skill set. you aren't going to convince me that working at a single-mgr is objectively superior to a multi-mgr, that is an asinine argument.
as to p72, once youre actually working at a multi mgr the only thing that matters is how your book's doing. i think you'd be flattering yourself to think that by working at p72 youre so closely associated with cohen that other HFs wouldn't want to hire you.
Whether or not the big multistrategy funds get respect, the fact is that a lot of them are closed to new capital. If you are turning away investors handing you cash, that's kinda sorta a vote of confidence from the market.
I can't speak to the traditional space but in stat arb, the big funds are often where you want to be. If I were to join a small shop, the first thing I'd have to do would be to build backtesting infrastructure-- and spend agonizing amounts of time double-checking the accounting software. Then I'd need to build risk management and portfolio management tools. And whatever I came up with as a quant (formerly a desk strat) might get done in a hurry (even though it would take months or even a year to put it all together) but it wouldn't be anywhere near as production-worthy or supportable as what SAC's IT team already has.
My main thing is that I don't want to be trying to do stuff that isn't my forte-- or losing sleep about it. Figuring out how to handle the accounting for brokerage fees, etc etc-- and then double-checking and QAing it 35 times-- isn't something that most quants are either good at or are really super-excited to do. And if you have a bunch of quant PMs, you can either build 10-15 (depending on how many teams you have) shitty accounting and backtesting systems, or you can build a single, nice, reliable one and share the expenses. So there's huge economies of scale for quant funds. And that's before I even get into the stuff that I think is way too proprietary/specific knowledge to give away on WSO.
There's actually one big fund I'm talking with right now where apparently all of the PMs have to build their own backtesting and accounting software. I understand being super-competitive, but this seems to be one of these areas where there's kinda sorta only one correct answer and it's in everyone's best interests to pool resources and have 10-20 times as many other users out there to catch (and deal with) the first bug rather than you.
Something tells me that there's a $500K/year IT Director job for some 3rd-4th year Desk Strat at Morgan Stanley who just calls up 5-10 Quant PMs at this fund and convinces them to all pool backtesting resources under him.
What I'd honestly really love to see is open-source backtesting software, but I think there's still some specific knowledge in building a system that works correctly.
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