L/S Hedge Funds vs. PE

Currently AN1 at a BB coverage group in London. Now in a light week, I am trying to figure out what would be the best actionable "next move" as I want to start networking as early as I did for IB internships back when I appied.

I wanted to ask you guys a broad view on the below topics: 

1) How different is the required skillset between PE and L/S Hedge Funds? Would the latest require me more quantitative skills?

2) How does the competition changes? I feel like while for PE positions I would mostly compete against former IBD guys, for HFs there would be guys from trading and ER roles competing too, is it true? 

3) Where can I find a comprehensive list of L/S HFs to network/apply for? What are the best resources to prepare for interviews/get a sense of the role? (Sorry to sound basic here, but I only considered PE and Credit as an exit since now)

Any experience/insight would be appreciated

2 Comments
 

1) Yes - its still mainly excel but you will find new and creative uses to apply excel which requires a very lite form of thinking of modelling like programming. Not hard whatsoever. You will do a lot of work identifying trends in historical information and seeing where the inflections were and what drove them. Often this will transfer into some form of third-party data analysis that you will be doing in Excel, and potentially in Python.

The role isn't mathsy per say. It is very quantitative and you will need to quantify much of the qualitative arguments you are making/investigating and will work a lot with big datasets.  A few of the IB analysts that make the transition sometimes struggle with this part, you're essentially forecasting the future of a company's earnings and so there's a strong need for being able to look at a narrative quantitively.

2) For L/S seats you will be competing against other people in IB, ER as well as other L/S analysts.

As for what its like, I would read this: https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/comment/3083137#comment-3083137

Ultimately, at MM funds, the job is pretty niche and can often be far removed from what prospective IB analysts assume HF work is like. The need for a defined edge on earnings rather than having a compelling industry/business analysis throws people off. (Funds like AKO, Lansdowne, Egerton etc tend to hire these types out of IB though)

 

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