MMHF —> Activist
Incoming 1st year analyst at Citadel/P72, I was super excited to work in a public equities seat ASAP but after the summer and thinking about where I want to be in 5 years, I think activism is where I want to be. Do you absolutely need to have banking/PE experience, or is having standard L/S HF experience also relevant? I have not seen many profiles on Linkedin of people who started at a hedge fund and went to a top activist fund, but could just be because a lot of these out of undergrad programs are new + numbers game of how many banking/PE candidates there are?
You rent stocks as a pod shop monkey and you want to do activism which is as PE-approach to the public market as you can get?
At the very least, I argue you need to have PE experience under your belt. And you need to be a star at your PE shop to have a shop at top activist fund.
Will an activist fund not even look at someone with my background? Are the skills you develop in PE that make someone with that experience much more compelling? FWIW, I’ve seen lots of people and even know a couple personally go banking —> top activist (Starboard, Elliott)
I doubt it. Just glancing through Third Point's roster. All of them have IB/PE experience, one guy has done MMs but only after GS TMT IB.
At the very least you need to have done top tier IB analyst.
Activist funds almost exclusively recruit out of mf/umm PE because of the overlapping skillsets. Know a handful that have gotten looks without PE but they were all top IB group straight to top HF single manager.
Why do you think you want to do activism? I ask because its a big deviation from the multi managers that you first pursued
Friendly reminder that activism is an incredibly niche-y strategy with max 2 open seats/year.
Yet for some reason it gets regarded on WSO as a major asset class.
You'd be doing very much the same thing at PE with more opportunities, better pay and more stable career path.
They are literally on opposite sides of the spectrum of public investing.
All these responses are directionally correct but way too strong. There are activist “institutions” like Elliott that have strict on ramps as an analyst into the firm but these are few and far between. You can get into an activist shop process through networking/pitching with the right ideas and people. You will need to catch their attention and then demonstrate you are actually the better hire than the traditional field. Tough but doable given the amount of resources available online.
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