What is your relationship like with your PM?
Title says it all. I'll start with mine (trying to benchmark if I'm outside of normal)
Type of HF: MM (P72, clearly)
My PM has historically been one of the top performers at our HF. I've been on the team for ~3 years and he has actually improved significantly at the team aspect of being a PM, but it still feels like he is in his own world day-trading while the analysts work themselves half to death trying to generate ideas which go un-noticed.
What is your relationship like? Do you speak often? Do you feel like you understand why an idea was traded (or not)?
My first PM was more or less similar to what OP mentioned. In my experience, if it starts off like this it isn't likely to improve because he may just not know what to do with analysts. I'd suspect there are a lot of PMs like this - they have a good strategy/niche but find it difficult to figure out how to utilize other people in that process. I had the exact same experience of working myself half to death trying to generate ideas that didn't seem to matter before I decided that enough was enough and found a different shop. If you want to make it work, you have to find a way to make ideas that fit into his strategy.
New PM is much better on the collaboration/mentoring side of things. I learned more in the first 6 months under this new guy than the first two years under the old guy. Weekly meetings (at least) with updates on the book, his view on how things are developing, reasoning behind trades, etc. in addition to organic day-to-day interactions.
Good stuff - happy for your new situation.
I'll add my 2c that I used to work at a famous shop (that you can read about on Bloomberg TOP every other day) and moved to a no-name for this reason. My former PMs had their own "assistant portfolio manager" teams that were basically their inner circle who determined trade directions. Analyst ideas were acknowledged, but too often things would get traded that were in my coverage and I would find out about it on the blotter. PMs had whimsical directional market views that they chased with the reasoning behind it often a mystery to the broader analyst team. Learned how to navigate the politics and be an aggressive pitcher (because this "every man for his own" environment demanded it), but I was not learning how a good PM thinks and why they do what they do. Looking at how the older analysts fizzled out, I knew I wasn't going to get trained to be PM material.
New shop has very low-key profile in the industry, but my PM is fantastic at feedback sharing. He doesn't always agree with me, but I'm always crystal clear on why. Trades rarely ever done without analyst's solid input and I have changed his mind on occasions where we disagreed. Learned more about investing in last 6 months than I had in 3 years at former shop.
assistant TO the portfolio manager