When you're trying to break into the HF industry, at the lower levels (i.e investment analyst), how critical is it that you know your preference about equity vs. fixed income and whether you are interested in specific strategies, such as merger arbitrage, global-macro, fundamental value, etc. or can you be more of a generalist who wants to get a little bit of everything before specializing?
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Seems kind of important.
A lot of people recruiting into the industry would probably be alright doing one of a few strategies. The reason people concentrate is not only because you're more interested in one type of investing, but that recruiting is hard. To make yourself a viable candidate for a merger arb, macro or fundamental credit group requires entirely different skill sets that take a lot of work to build. Are you going to have viable pitches that you're prepared to explain and defend for each strategy? When they ask you about your investment philosophy, are you going to be able to give one catered to each firm that doesn't sound hollow? When they ask about your story, will you be able to give one that logically builds to recruiting for each of those firms without coming across as disingenuous? How many investing books are you willing to read, because value, arb, macro and credit all have different "bibles" so to speak. You'll be recruiting against people who's singular goal in life is to land that role, do you think you can beat them while juggling everything else?
Not only all of that, but those firms want to hire someone interested in what they do. If they sense you're more interested in getting into any fund versus their fund, then you probably won't get it.