Best (and worst) IB Groups for Moving to Hedge Funds Post-IB

Pretty straightforward. What are the best and worst groups for moving to a value or L/S hedge fund? I know M&A is good for all types of funds (broadly speaking), & LevFin is good for credit/distressed, but mainly I'm interested in the coverage groups.

How do Healthcare, Media & Comms, and Industrials place into these funds? (Looking for broadest options, not just sector-specific funds)

21 Comments
 

Why TMT and Consumer? If anything, those are the industries with the most intuitive business models, so it's not that difficult for anyone to claim that they understand those industries

If anything, I would pick an industry that fewer people can understand like HC, FIG, IND

 

RX places well for distressed or credit focused funds.

Anecdotally, I’ve seen some good L/S HF exits from HC, but agree that TMT and Consumer are probably best.

 

No need to be sarcastic, nobody mentioned it in the thread yet. Maybe it's obvious to you, but prospects might come along and find this thread down the road and find it useful.

 

Intern so take it w a grain of salt but I think if you did any classic group at GS or any of the top groups at Barclays it’d be great cuz you get sector and M&A experience

 
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In no particular order - M&A, TMT, FIG and healthcare

  • M&A: Generally speaking, you get the more technically rigorous folks from banks that have the M&A team focus on execution - MS, JP, EBs etc. The toolkit is very valuable especially in special situations
  • TMT: Pretty self-explanatory. Aside from specialized industry knowledge in sectors like semiconductors, the talent pool within TMT runs extremely deep   
  • FIG: The nature of the sector demands higher precision with technicals and analyzing complex businesses. I also find more intellectually oriented folks similar to RX. By extension, I can have a FIG analyst cover consumers, tech, and other relatively "straightforward" sectors, but having a non-FIG analyst cover FIG is another ask. Not that its overwhelmingly hard, but its far easier to train one to learn the business model of Chipotle etc.
  • Healthcare: To deep dive in the industry with the appropriate level of due diligence, I absolutely require a healthcare background analyst. Pre-med, Masters and other higher education degrees in life sciences-related fields are a huge plus. A colleague who explained (1) the science behind mRNA and (2) identified why Moderna will pop in 2020 is now a senior PM   
 

Ignore the above comment. Go to the group which offers the most breadth and insight into your areas of interest. Eg. If you go into HC you’re more than likely going to be in a pod or fund which deals with HC derivatives. M&A will filter into merger arbitrage.

Also two notes:

1) the technical modeling in M&A is completely different from HFs so no idea how that would prepare you - alpha isn’t generated by building acc/dil models.

2) I’m not a medical expert but the HC comment about analysts knowing about drug trial phases and different types of genomes is comical

That is all.

 

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