Distressed debt career

Given that high-yield has not been very high (until the last 3 weeks), most firms were focused on out-of-court restructurings/recaps etc. With new filings and a looming recession, there's likely to be more bankruptcies in the next 18months. From a firm perspective, there are distressed-to-control buyers (Apollo, Oaktree, Knighthead, Och Ziff, Centerbridge, etc), more nimble HF'/Multistrat groups (Anchorage, SP etc) and a lot of in between. The biggest difference between these shops are the types of deals you can work on. For example, if you have a $10B distressed fund, you aren't deploying 50M checks (needs to be 500+ to make it worth your time). However, there aren't many big filings out there right now which leads to creditor violence (see Envision) for the limited opps that exist.

Most of these firms take analysts who are out of restructuring groups or out of B-school/PE and comp is competitive. Varies if you are at a HF style (lean teams, higher comp, higher vol) or like an Oaktree where there are 6 people on a deal team.

If you get tired of distressed, marketability depends on what kinds of deals you worked on. If it was more distressed-to-control, you should have the same skills as a regular PE guy.  Spent the last 4 years in distressed and would say the biggest difference between me and the L/S guys is that I spend more time looking at the downside than the fairytale upside (and I'm also not down double digits this year).