As I browse companies and people ON LinkedIn to cold email I notice that some firms have no analysts. Is this typical for small firms? I am trying to land an analyst position, but I am unsure if it is worth emailing or contacting these firms/people if they do not have analysts already?
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Often there are no people with less than 5 years experience (or more). Some funds just have seniors, particularly boutiques. There are some roles for recent graduates, but these are mostly at very large firms.
Try and get a role in research. That's probably a better path anyway - as a junior at a fund you'll be doing a lot of grunt work which isn't always relevant to investment strategy.
What kind of grunt work? Just curious.
Really depends on the fund itself, the strategy and the asset class. It could be making presentations for asset consultants or researchers, it could be collating analytic data from different sources, it could be running attributions. It will take time and experience before you've got responsibility for much research, which is why many funds don't like to hire recent grads.
Any tips on making myself more appealing to these firms? recent grad no experience, wrote CFA level 1 a month ago
For full disclosure I'm not in AM - I'm research, but I work closely with funds and know a lot about staffing (much more than is made public).
Frankly, you're not an attractive candidate with no experience. Writing CFA has little gravity until you start passing levels. If you didn't go to a strong university, this makes things harder too, especially with nothing else on your application. For the few intern/graduate positions I've seen, the competitive candidates all had internships under their belts, and many of them had work experience too. This is also the case for the more reputable research houses, though there is some flexibility here. The most recent junior hire I know of at my firm had a degree from a top local university, over a year of contract work and just sat CFA level 3. He came in as a first-year employee equivalent (same as what you'd be looking at).
Hiring in AM is much less about networking (like IBD) and about what skills you can bring to the table. There is no global training program like there is for banking, there are not dozens of associates and analysts who can show you the ropes. For the smaller (and leaner shops), it's a bunch of senior guys, and they don't have the time to go through the basics. They're looking for specific skills and experience which recent grads don't have.
The thing you can do to make yourself more attractive is to get a full-time job in a related field - preferably research, as I said above. Depending on your skill set and what you want to do, there are other options too. I have seen a lot of quantitative analysts come from middle office analytics roles. I have talked to a boutique about how they didn't want to hire someone already in AM, but were hoping for someone from a credit rating agency. Sometimes commercial banking (particularly credit origination) is useful if you want to work for a loan fund. I've also seen juniors pop up from corporate treasury roles.
Wow, awesome. Thanks for the response. Looks like I have a long uphill battle ahead of me.
Try looking for titles like specialist and associate.
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