Working for good HFs with bad PR

Many good HFs have had periods of bad PR. For instance, Millenium Partners (back in 03/04), Moore Capital (in 2010) and currently of course SAC Capital.

It's one thing if a no-name fund is caught in a scandal but quite another when a well known fund faces one. All three funds mentioned above are of course very good ones. But would it be a good idea to accept an offer from them when they are in trouble?

How many of you would be willing to accept an offer from SAC Capital now for instance?

6 Comments
 

No it's not bad. Overall, these are still highly reputable funds. The only time I've ever heard that that it was bad to work at a firm was if you worked at Madoff Investments no matter if you were a low-level analyst or senior executive. I've seriously had a director at a headhunter firm tell me that banks were flat-out declining to interview people who worked at Madoff because it would look bad for them. Rumor is a lot of Wall Street firms ran along this mindset as well.

It would only be bad if you worked in the same division of the HF with bad PR. So if you work in the same sector trading division as the SAC insider guy, then that may be touchy, but aside from close commonalities it isn't bad.

 
Best Response
HaurMany good HFs have had periods of bad PR. For instance, Millenium Partners (back in 03/04), Moore Capital (in 2010) and currently of course SAC Capital.

It's one thing if a no-name fund is caught in a scandal but quite another when a well known fund faces one. All three funds mentioned above are of course very good ones. But would it be a good idea to accept an offer from them when they are in trouble?

How many of you would be willing to accept an offer from SAC Capital now for instance?

If you work at SAC you essentially work for your manager who works for Steve. PM's get a cut of their P&L and then pay their analysts out of that. Cohen doesn't have a clue who a lot of the analysts are, he isn't responsible for them or gives a shit what they think unless they are directly responsible for the information that leads him to personally put a trade on. An offer from SAC is still a good offer, most likely because you are working for a talented PM that can take his book to any number of multi-manager shops.

 

Its funny, I was just talking to my friend and there is a guy at his firm, who was almost about to work for Galleon Group. He had a chance to move there, but ended up taking his current gig.

Array
 
TeddyTheBearIts funny, I was just talking to my friend and there is a guy at his firm, who was almost about to work for Galleon Group. He had a chance to move there, but ended up taking his current gig.

Your friend was really lucky!

BTW, does anyone know if Galleon employees who had nothing to do with the insider trading landed on their feet when the firm closed? Or were they tainted by the association?

 

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