Does being good at your job on Wall Street consume you as a person?
Am a few years into a buy side public equities investing role and I realize that I don't particularly want to be like the senior people around me. Most of them don't have much going on in life except their job (you need to be locked in on the news flow 24/7 in public markets), are out of shape, balding, etc. They're constantly stressed and being whipped around by market rotations, tweets, and other things outside their control. They sacrificed their youth and the vast majority of them can't even beat their benchmarks. While I knew that Wall Street is a demanding and time consuming job, I never realized that people will end up this hollowed-out until I started the job full time. All of the PMs I've talked to admit that they have no edge in this business.
I understand providing for your kids and having a big house gives people meaning but surely there are other ways to achieve this. Don't want to open up another tech vs finance debate but I wish I realized that even though investors are obsessed with moats, they thenselves have no moats/edge so they have to constantly locked in to the markets (and still underperform).
Go to a systematic place. I found that leaving a bank(where most senior people were consumed) to a prop shop that was mostly systematic was like night and day. People would shut off their computers at market end and then just disconnect entirely.
Unfortunately I missed the boat on being a quant.
You don't need to be a quant to be in a systematic fund. Systematic fund != all quants. Plenty of people with fundamental knowledge are needed to help run trading strats. You can also go back to school and get a degree and pivot. I've seen a lot of people do that after a few years, as the burnout isn't worth it at a certain point. Lots went to get MBAs and masters, few others got PhDs
This is normal. Save money and start thinking about what else you would want to do.
So I don't fully agree with this statement but I've lately been worried that my job was turning me into a "boring" person because I don't really have much else going on outside of it - the free time I do have is spent keeping fit and healthy, or relaxing/travelling.
What I've come to realise is that while what I do is work, it is something that I'm genuinely passionate about and I feel privileged to be in a position where I can do the things that I do through work - regular travel, meeting people I'd otherwise never be able to meet, living in different places, and slowly beginning to at least work my way into the rooms where semi-important decisions are made (at least relating to my asset class). I regularly have to remind myself of all this stuff because it's very easy to get into a cycle of taking everything for granted and whining about packing another bag to fly (business class) to wherever, or giving up an evening to do another roundtable at Nobu. But back to the point: yes this has consumed my life to an extent, but all things considered I'm happy about it.
I'd say the one partial casualty is that I feel some distance with some of my non-finance friends. When I hang out with my buyside friends there's barely any talk about money, everyone there is doing well for themselves (many if not most of them much better than me btw) and we happily spend hours nerding out about our asset class or talking about some antics that happened on an investor trip last month or whatever. But whenever I talk to a few of my friends in corporate roles, especially one in particular who's been a close friend since I was a teenager, I just feel like he's always trying to either prove himself to me or one-up me career/money wise. It's really tiring/tacky, was never like this before, and for the record I've never told anyone who isn't in a similar role what my (pretty average) bonuses were or anything.
Thanks for sharing your views and I'm glad you found happiness in this.
That's what I don't like about public markets. It's open to everyone, which makes it even more competitive. Might as well do PE to clock in everyday like one of those 1950s propaganda clips. Husband leaving after his morning coffee and kissing his wife goodbye.
u are looking at cautionary tales, not role models.
if ur seniors are fat, bald, and can't beat the benchmark, they aren't "successful". they are just highly paid hamsters on a wheel.
the job consumes you when you have no edge. when you have no edge, you have to grind 24/7 just to survive. that is hell.
you realized the game is rigged in public markets. investors preach "moats" but have none themselves.
don't accept that fate.
pivot to private markets (PE/Credit) or a niche where the edge is real. grinding for alpha that doesn't exist is a fool's errand.
run.
I thought about pivoting to PE but where is the edge when PE has been around for decades and asset values are pumped up? Owners and operators are smart now and any decent asset will have a bunch of PE shops circling around it.
Yes, you must be be locked in. Surround yourself with mediocrity and that’s what you’ll end up being.
When roughly 90% of active equity managers underperform over a 10 year period, it feels like underperformance is just part of the job/structural.
I think a lot of people are different. I know a Goldman partner (long time family friend) and he seems like a normal guy, 40s-50s + in-shape + has some quirky fun hobbies / bit nerdy by nature. There is no way you could guess he's a big shot on Wall Street by meeting him in a casual social setting.
What does your family friend do? Is it a role that requires him to be plugged in all the time?
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