Pay attention to specialty finance/lending

Hot take for everyone here (or maybe not so hot)...

If you want to kill it in life while still being able to have a life, go to markets where talent is lacking and demand for capital is plentiful. This is obvious to some, but everyone on WSO is obsessed with making it into MF PE while I personally know people in more "boring" financial jobs that absolutely crush it in terms of comp and WLB. There are people in fields like equipment finance, litigation finance, trade finance, etc. bringing in boatloads of cash while working half the hours. Some of these assets yield 25-40% with minimal work needed from the investment team (relative to a multi-billion dollar PE deal) if you can source deals. Hell, even generic LMM factoring firms can generate ridiculous cash flow to the partners (charge borrowers 1.5% per month, recycle capital constantly, deploy from a bank line costing you 9%...do the math).

Sure, this is less sexy work. And yes, you're capped by portfolio size as you can only scale so far in niche pockets of the market. And yes, you might be pigeonholed (likely). But you can still have an interesting career while having a life worth living.

Add in all the innovation that can be brought to these markets via fintech solutions and you have a pretty interesting opportunity for those who are ready to get their hands dirty.

Just food for thought. For everyone else, keep crushing it in whatever you're doing.

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