LMM is underrated
Your career is going to be easily 50 years long and maybe more, already current retirement age is 67 in the USA, 66/70 in the UK and will 300% rise due to the pressures of looking after an ageing population
Yes the LMM experience is highly variable but on average/median, it offers quite a bit more chilled lifestyle than MF/UMM, once your in the space and know more people, I imagine you can optimise for this later more easily
You have a higher risk of burning out in MF/UMM meaning that you won't really get to reap the full benefits of a lifetime career in PE over 50 years with all the compounding and investment returns
Things life office politics exist everywhere and are more a firm specific than sector specific problem
Even if you don't burn out in MF/UMM, you might often find that there's no space above for you because the guy/gal doesn't want to leave so you have to go downmarket anyway, let alone the chances of making it senior in a huge fund
You still get to make multiples of the avg. salary in your respective city/country
The work can arguably be more interesting from the perspective that there's generally more focus on operational improvement instead of getting returns via leverage
Yes I know the optionality isn't the same but at some point you gotta just friggin decide what you want to do. LMM PE still gives you a relevant skillset to move into business roles in tech and other areas if you so choose, sure not the sexiest roles but nevertheless
Sure I admit I get a kick out of saying yeah I work for bank X and the prestige but that's not what really matters in life. I get that some people want to work on the biggest deals and that's fair but my point rather is that the level of focus on getting into a huge fund is warped. LMM isn't for everyone but its for more people who want to do PE than I think they realise.
Having a role at a great company is not the same as having a great role. Apollo hiring you is great for them, you're making them a lot of money, doesn't mean its necessarily great for you
Thanks for listening
One thing to keep in mind is that while LMM may be more chill on average, it’s extremely firm dependent. I know LMM guys who work 9-6 and I also know LMM guys who work longer hours than your typical MF person. You can’t just go work for a LMM firm and assume you’ll have a great life.
The other thing I’d consider is your tolerance for drudgery. The nice thing about LMM PE is that it tends to be very entrepreneurial with fewer roadblocks to actually getting deals done but you also end up spending a lot of time doing mundane/annoying/tedious data cleaning, babysitting your management teams during important meetings, lack of 3rd party resources / research, etc. A lot of that shit it taken care of at larger funds so you can focus more on investing, which is presumably what you signed up to do. Not saying one is better than the other but there’s definitely a trade off.