PE Compensation - General Unsatisfaction?
Recently, I've seen many an article about low satisfaction with regard to pay for PE proffesionals across the spectrum ((Assoc-Principal, potentially not partners upwards), some of these have been specified as total comp and some articles blindly say pay and list the average base at each position.)
Why is PE comp not as sexy as it once was?
Will we continue to see relative low pay to the past era's (is this be an inverse function of interest rates, thus a function of returns), is it just excessive saturation...., and is this going to be a continuing trend?
and, (lol) should i just change career trajectory to HF?
You're an industry analyst, or at least you're trying to become one, right? That's what investors do. Why would moving from PE to HF, another industry that has been in secular decline for much longer, likely yield higher compensation?
I'm ignorant to say the least, but you cant short sell in PE?
And is it not the style of investing that generates the returns and therefore your comp, can you not be so much more creative as a HF in your example in a declining market you get both sides, and in general higher comp ceelings?
Do yk how hard short alpha is to source lmao
Previous commenter is not saying the stock market is declining, they are saying the market for hedge funds (i.e. LP demand for public markets investment vehicles) is declining. It's harder than ever to be publicly traded, and a bigger and bigger share of companies and GDP are privately held, at least in North American markets. Plus, a lot of LPs have figured out that many hedge funds just aren't differentiated because market information in the digital age is pretty freely available to anyone who can read a 10-K.
It was a weird article. Cash comp for juniors is as high as it’s ever been and didn’t have the same violent reset as bankers did. Carry is way less lucrative now than quoted a few years ago but not like many folks at the VP/principal level are counting on massive carry checks. I think dissatisfaction has more to do with general malaise / ennui across the industry but objectively still a great and lucrative W2 job with a low potential of outsized returns if things hit.
Eh would disagree...yes, MF / UMM junior cash comp is good but there are a lot of LMM / MM shops that don't pay good cash comp relative to banking / other finance jobs especially given the pay bump banking has seen during COVID. Have seen some very subpar comp numbers for LMM shops (and there's no guarantee that there will be a better WLB...) - part of that is function of supply / demand given today's very competitive PE job market
Then people would argue well PE is for the longer-term carry comp - but as discussed ad nauseam recently, the carry pool has gotten smaller and much harder to make those outsized returns and get those DAW numbers
Then you add on top of it the high unemployment rate in PE today given the number of firms that can't raise and are winding down...who knows when the market will recover but there is a lot of dissatisfaction in PE today
Think we all know the underlying driver of the new diversity of PE experiences — the industry has democratized (somewhat).
You see this with lawyers. Cravath started the elite law firm idea — we only hire from xyz schools and it’s the best of the best in terms of signaling value, and therefore we charge high prices because we’re so brilliant and we get these kids by paying big. Now every big law firm does this. And so there is a bimodal distro of law grads in terms of income. The ones that go to the elite firms and the ones that do other law jobs.
Similar thing has happened in finance. There has been a massive increase in the demand for Alts exposure due to unfunded pensions, aging population, definitely ZIRP, etc.
So an industry that previously was pretty exclusively reserved for a relatively small number of professionals and firms became much larger. There are now a million banks and pe shops. Some firms still market to LPs based on “our sheer brilliance” and so have to hire only really elite backgrounds and those folks have a pretty easy time moving around firms or industries into whatever other jobs, because they have such strong signaling value in their resume. Other firms have different LP marketing stories or are just like one guy’s scheme so they hire folks who have less leverage, and so those folks make less money generally. Couple this with the overall hyper efficiency of the sorting economy these days and you get a situation where “PE” is no longer, at all, a one size fits all. Everyone knows this but we still sometimes allow it the connotation of a one size fits all because it admittedly used to be the paradigmatic example of a one size fits all where everyone is a cookie cutter (and generally extremely marketable) professional. Now it varies more.
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