Best S&T Groups at Baird?
Anyone know what the best S&T groups are at Baird in their Milwaukee and New York offices. I also haven't been able to find much info on MM S&T in general, so more insight on the status of the MM S&T industry would be super helpful as-well.
Baird does well in munis. They have a nice niche there and underwrite a lot of smaller deals. Munis are generally a very niche market with so many credits who all do deals of various sizes that it is does not make sense for the BBs to try to be involved in everything. Also there is wider bid ask so you can make money using less balance sheet. The MM space in S&T is set up to do 2 things.
With the direction bid/ask is going across products and consolidation on the buyside I think a BB is where you want to be, but the right seat at an MM can be lucrative.
I don't think comp is way less, but I think if looked at the amount of revenue that banks generate in munis its not as much as other products. The trade sizes tend to be smaller and you can only make up for that so much in bid/ask. You can't short munis so it really is a buy for a dollar and sell for 2 market, its very demand/client flows driven. If one of the major mutual funds is selling for whatever reason you better hope there is enough bank/insurance demand to meet it otherwise the market is going wider, and that has nothing to do with fundamentals of the sectors or general market tone. In other asset classes things tend to be correlated, in munis not so much. Ex- Stocks open weak on some news, and all sectors of credit are now 3-5 wider, munis could be 3-5 tighter (flight to quality) or 10 wider for some other reason that nobody would have thought. Also hedging is spread/rate risk seems impossible there really is no good way to do it. All that being said I think its going to be harder to replace people but if I knew the future or automation I would be in tech or at a VC trying figure out how to make it happen or invest with people who do.