Star / Top Trader
When articles talk about star traders or top traders at XYZ firm, are they actually top-performing traders? How would journalists know? Are PnL's published publicly somewhere? Also, do traders have a reputation across banks/firms? Like would people from Morgan Stanley be aware of a 'top trader' that works at Citadel?
Simply put, yes people know who the star traders are in different places, although sometimes the media makes a few mistakes here and there especially when ranks work differently at specific banks and it looks like someone got promoted unusually fast (eg ubs directors being VPs at most places).
Reason is fairly simple really - pnl stats are fairly well known simply because at many places they are published quite transparently to entire teams, and these people talk to their counterparts on the street/brokers/headhunters. Headhunters often even have compilations of the PnLs at different teams of different shops, and generally they roughly know the monetary ‘transfer’ value of successfully poaching specific high performing individuals
Also, many senior traders know each other and poach from each other; it’s fairly common for a boss somewhere to ask their friend (who might be the boss) at another place about whether they should hire certain traders
If the stats are published, does that mean you also know who the deadweights are 💀 That sounds highly stressful 😬.
Yes, everyone knows who the laggards/loss makers are, which is I guess why trading really isn’t a job for everyone
Generally, if the media reports that a trader is leaving or transferring to a different firm, does that mean they are 'worth' reporting on? Do they ever report on mid/low-performing, irrelevant traders?
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