Citadel exit options?
This question is for a friend's younger brother, who's a college senior and accepted a job offer at Citadel's investment&trading analyst program. He's excited but is concerned about the exit opportunities afterwards. Supposedly you get assigned to a group after your rotation, and he's worried that his options might be limited depending on which desk he gets into. What do Citadel analysts usually do after they leave? Are they able to land at other elite hedge funds fairly easily?
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He should have no worries about exit opps no matter what area of finance he wants to enter
Agree with the above . With citadel on his resume, he can write his own ticket.
same citadel that blew up in 08? congratulations to your friend, i doubt i could get a job at citadel, but the any fund that can down ~50% year is not anything special imo.
? He's right.
I'm actually curious about this, but from a different angle.
When my fund recruits for our research team (we're a concentrated equity, fundamental value hedge fund), I never quite know how to deal with the resumes of candidates from citadel who cross my desk. Like, I've never talked to one that's impressed me enough to make it past a first round interview but my sample size is very small to draw conclusions from (I've interviewed maybe 2-3 candidates from citadel over the past three years but countless dozens of bankers and ex consultants and ex ER).
I guess my point is, I have a general sense for what a starting level analyst does at an investment bank or a consulting firm or a mutual fund, but I have bugger all understanding of what a starting investment and trading analyst at Citadel does and none of the ones I've interviewed have ever given me a good understanding of it. Are they trade assistants (useless to me)? Are they like fundamentals driven buysiders (much more useful to me)?
This, of course, is complicated by the fact that their careers website is not helpful in the slightest. Can anyone who was in the program or has some experience with them give me some details on this?
I wouldn't interview anyone coming out of Citadel. I've heard that place is a total shit show.
What DOES an analyst in citadel do?
+1 to what PennTeller wrote. I've seen a bunch of kids with experience their. Huge dispersion in quality, only thought 1 was competent.
Weird. Citadel has some of the smartest people in finance, especially their ITAP program, which is insanely selective.
Not trying to toss monkey shit at Citadel. As I said, I've had pretty limited experience with them and we really don't cross paths with Citadel in our little area of finance. I just don't know if I've gotten a mediocre batch of resumes or if they're just not going to be a fit for my fund (in the same way that a guy from Renaissance might be 4x smarter than I am but he's not going to do well at our fund given our strategy) or if the training program just isn't that good/selective.
Is Citadel insanely selective? I know they recruit at Harvard, Yale, etc. but that puts them basically in the same category as basically every other bulge bracket investment bank, major consulting firm, and a ton of less selective employers as well. How many analysts are there in the ITAP program? Are they genuinely competing with MBB and Goldman/MS for their candidates or is it just another one of a dozen other pretty decent employers who I should take a look at but not give any particular weight to?
I guess my position is this. I know Ken Griffin is ridiculously intelligent. I know that the team around him is probably ridiculously intelligent. But I'm not recruiting Kenneth Griffin or his top team (and Ken Griffin probably has very little interest in being recruited by ME). I'm trying to recruit the people who the guys two or three levels down from Ken Griffin hired to work two or three levels down from them.
There's a lot of separation between top and bottom and the quality of an analyst is going to be highly dependent on what they learned there and the middle of the line management who trained them. Some places do a damned fine job of training people for the position I'm trying to fill. Others don't. I'm just trying to figure out if Citadel is one or the other.
Thanks for the color, Marked to Market. Good to know I'm not the only one but I'd love to hear other perspectives. Can anyone in the program chime in on what goes on in it?
"any fund that can down ~50% year is not anything special imo."
This is right. It has nothing to do with perception or prestige. Citadel is not special. They market well to LPs and undergrads, fine. But anyone in the industry will tell you that's a headshot no real fund should take (i.e. Paulson in 2011).
Brady4MVP, that helps. Given your comparisons, you seem to be implying that their training/interviews skew much more quant focused, which would explain why I've not found their experience applicable to our strategy. We've had shit luck with DE Shaw/Jane Street candidates too, less because of lack of brain power and more because of philosophical differences in approaching investment problems.
Guess I'll chalk Citadel up to that as well.
If I'm not mistaken, you are at a fundamental long-short equity hedge fund. If that's the case, then candidates from citadel/de shaw/jane street would not make sense. You would probably be better off focusing on banks, investment management, and some consulting.
Yes, clearly I've been doing that. But as I referenced in my original post, I didn't really have much idea what someone junior at citadel does day to day so I didn't want to be tossing potentially good candidates unless there was a good reason to. The difference in training/strategy seems to be a perfectly valid reason to do so.
Plenty of 2nd and 3rd year M&A analysts go to HF ... just cuz you got a HF on your resume don't mean you're a genius. I've met plenty of dum dums.
Then again citadel down 50% probably not their fault.
Brand only gets you so far
We do not hire from there but see resumes all the time. I think you should tell your buddy his exit options are too stay employed for two years then think about it. Most people i know didnt stay very long.
and Citadel of early 2000s is not same firm today
It's a big company with a lot of different people.
One of our clients is a PM at Citadel in their long/short fund and he's one of the brightest people we work with.
He'll be fine. Take the job.
Count me among those who say you can write your ticket with Citadel on the resume. I mean, that name on the resume - it will def get you interviews.
Up 20% this year. Like everywhere you will get the good and the bad. At Citadel probably the bad is high turnover and stress. The good is the name brand. Yes it will open doors down the road and yes it will make you look smart.
Here in Chicago, when people find out that you work at citadel, they assume you're a brilliant rich genius. You're basically a demi-god in the young professional social scene.
When i was in Chicago i thought everyone at Citadel was a huge nerd....
and we dont extend interviews often to Citadel people.... so selling the idea that you write your own ticket
citadel has some of the brightest & most accomplished guys working in the market that I trade. certainly cream of the crop in terms of talent and Ive worked with some directly before they made the move. impressed with all of them
I do work at a quantitative place, so I think I should probably explain why I did not find those I interviewed that impressive (except for 1). The people I interviewed were clearly bright, had excellent resumes and had worked in areas at Citadel that I would have guessed would prepare them extraordinarily well to impress me.
Those I found lacking didn't have any sense or understanding of how their particular area of expertise fit into a broader whole. This is different from being dumb, but it is somewhat troubling to me that they often did very impressive sounding things without really understanding why they were doing them or what they were doing at a deep level.
To comments here about the "prestige" factor, I would mention that these people had prestigious undergrads already. And, while the "prestige" of their employment may have helped get them in the door with me, they didn't seem to have learned much while there.
None of this is to throw shit at Citadel, or to suggest everyone there is a robot without independence, but I am not sure I would recommend someone capable of getting a job there should take it without thinking carefully. I have obviously interviewed only a small and probably biased subset of those who have worked there. However, for people with the high end undergrad stats, I am not so clear on what value Citadel adds. Oddly, I would not make this criticism as much of GS or JPM based on experience with junior people there.
Incidentally, they just passed their highwater mark.
Yup. Bloomberg just released their top 100 hedge funds of 2011 by % return, and citadel is in the top 5. When you have some of the smartest people working there, it's bound to get back to their highwater mark. This is also one reason why i think paulson will recover as well.
GoodBread, can you please post a link to the said reference? I have a friend who recently got a quant research kind of job there too.
On the other hand, S&P (dividend adjusted) is also nearing it's high watermark from 2008. To the OP though, your friend made a fine choice. Just make sure he doesn't slack during training (since they supposedly cut a % of the class).
I think it adds significant value above a HYPS degree, but this is within the fairly narrow universe of HF. Most finance focused kids out of a HYPS type program can get a solid banking job, but very few will land at a place like Citadel. You can't "write your ticket" in the sense that you're guaranteed a job at a place like KKR, Capital Group etc., but you probably can jump to any similar HF, or stand a decent shot a launching your own fund after a few years. I'd also challenge the "high turnover" bs that everyone has been led to believe. Yeah, there's turnover there, but it's not insane like everyone seems to believe. Maybe 10-15%. And frankly that's a good thing. Some funds literally never seem to fire anyone, or maybe one person over 5 years. That's bad news if you're a part of a decaying team.
http://dealbreaker.com/tag/citadel/
Check out the top two stories.
Nice read, thanks!
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