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Everyone knows that the people who achieve a place on investment banks’ summer analyst programs are impressive. If you don’t have a pile of top qualifications, you’re not going to get in. Most summer analysts have also spent at least two months volunteering. They have run various university societies and maybe started a (vanity) company on the side. So far, so identikit. – As one Goldman Sachs recruiter complained, the industry is deluged in “plug and play” types.

Every now and then, however, someone a little different comes along. In 2011, Xenia Tchoumitcheva, a Swiss-Italian-Russian model who speaks six languages, turned up for J.P. Morgan’s intern program. The U.S. bank liked her and offered her a full time place. Tchoumitcheva didn’t accept and now runs a lifestyle website instead. Zahrah Madihah Hussain, another professional model who arrived as a summer analyst at Morgan Stanley in 2015 did accept and is now a member of Morgan Stanley’s bank research team at London’s Canary Wharf.

There are no current or ex-‘super models’ among this year’s summer intern classes (as far as we know). There are, however, a smattering of people who’ve done things that are a bit different to the rest. We’ve posted a sample of them below. If we’ve missed anyone significant out, please email us (editor@efinancialcareers.com), or let us know in the comments box at the bottom of this page. In an industry replete with uniformity, it’s encouraging to see a little difference.

1. David Fong, markets summer analyst at Citi in London

David Fong may look like your archetypal Imperial Electrical Engineering penultimate year student and senior vice president of the college finance society, but he has hidden depths.

Fong also has a CertHE with Distinction in Sound Recording from Surrey University. He’s a sound engineer, an accomplished violinist, and has been known to DJ and bonfire nights and barbecues.

2. Christopher “Lambie” Lanman, investment banking summer analyst at UBS in New York

Christopher Lanman has it all: a place studying political science at Yale University, an IBD internship at UBS, and a sense of humour.

When he’s not studying or playing football, Lanman can also be found at The Odd ducks, Yale’s comedy show, where he’s a performer. This could stand him in good stead: bankers who are also comedians are becoming a thing.

3. Ranulph Tees, equity research summer analyst at J.P. in London

Tees already has plenty of internships under his belt. A philosophy and economics student at London’s UCL, he’s completed the Economist’s internship program and a two month internship at Close Brothers Asset Management. There’s more to Tees than just his finance experience though. He also toured Greece in 2014/15 with a production of Euripedes’ Bacchae, and London’s Tatler magazine reported that he tried to storm a naked cabaret during a friend’s 18th birthday party ta few years ago.

4. Caroline Ririe, IBD analyst at BAML in New York

Ririe’s competing a bachelor’s degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She’s also in a band which has released two albums and plays across southeast America. You can see Ririe playing the violin and singing here.

5. Eloka Agu, investment banking summer analyst at Goldman Sachs in London

Agu’s an analyst at Goldman this summer. He’s already been analyst at Accenture, has work-shadowed a project manager at Google for a month and has had two months’ work experience at the British houses of Parliament. Agu’s on track to achieve a first class degree at Warwick University, but this isn’t his big differentiator. At the end of his list of achievements on his LinkedIn profile, Agu says he’s the “top personality in the UK.” Try matching that…

6. Andrew Camp, global markets summer analyst at J.P. Morgan in London

A lot of accomplished interns have dabbled in small side businesses. Few have been really successful. Camp seems to be an exception: he’s founded two successful businesses (a Rock School drumming business and an online company that trades second hand musical instruments) and used the profits he generated to set up a property investment company, making him a self-funded landlord at the age of 18…

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Traditional, fundamental human traders and portfolio managers are being challenged by technology to a greater extent than ever before. As a smaller percentage of the hedge fund industry uses purely discretionary methods and a greater percentage incorporates systematic trading and big data analytics, it’s likely that the best long-term career opportunities will be at firms specializing in quantitative trading strategies.

For the first time this year, three computer-based hedge funds elbowed their way onto the fund of hedge funds LCH Investments’ all-time top 20 list of the best performers – D.E. Shaw (third), Citadel (fifth) and Two Sigma (20^th), which all implement systematic strategies executed by trading algorithms. LCH estimates that those three quant behemoths, plus Bridgewater’s partially systematic Pure Alpha Fund, have made their investors $90bn over the past decade.

Bill Libby, the head of electronic quant sales in the Americas at Goldman Sachs, serving as a moderator at the Battle of the Quants conference in New York, asked his panel: With such huge, successful quant hedge funds like those three and Renaissance Technologies, which reportedly manages in the ballpark of $70bn, can smaller quant teams, startup firms and emerging managers compete in a world where you need economies of scale?

“The headline is that, yes, all aspects of quant trading are becoming scale businesses, and it’s increasingly harder for new players to make their mark against entrenched competition, partially due to the nature of the business,” said Manoj Narang, the CEO and founder of MANA Partners, formerly a vice president specializing in statistical arbitrage strategies in fixed income and derivatives markets at Goldman. “It is a finite sum business, and the opportunity set doesn’t get larger just because new players want to enter – you have to extract a slice from an entrenched player, which makes it difficult.

“Just like you wouldn’t go head-on against Google or Apple in their core businesses, the best way to make your mark is to do something unique and new,” he said. “There are far more great ideas out there than there are people to execute them, and everything is obvious in hindsight when looking back at things that were successful years.”

Some of the large players have gotten so large that they bypass some profit-making opportunities because they don’t deem them to be significant enough to be worth their while, Narang noted. Well-positioned small fry can pounce on them.

While it’s difficult to gain traction and win over investors without a long track record of success, it is possible for new firms to find a niche and build a business around the trading algorithm or investment strategy that they’ve discovered.

“If a small fund actually has its own privileged algorithm that makes money and the strategy is competitive, the founder will give investors the better strategy to increase their capital, whereas big funds may not, and when changing positions they have a big impact on the market, while small funds are more flexible,” said Huadong “Henry” Pang, a quantitative research analyst and risk strategist at Global Sigma Group who previously worked at J.P. Morgan and EY.

“Big funds have more resources, so as a small fund, they could be better in some fields if they specialize, just focus on one thing and be the best,” he said.

The bottom line is that new entrants and modestly sized quant firms should avoid trying to beat the big dogs of the quant space at their own game and instead embrace their idiosyncrasies.

“There’s no sense in starting a firm to launch a traditional quant practice, because economies of scale are so difficult to achieve,” said Maximilian Roos, the CIO of Sixty Capital Advisors who previously worked at Bridgewater, Goldman and BCG. “That said, there is a lot of room for innovation for small quant funds that do different things.

“We focus on flows to and from ETFs with lower levels of liquidity, so smaller specialized funds like ours will be successful if they’re doing something unique,” he said.

Low trading volumes and low levels of volatility make it especially difficult on smaller quant funds, which still have to deal with high cost of doing business, Narang said, so it helps to diversify your revenue streams.

“We launched a fintech practice that leverages the same IP as our trading business, and we explicitly seek to monetize our technology via products and services providing research and data over multiple business lines, which helps us to reduce or manage the costs more effectively,” he said.
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Step aside Goldman Sachs with its competitive omelet station: There’s a new healthy banker foodstuff on the block. It’s fine, as long as you don’t look at it too closely.

The food in question is a healthy concoction of chia seed, almond milk and granola that bears a strong resemblance to frogspawn. It’s to be found in the large sixth-floor canteen known as the Terrace at Nomura’s London office. There, you can eat your pot of dubious-looking combination, which helps power your brain, whilst overlooking the Thames River.

Pseudo-frogspawn isn’t all that’s on offer. Nomura also has a kitchen garden that includes a habitat for bees and other bugs and many different types of vegetables, including Hakurei turnips, which the cooking staff uses as ingredients in the meals. The canteen is full of healthy options, Business Insider reports. In addition to fruits and veggies, there’s sushi, a build-your-own burger station, Cumberland sausages and chicken schnitzel.

Nomura’s London employees can allow themselves some dessert on a hot day: There’s low-fat frozen yogurt, with toppings if they’re really feeling frisky. Finally, there’s a sweet shop that doubles as a dry cleaner for the messy eaters among them, although candy is reportedly far less popular than the gluten-free, chia seed, almond milk and granola concoction.

Separately, even with the U.S. Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule in limbo due to the Trump administration’s opposition, the main elements of the law went into effect at the beginning of this month.

That, combined with the increasing popularity of low-cost, passive investment vehicles such as exchange-traded funds (ETFs), have helped independent registered investment advisers (RIAs) win business from the wirehouses – Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, UBS and Wells Fargo Advisors – and other big broker-dealers.

Investors’ heightened scrutiny of fees since the financial crisis has benefited RIAs – most of them far from Wall Street – at the expense of big traditional brokerages, The New York Times reported. In fact, independent financial advisers’ market share has increased from 13% to 23% since 2005, according to Cerulli Associates.

One example is the investment advisory firm Creative Planning. Based under a dentist office in a nondescript building in a Kansas City suburb, Creative Planning is riding the wave of the latest wealth management trends, surging from handling just $34m in 2004 to $26.2bn with advisers in more than 30 states today. It is averaging a new hire every single day.

Meanwhile:

Democratic lawmakers are pressuring Deutsche Bank to disclose sensitive information about its loans to President Trump and its alleged involvement in a trading scheme that allowed wealthy Russians to launder more than $10bn. (Bloomberg)

Venture capitalists snubbed Trump. (Bloomberg)

Morgan Stanley managing directors and recruiters responded to questions that the bank’s interns asked. (Business Insider)

There’s one thing that new hires and interns must do to be successful at a Wall Street firm. (Business Insider)

The British bank Barclays is currently leading the pack for investment banking fees on its home turf. (Financial News)

In preparation for Brexit, Japanese banks Nomura and Daiwa Securities Group have both decided on Frankfurt to serve as their E.U. subsidiaries’ HQ. (Financial News)

Paul Walker, former co-head of the technology division at Goldman Sachs, has joined the board of directors for OpenFin. (headoftrading)

Michael Romanowski, previously a director in credit sales at Barclays, is becoming a director on the high-yield sales desk in the global credit products division at Credit Suisse. (Yahoo Finance)

Fintech lingo explained. (Reuters)

A poll of asset managers found 85% are confident that they’ll be compliant with MiFID II’s unbundling rules by the end of this year, while the other 15% are in full-on panic mode. (The Trade)

A Princeton economics professor and author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street is changing his tune on the active vs. passive debate and smart beta. (New York Times)

Billionaire Leon Black, the CEO of buyout firm Apollo Global Management, sold Alberto Giacometti’s elongated sculpture of a female nude for $22.6m. (Bloomberg)

A new study found a correlation between a love of black coffee and sadist or psychopathic tendencies. (indy100)
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Is there really any point of going into banking nowadays? After all, the hours are still long, the people are mostly identikit uber-achievers (with a few exceptions), and the pay is lower than it used to be. Why not go into consulting, or technology, or realll any other industry at all?

Because, if you’re lucky, banking still pays. And it still pays a lot – especially if you stick with it beyond the age of 30. So says new analysis from the analysts at Bernstein Research who – having perused some of the historical figures on this site and elsewhere, conclude that banking pay is not now as low some would have you believe.

1. In your early 20s you can earn three times more in investment banking than the average job

You might fancy becoming an accountant or a broadcaster or a civil servant instead of going into banking. If so, you’ll still earn a lot less than if you leave university and achieve a front office banking job. Admittedly, it shouldn’t be about the money, but the discrepancy is probably big enough to make you stop and think: Bernstein says entry-level banking jobs pay three times the average entry level pay for other sectors in the UK.

Bernstein analyst and associate

2. Banks are paying more to attract recalcitrant students

Banks like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan seem to have no problem attracting hundreds of thousands of applications from students (who likely want to earn enough to pay off their student loans). Last year, Goldman said the number of student applications it received had increased 46% since 2012.

However, Bernstein’s chart below suggests there’s still something in the notion that students are less enthused about banking than they used to be. Between 2014 and 2016, the percentage of Harvard MBA graduates going into finance fell from 33% to 28%. MBA starting pay increased from $160k to $190k over the period.

Bernstein attracting associates

3. Pay for some 30-somethings has come down though

While banks are putting out to pull people in, Bernstein suggests they’re more complacent about paying people who’ve been around a while. Compensation for mid-ranking vice presidents (VPs) has fallen since 2012 – especially for people who’ve been VPs for one or two years.

Pay has fallen for VPs

4. But you probably shouldn’t leave banking until you’re AT LEAST 34 years-old

Bernstein’s most exciting chart (below) suggests that if you can stick it out beyond the mid-VP level, it will be worth it.

By the age of 30 you should, cumulatively, have earned $1m in front office banking. Thereafter, cumulative pay increases exponentially. By the age of 34, you should (cumulatively again) have earned $2m. If you can stick it out until the age of 42, Bernstein says you’ll have earned nearly $6m over your banking career. Do you really want to quit aged 27 for a small and ultimately unsuccessful tech firm?

Bernstein cumulative

**5. However, most people in ‘banking’ don’t make this money**

Don’t assume that just because you get a ‘banking job’ you’ll be paid this sort of money though.

As the charts below show, hardly anyone in finance works in front office investment banking (IB) (ie. in sales, trading, M&A or capital markets), and those who don’t aren’t paid much more than people doing something entirely different. Most people who work in banks are working in the retail or commercial banking sectors. Even within investment banks there at least twice as many people working in support roles in the back and middle office as there are in the highly paid front office jobs. These jobs don’t pay nearly as much.

Banking vs median

Bernsteing banking

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So, you’ve got yourself a summer internship in an investment banking division (IBD)? Congratulations, but…you haven’t got the job yet.

It’s not unheard of for banks to hand out only 1-3 offers for every 10 summer internship candidates. You need to work at your internship. You can’t rely on your Oxbridge credentials and excellent grades to get you past this hurdle.

If you want to land an offer, a sign-on bonus, and a relaxing final year at university (probably the most relaxing you’ll have in a long time), do this.

1. Show commitment. Commitment is key in in investment banking. You need to use your internship to demonstrate that this is what you want to do as a career. Do not raise questions about the lifestyle. Do not say you want to start your own business. Do not say you want to leave in a few years for a hedge fund or private equity firm. For the moment, you want to be a banker. And you want to be a banker forever.

2. Be reliable. Do your work! The analyst/associate who assigned you that piece of work needs to know that you are working on it and that he will not end up doing it for you.

3. Be swift but thorough. If you’re in IBD, you’ll be using a lot of Powerpoint. Be honest with yourself – does your Powerpoint presentation really look good? Ask your buddy/mentor to have a quick look before handing your final/near final output to the guy who staffed you. Ask for feedback. Never repeat the same mistake twice. Work on your Powerpoint, Excel and printing skills to ensure you can turn things around quickly.

4. Always reply to emails. It is not acceptable to leave an email hanging in banking. On the other end of that email is a nervous banker thinking his weekend is ruined because you haven’t done your job. The best reply starts with “Sure, will do”. It is also common to thank the person for the work he/she just gave you.

5. Don’t be stupidly keen. Don’t insist that you have to work on financial models. Don’t insist that you can deliver something in a few hours when it will take a day. Don’t spend 20 hours in the office when 15 will do. Sleeping four hours a night will not do anything for your ability to get the job done.

6. Show smart curiosity. You have plenty of friends: their names are Google, Investopedia and Wikipedia. Ask them simple questions about the meaning of financial terms and how to get things done. Save more complex questions about the work you’re doing for your staffer. For example, ‘Are those companies acquisitive?’ ‘Why is this company presenting those targets to PE firms?’ ‘What is the bank’s role in this situation?’ These are the kinds of questions that junior bankers love to answer. They will be made to feel smarter than you.

7. Make friends. Socialise, socialise, socialise! If no more than 2 people know your name by the end of your internship, you are in trouble.

Thomas Viguier and Guillaume Tardy-Joubert are the founders of Coaching Assembly, a website to help students get jobs in IBD. Both were former analysts at Moelis & Co.

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High frequency trading firms are supposed to pay well. After all, they don’t need many actual people – algorithms place trades instead of human beings, and the few humans that write and manage the algos are supposed to cash in on the results. How is it then, that at least one top firm pays a fraction of any self-respecting hedge fund?

Sun Trading International just released its results for the year to December 31st 2016. During that time, the average of 26 employees at the London-based operation was paid $241k (£189k), down 8% on one year earlier.

$241k is a lot of money. But it’s not exactly hedge fund territory. After all, Balyasny Asset Management paid people an average of $794k per head for the same period.

Sun’s figures suggest HFT isn’t the pot of algorithmic gold it’s made out to be. Nor is there some kind of uber quant creaming money off at the top end: the highest paid individual at Sun International earned $366k last year. On this basis, the company looks more egalitarian the average hedge fund.

What’s up with the HFT high pay generator? Try falling profitability (profits fell 21% at Sun Trading International last year), increased regulation, low volatility (creating fewer trading opportunities), high data costs, high trading fees and the high cost of the technology systems that underpin it all. Revenues at Sun Trading International rose 16% last year, but the company’s net loss went from $1.5m to $2.1m.

Pay aside, Sun’s results also reflect just how hard it is to get a job with an HFT. Last year, the firm only employed seven traders at its international operations. This was one fewer traders than the year before. If you’re quantitatively inclined, you might be better off trying your luck at a systematic hedge fund instead.

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Leaving Goldman Sachs and joining UBS is becoming a theme this year. As we have variously reported, the Swiss bank appears to be rebuilding its fixed income capabilities with salespeople and traders drawn from its U.S. rival.

The latest GS man to move in this direction is thought to be Dmitry Khoroshavtsev, an experienced emerging markets trader. Colleagues say Khoroshavtsev resigned this morning. He’s thought to be joining UBS.

Neither Goldman nor UBS responded to a request to comment.

UBS aside, Khoroshavtsev isn’t the first emerging market trader to leave Goldman this year. Gokhan Buyuksarac quit for Nomura in April. Buyuksarac’s exit followed that of four other traders from Goldman’s emerging markets desk in the previous 18 months. Goldman in turn hired an emerging markets trader from Cantor Fitzgerald in London in May.

The FCA register indicates that Khoroshavtsev joined Goldman in 2013 after a seven year career at Barclays. He’s unlikely to appear at UBS until the fourth quarter due to Goldman’s three month notice period. If and when he does, it could be taken as a sign that UBS is paying guaranteed bonuses to lure people across. – Why else would a trader leave Goldman Sachs halfway through the year?

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The crowdsourcing model for developing trading algorithms has gained traction on the buy side and is picking up momentum. Just as Uber and Airbnb have disrupted their respective industries, it is only a matter of time before “the gig economy” makes an impact on the sell side as well.

Tom Ducrot, the founder of venture-capital firm Fides+Ratio and a former executive director at Morgan Stanley, moderated a panel at the Battle of the Quants conference in New York that included four of the biggest players in the algo crowdsourcing space: Quantopian, Quantiacs, WorldQuant Challenge and CloudQuant.

These firms are in effect crowdsourced quantitative hedge funds – rather than employ in-house developers, they host competitions and invite freelance developers to write trading algorithms, which are then back-tested. They put real money behind the best of the bunch, and the trading algo development gig workers get a cut of the profits.

The way they tell it, this model is already starting to upend the asset management space and is likely to grow in significance. If you’re a great coder who would never be caught dead wearing a suit and tie or working at a bank or hedge fund, this could be your chance to get in the quantitative finance game – without changing out of your bathrobe or leaving the house.

Printer repairman by day, trading algo developer by night – if you’re lucky

Jonathan Larkin, the CIO of Quantopian, whose resume also includes J.P. Morgan, Millennium Partners, Nomura, BlueCrest and Hudson Bay, said he believes the addressable market of people with STEM-based backgrounds is around 25m globally. To date, the firm has attracted 140k people to its website who have used the research and data environment to back-test their trading strategies. A mere 25 have had their strategies licensed however: a success rate of just 0.02%.

“We don’t profile people when they come on board, before we license the strategies we get to know them and do full background checks,” Larkin said. “We’ve licensed strategies from 25 people living on five continents, and the common denominator is their technical experience in a modeling field, typically not financial services, but everything from academia to the oil and gas industry and someone whose day job is calibrating printer jets.

“If we license a strategy then we can act as a consultant, and our only revenue is as an asset manager operating strategies from our community,” he said. “It’s our intention to invest significant capital in these – right now it’s a maximum of $10m per algorithm but we’re trying to ramp up to $50m by the end of the year.

“We pay people a fixed percentage of P&L just like I used to do in a former life working at a multi-manager hedge fund.” Larkin omitted to mention what that percentage is.

The gig economy plus data science plus algorithmic trading equals crowdsourced hedge funds

Martin Froehler, the CEO of Quantiacs, formerly with IdeaLab Research, identified two big trends that are converging: first, the decentralization of labor spurred by companies like Uber and Airbnb; and second, data science becoming more mainstream to the point that it is now frequently taught in universities. His firm hosts Python coding competitions and offers machine-learning libraries.

“Crowdsourced algorithmic trading is at the intersection of these two friends,” Froehler said. “Quants get to retain their intellectual property, and the only risk that they run is that they don’t manage money, but if they do manage money, then there is unlimited upside.”

Coders without borders

With these crowdsourcing platforms available on the Internet, it democratizes the allows someone in a remote village in India, a farmer in Brazil and a video game developer in Russia to potentially monetize their trading algorithms, said Rich Brown, the CEO of WorldQuant Virtual Research Center a.k.a. WorldQuant Challenge. The firm has around 50k active users on its platform, the majority from academia. He says around 25k trading algos, which he calls alphas, have received assets.

“These coders want to work at home at their leisure to develop these strategies, and there are people all over the world pursuing these opportunities,” Brown said. “Even undergraduate students, if they are engaged in our consultant networks, then they can develop these alphas, and they are getting used.

“If you can come into these platforms, incorporate data, whether it is alternative or traditional data, get an understanding of this industry and apply your skills and get paid, that’s great.”

Quantitative research and data science applied to create trading strategies

Morgan Slade, the CEO of CloudQuant, formerly with Merrill Lynch and Citadel, said they officially put their website up publicly six months ago and now researchers in 70 different countries are using it already. He sees this crowdsourced development model as an opportunity for students, recent graduates and career-changers alike.

“We’re tapping into the new skills coming out of educational institutions and students’ and graduates’ new ways of looking at things, but there are also opportunities for experienced people to connect the dots related to the ontological relationships between the data and the stock markets and other assets,” Slade said. “There are huge untapped resources out there, and we try to engage with the researchers as if they were employees and support them as such.”

Two of the freelance researchers wrote trading algorithms that were so impressive that Slade hired them as full-time portfolio managers.

“We’re building [in-house] teams to support [freelance] researchers’ investment strategies, and we expect that to continue,” Slade said. “If we see people who are especially talented, then we might decide to have remote teams centered on individuals who stand out.

“To be successful, they have to master a prediction step, a portfolio construction step and a trading expression step – we give researchers the chance to take a stab at portfolio construction and trade expression on their own,” he said. “We help them with things they’re not going to be good at, such as trade expression – we help them get better execution and give advice on portfolio construction if they need it.

“People are spending their free time doing research, and if they weren’t getting something out of it, then they wouldn’t be engaged with our site, and there are also experienced traders who don’t have the ability to build what we have – people are eager to retain their IP, which we let them, so add it to our platform and we can both make money off of it.”
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If you want to make it to the top of Goldman Sachs, you’ll need to be a dedicated team player ready to subjugate yourself to the whims of the firm. Right? Not exactly. While these qualities will surely smooth your passage to the executive suite, Vanity Fair’s new profiles of some of the Goldmanites in the Trump administration, suggest something extra is necessary too.

In the case of ex-Goldman COO Gary Cohn, this extra something appears to be an ability to speak extremely bluntly whilst still being liked and respected. In the words of one former Goldman Sachs board member, Cohn is “straightforward…he’s right from the brain to the mouth.” Cohn, who’s dyslexic, gets away with this because he’s also, “unusually bright,” and gifted with extraordinary concentration: “He’s never read a five-page memo in his life, but when he asks you to describe something to him he pays incredible attention and remembers every word,” said Robert Steel, an ex-Goldman Partner who’s now CEO of Perella Weinberg.

If Cohn speaks bluntly, Steel says it’s never with the intention of deprecating other people. And if Cohn’s got a “strong character,” he also kind and solid. “He has nice kids, one wife. He’s not obnoxious. He looks you in the eye. I’ve never heard him say a single thing derogatory about anybody.”

When it comes to Dina Habib Powell, the former global head of corporate engagement at Goldman, who’s now helping Trump promote the rights of women, the special something seems a little less meritorious. The GS people who spoke to Vanity Fair, said Habib Powell has a special talent for making her superiors think she’s special. “Her gift is that she’s incredibly politically astute,” said one former Goldman Partner. “She is an incredible worker of people and relationships, and she is that type of person where, if you come into the room and Dina wants to make you feel like you’re important or whatever, you are going to feel it.” Another former GS colleague said Powell, “can manage up better than anybody I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” and that she is therefore able to make the people she works for think she’s, “unbelievably good and competent ” at what she does.

Former Goldman colleagues who didn’t feel the full force of Powell’s charm seem skeptical that this is the case (one describes her knowledge of finance as “content lite”), but Powell has convinced the people that matter. Lloyd Blankfein was and is a big fan. “You’re going to find she’s going to be a very big, positive surprise to you. You’re going to find out that you end up counting on her for much more than you could imagine,” he reportedly told Trump when Powell left GS.

Separately, don’t cross Deutsche Bank. For the German bank bears a grudge. The Financial Times reports that Deutsche “shunned” UBS when it chose banks to help with its recent €8bn rights issue. UBS played a lead role in Deutsche’s 2014 capital raising, but this time around it was excluded altogether. The reason appears to be staff poaching: UBS has been “aggressive” in its recruiting for Deutsche’s wealth managers in Asia. John Cryan’s not going to let that go.

Meanwhile:

Stephen Pierce, Goldman Sachs’ global head of equity capital markets is retiring after 31 years with the firm. (NY Times)

Deutsche Bank was going to hire Rob Allard, a former Deutsche Bank executive who ran the structured product sales team before moving to Goldman Sachs in 2008. Weirdly, it pulled Allard’s offer at the last moment and no one knows why. (Business Insider)

Are you a European banker working in the City of London? The British government proposes to divide EU citizens into one of these three groups. (Bloomberg)

Nomura wants to charge clients $134k a year to access their favourite analysts. (Bloomberg)

Deep learning models in finance. (SiNews)

There will not be actual quantum computers until 2027. (New Scientist)

Google’s AI fund just invested in Algorithmia, a marketplace and enterprise solution that allows developers to easily tap into its catalog of 3,500 algorithms, functions and machine-learning models. (TechCrunch)

Working your ass off isn’t bleak. Provided there’s a purpose, sprinting at an unsustainable pace is an act of tremendous optimism. (ShyamSankar)

Visa wants to hire a BlockChain engineer who is “experienced with Ethereum and blockchain architecture to be a part of team tasked with building distributed application.”.Total Industry experience must be 8+ years, which is about twice as long as Ethereum has been in existence. (ZeroHedge)

Can you solve this? BZ R UNIACEM VY XRGMPZXX KW OK BHWIYRBVCM, VZ VUEVBZ TFJW OK BHKMYRBAVVG. (Goldman Sachs)

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Photo credit: Dina Habib Powell, Head, Impact Investing Business, Goldman Sachs; President, Goldman Sachs Foundation by Chatham House is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
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If you’re an analyst in a front office job with an investment bank, you’re probably doing pretty well for yourself. Emolument.com, the real time salary benchmarking site, puts the median and salary and bonus for a front office analyst in London at £57k ($72k). Bernstein Research says analysts in banks earn starting salaries three times higher than those who go into other professions. Comparatively, therefore, 22 year-olds in finance are “rich,” but at least one seemingly doesn’t feel rich enough….

A student at one of the UK’s top universities claims an analyst on the trading floor at Citigroup is monetizing his position by charging eager students for interviews and informational sessions. The analyst’s going rate is reportedly between £5k and £7.5k ($6k to $10k) for advice on presentation skills and working in the industry. “This was just in response to me asking for an interview with him!,” the student complains, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Citi declined to comment on the allegations in the absence of validation of the claim or further information on the analysts’ identity. The student declined to provide additional information.

If true, the allegations suggest that at least one junior banker has struck upon a potentially rich seam of additional income (albeit one that is not sanctioned by banks and could lose him his job). Applicants to investment banks typically outnumber places in a ratio of around 40 or 50 to one, meaning anyone already on the inside has potentially valuable information to impart to all those trying to get in.

This wouldn’t be the first time bankers have charged handsomely for advice on penetrating the industry, although most do so after leaving rather than whilst still employed. Muzaffar Khan, a former Barclays trader and London School of Economics graduate, once offered students advice as a “success coach.” Peter Harrison, a former executive director at Goldman Sachs, provides students with advice on presentation skills and applications in return for an upfront fee, plus 12% of a student’s first year salary (if successful).

Whether most students can afford to pay this kind of money is open to question, however. In 2012, Magali McIntyre, a former M&A banker at Lehman Brothers, set up a website enabling experienced bankers to offer students coaching and application advice for £300 an hour. It closed down in 2015.

If you’ve experienced analysts charging you for advice, please get in touch at the email address below.

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If an investment bank posted a 332.5% increase in profits, you’d expect it to bump up pay and indulge in some celebratory expansion. But things don’t work that way on the buy-side.

A case in point is Blue Mountain Capital Management, which has just released its 2016 accounts for its UK operation on Companies House. Its profits surged from £4m in 2015, to £17.3m last year – a 332.5% increase. And yet, it reduced the number of staff it employs by 11%.

Blue Mountain’s accounts suggest it had 42 people in the UK at the end of last year, down from 47 a year earlier. The $22bn hedge fund only breaks out front office employees in its London operation, so those five missing staff were all front line investment professionals. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) register offers an alternative perspective on the departures: it suggests two registered employees out of 30 disappeared in 2016 and that departures have continued this year, with a further seven exiting since January. As we reported, Peter Greatrex, its head of private investments, left in January.

The good news is that, for 2016 at least, the remaining staff were paid more. Blue Mountain’s compensation costs were largely in line with 2015, at £16.6m. Average pay per head in 2016 was £395.6k, up from £353.2k the previous year. Blue Mountain also said that it paid an additional £1.1m to ‘key management’ last year, down from £1.7m in 2015..

Blue Mountain’s shrinkage contrasts other large U.S. hedge funds in London. Balyasny Asset Management increased its UK revenues by 117% last year. In response it doubled headcount and increased average compensation to £624k.

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You’re being offered an operations job in an investment bank. In banking vernacular, you’re being given the chance to work in the “back office” on the infrastructure that helps the “front office” (where all the revenues are earned) to function. Back office jobs are important – banks couldn’t operate without them. They’re also an increasing source of competitive advantage – banks that have efficient back offices are more efficient overall. And they’re easier to get – fewer people want to work in the back office and there are plenty more jobs there. Most banks have at least two back office people to every member of front office staff.

So, if the back office of an investment bank dangles an offer, should you accept? Not if you want to maximize your earning potential.

Contemporary figures from Emolument.com, the real time pay benchmarking provider, suggest that over a 16 year career in a front office banking job (eg. sales and trading or M&A), you’re likely to earn 88% more than in the front office. Median front office compensation over a 16-year period is likely to total £3.1m ($4m) according to our analysis of Emolument’s figures. Median operations compensation is likely to total £1.6m ($2m) over the same period.

We’ve plotted the implied earnings by age in each sector in the chart below. The figures are derived from Emolument’s pay data for interns, analysts, associates, VPs and MDs, which is smoothed after assuming a three year period in each role (interns excepted).

The pay divergence widens from the age of 30 – from director-level up. Predictably, the discrepancy is partly down to bonuses: whereas managing directors (MDs) in the front office receive bonuses averaging 93% of salaries, bonuses in operations top out at 44% of salaries. However, salaries for MDs are higher in the front office too, at £230k vs. £160k in operations roles.

Does anything mitigate this low pay? Well…the hours are usually shorter in the back office jobs, but you can probably still expect a 10+ hour day. Worst of all though, operations jobs now have some of the highest levels of insecurity: as banks look to automate processes and cut costs, operations staff are on the front line. – Just ask Deutsche Bank or Barclays. By comparison, junior bankers in M&A are confident they’ll still be employed (and paid) even as computers take over the more boring parts of their jobs.

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Hedge funds seeking artificial intelligence expertise need to cast the net wide these days, due to a shortage of people and a massive uptick in demand over the past 12 months.

Citadel has just turned to Microsoft for the new role of chief AI officer. Li Deng, who joined the tech firm straight out of academia 17 years’ ago, has just joined Citadel’s hedge fund operation in Seattle, but will work also across Chicago and New York.

Deng announced his move to Citadel on LinkedIn yesterday, saying that he was “very excited about the opportunities for artificial intelligence innovation here and the firm’s passion for growing its leadership in this space.” Citadel didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Deng was chief scientist of AI and partner research manager at Microsoft. He joined in December 1999 from Waterloo University in Washington where he was a professor. He clearly has a passion for expanding AI knowledge – he headed up Microsoft’s AI school, as well as founding its deep learning technology centre.

Citadel is the latest big buy-side firm to create a new role heading up AI and machine learning as hedge funds rely on ever-more complex datasets to gain an edge over the competition.

Man Group brought in William Ferreira as head of machine learning for its discretionary hedge fund business GLG in April. It was a newly-created role and he previously worked at Florin Court Capital. David Ferrucci, who previously headed up IBM’s development of super-computer Watson, joined Bridgewater Associates in 2012 and now heads up its AI function, the Systematized Intelligence Lab, which has been growing this year

He’s kept his hand in academia, and was affiliate professor at the University of Washington for over 17 years until he joined Citadel in May. He’s written numerous books on using deep learning for automatic speech recognition as well as deep learning applications and methods.

Citadel already has a head of machine learning. Pradeep Natarajan joined from Amazon, where he was a senior research scientist, in October 2014.

It’s also its second stab at poaching from Microsoft – it brought in Kevin Turner, the tech firm’s ex-COO as CEO of Citadel Securities in August last year, but he left just seven months later. He’s now founder and CEO of his own start-up Forward Progress Ventures.

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Priya Mistry has a demanding but rewarding job at London Business School (LBS). As portfolio director for finance, it’s her role to ensure that LBS’s Executive Education programmes are as relevant and engaging as possible, to meet the career needs of finance professionals across the world.

“With the economic and political landscape constantly changing, businesses are facing new challenges to ensure growth,” says Mistry. “I make sure LBS delivers a portfolio of intensive-learning programmes that help professionals – from middle managers to boardroom execs – deal with this change and master a wide range of financial tools that fill crucial gaps in their knowledge and help them make the best strategic decisions for their business.”

LBS offers a variety of Executive Education programmes in finance, all led by world-renowned faculty and lasting for about five days each on average. These include four courses in corporate finance, as well as topics such as strategic investment management, project and infrastructure finance, mergers and acquisitions, private equity, finance for non-finance executives and financing the entrepreneurial business.

Mistry says LBS Executive Education programmes attract future business leaders from around the world who want to become better decision makers, develop areas of technical expertise, or deepen their current knowledge in a particular field of finance.

“There’s a great mix in our classrooms – you’ll be learning and networking with people from several different countries and industries. They’ll all be in roles which require an understanding of finance to make critical strategic decisions, but they might be lawyers, engineers, senior advisers, members of a family business, or chief executives” says Mistry.

But why do an Executive Education programme at LBS if your own company also runs training and development schemes?

“People who’ve completed our programmes tell me one of the main benefits of LBS over in-house training is that you get a greater variety of global perspectives, which encourages you to think about things in a different way,” explains Mistry.

“Having run Executive Education courses for 50 years and being based in the vibrant city of London –which naturally draws talent – we’re able to attract a high calibre group of participants to our campus. You learn a lot from the experiences of others in the classroom” she adds.

You also receive fresh insights on business and finance from the LBS lecturers. “Not only are our finance faculty some of the world’s best academics in their fields, they also have extensive industry experience,” says Mistry. “They’ve advised governments, been consultants for leading companies, and have been awarded prizes for their research.”

“They bring this research into the classroom, and also provide practical examples based on their insights from case studies. And because they’re so well connected, they give you knowledge that you couldn’t get from reading a news headline or textbook,” she adds.

You won’t be spending the week just listening to lectures, however. Mistry describes the Executive Education programmes as “interactive boot camps” in which participants solve problems (based on several real-life case studies) in teams and then present their findings to the wider group. To encourage participation, LBS typically limits each class to 40 people on average.

LBS also taps its long-established connections in London’s financial district to bring in senior-level guest speakers who are industry specialists.

“These are often people who’ve actually been on the deals you’re looking at in class, so they give you hands-on insights,” adds Mistry.

Mistry says the best aspect of her role at LBS is hearing from people who’ve completed an Executive Education programme and have used their new expertise to make positive changes at work.

“Finance professionals tell me that because these courses are intensive – you get a lot of new knowledge within a short timeframe – they were able to add value immediately when they returned to their jobs,” she says.

“One participant said they used the knowledge gained from the accounting and financial analysis programme to immediately negotiate a 10% increase in their company’s credit limit with the most important mortgage bank in Brazil. They also incorporated other new features into their credit analysis, significantly improving future credit-limit scores,” explains Mistry.

Another person “made the return on their investment during the programme as he instructed his team to change a clause on an existing deal, saving the company thousands”.

If you want to succeed during an Executive Education programme at LBS, Mistry has some advice: “Prepare yourself – it’s time for you to invest in your professional development, so delegate as much work as you can. It’s going to be an intense week, which you’ll love if you get involved as much as possible. Your company will then reap the rewards when you return and make an impact.”

Above all, Mistry says you should take advantage of opportunities throughout the week (LBS organises breakfast, lunch and dinner events) to network with faculty, guest speakers, and fellow participants.

Many participants stay in touch with each other long after the programme has finished, she says. And if you complete three Executive Education programmes, you can become an LBS alumni and gain access to the school’s 16,000-strong alumni network, spread across more than 150 countries.

“Your learning doesn’t need to end when you’ve completed the one week course,” says Mistry. “The networks that you make with other senior professional can last a lifetime.”

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The Financial Times has identified a peculiar anomaly among employees of one of the world’s top investment banks: on one hand, they don’t especially like their jobs, on the other they idolize their leader.

The bank in question is Goldman Sachs, although something similar seems to be afoot at J.P. Morgan. The FT notes that current and former Goldman Sachs employees using Glassdoor rank the firm extremely badly for work life balance. – It’s allocated just 2.7 stars out of a potential five. “Be prepared to say goodbye to family life, exercise routines and hobbies,” one former Goldman technology employee complains. The FT also observes that Goldman’s ranking on this particular dimension is below that of Sports Direct, the UK retailer accused of subjecting staff to conditions similar to a “Victorian workhouse.”

Simultaneously, however, Goldman staff think CEO Lloyd Blankfein is just great. In fact, Blankfein is one of Glassdoor’s highest rated CEOs, with a 93% approval rating. J.P. Morgan’s staff are equally adoring of Jamie Dimon, whose approval rating is 91% – even though J.P.M bankers use Glassdoor to complain of fragmentation and political infighting.

What’s going on? The FT doesn’t claim to know. It suggests that what Glassdoor’s figures do seem to show though is that people who work in banking love their bosses irrespective of their working conditions. – Which is odd.

Separately, if you want to inject yourself into a fast growing of finance right now, you could always try cybersecurity services provided to companies in the midst of a merger. Bloomberg has spoken to Deloitte, which thinks this is the new steaming thing. “It’s something our very large customers are asking for in the final phases of a deal, as part of a mapping of potential risks,” says the head of cyber-risk services at Deloitte. “..It will become a pillar of M&A decisions,” he predicts. Deloitte is targeting revenues of $1.9bn from this by 2020.

Meanwhile:

Goldman Sachs says ETF purchases are on pace to hit a record $300 billion in 2017 – more than 2015 and 2016 combined. (Bloomberg)

J.P. Morgan thinks banks’ rates trading businesses will grow by an annualized rate of 7% for two years. (Bloomberg)

BNP Paribas has become one of the top three investment banks in Europe. (Bloomberg)

New reasons to get yourself to a quant hedge fund. (Business Insider)

Jamie Dimon was spotted having lunch with ex-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick on Sunday. (CNBC)

Stephanie Flanders, the former BBC economics editor who left to join JPMorgan Asset Management has left to run a new team of 120 economists and journalists at Bloomberg. (Financial News)

Citi hired Toby Ali from Bank of America to head its leveraged finance group in Europe. (Financial Times)

Citi also hired Karl-Georg Altenburg for a newly formed advisory board to help the bank and its clients navigate Brexit. Altenburg was Deutsche Bank’s co-head of corporate finance in EMEA before retiring in late 2015. (WSJ)

SocGen combined its electronic and high touch trading teams ahead of MiFID II. (The Trade)

Michel Barnier outlines exactly what’s required to maintain the rights of EU citizens in the UK. (Europa)

There is no downside to high levels of self-control. (British Psychological Society)

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Headcount at Brevan Howard has been heading down this year, as Alan Howard’s hedge fund deals with fund outflows and ongoing poor performance.

However, like most hedge funds, Brevan Howard appears willing to invest in quant expertise. It’s just brought in Duncan Larraz, who was latterly head of quant analytics at asset management firm Tages Capital. He joined Brevan Howard as a strategist earlier this month.

Larraz was head of collateralized debt obligation (CDO) investments for UBS’s asset management arm in Chicago until he left to found London-based hedge fund Morganweiss Capital in April 2012. He then joined Charles Street Capital’s systematic investments division in 2013, before moving to asset manager training firm Essentia Analytics in December 2014, where he was head of financial engineering. He signed up to Tages Capital in May 2015.

Larraz’s arrival comes as Brevan Howard has been losing staff. Its Master fund is down 3.8% so far this year, according to Bloomberg. Last year, Brevan cut employees by 32% – it had 178 employees in 2015, but reduced headcount to 122 by the end of March last year, according to its latest accounts.

While Larraz bolsters Brevan’s quant analytics team, actual traders have been trickling out. Most recently, James Watson, a Brevan Howard partner who joined in 2011 after a four-year stint at Morgan Stanley where he was head of swaps trading ex-euro, left for Millennium Capital Management in May. Meanwhile, former Goldman Sachs prop trader Andrew Dausch who also joined Brevan in 2011, left for Moore Capital Management and Mark Deniston left the hedge fund to lead GDP rates trading at Royal Bank of Scotland in January.

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The ‘Goldman Sachs of private equity’ has been hiring junior bankers in London. And guess what? It likes to hire from Goldman Sachs. Or, maybe…J.P. Morgan.

KKR’s most recent London hire is drawn from Jamie Dimon’s stable. Risham Saif, an analyst who spent nearly two years on J.P. Morgan’s leveraged finance team, has just joined as analyst in London. Saif follows in the footsteps of Vazgen Badalyan, another JPM analyst who joined KKR in after a year in a half in January, and Paul Atefi, who spent a full eight years in J.P.M’s lev fin team and joined KKR in May.

KKR clearly quite likes to hire from J.P. Morgan. However, it also quite likes to hire from Goldman Sachs: around 15% of its London staff are GS alumni. In May, KKR poached Alexis Augier, an analyst from Goldman’s securitisation team. Augier had only been at GS 11 months. In February, it poached Christopher Drewson from rival private equity fund BC Partners. Drewson had been at BC 18 months, but he was at Goldman for a year before that.

What makes KKR so appealing? Having a big brand name helps. KKR ranked second as the most popular private equity fund to work for in our ideal employer survey. You’re going to be keeping your “optionality” open with KKR on your CV. You should also do well out of any carried interest – albeit not until you’ve been there for several years. And KKR’s share price is rising – it’s up 11% since January, compared to a rise of just 2% at J.P.Morgan and a decline of 9% at Goldman Sachs. That’s nice, given that KKR paid out $111m in equity-based compensation in the quarter ended March 2017.

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Steve Cohen might be prepping a massive new $20bn hedge fund, but the build out of his ‘family office’ Point72 Asset Management in London continues and is focusing on junior recruits.

After an initial bout of hiring portfolio managers, Point72’s London recruitment drive has more recently centred on analysts, and the bar has been unusually high. The latest junior recruits to stroll into Point72’s St James’s Square office are Ryan Fox, a former equity analyst at the UK operation of Tudor Investment Corporation, and Daniel Sepe, an analyst on the firm’s equity long short fund who joined from BNP Paribas’ equity broker Exane earlier this month.

Like most recent Point72 junior recruits in London, both Fox and Sepe have an investment banking background. Fox started out as a telecoms research analyst at Morgan Stanley, while Sepe was an associate in Macquarie’s investment banking group for three years before joining Exane.

Point72 rose from the ashes of SAC Capital Advisors following a major insider trading scandal in 2014. It has over 1,000 people globally managing $11bn of Steve Cohen’s money and relaunched its London operation last year after SAC pulled out of the UK in 2013. Initially, its recruitment drive primarily attracted former senior SAC employees who had moved on to other hedge fund roles after the office closure, but this year hiring has focused on analysts.

In April, it hired Jonathan Bensoussan, a credit trader at BlackRock who was named in Forbes’ annual 30 under 30 finance list in 2016. He also previously worked in M&A at Goldman Sachs, but is now working as an analyst on Point72’s equity long-short fund.

Meanwhile, Kim Chatall, who spent three years working in IBD at Morgan Stanley as well as spending time as a quant at Handelsbanken Capital Markets in Sweden, also joined Point72 as an analyst in February.

Steve Cohen has bemoaned the lack of talent available to hedge funds on a couple of occasions now, so has focused on hiring in juniors and training them up. Around 80% of Point72’s money managers started out as trainees. As well as the analyst recruitment, it’s also rolled out its ‘academy’ to London and received 1,500 applications last year for three-five available roles.

The best route in is internships, and Point72’s London interns have just started their summer at the firm. Fin Brown, a statistics, economics and finance student at University College London (UCL) – and who previously interned at quant fund Cantab Capital Partners – has just started at Point72, as has Farah Hamzaoui, who is also studying at UCL.

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If you know your hard and soft Brexit, you probably also know your hard and soft Brexit-related banking job losses in the City of London. Oliver Wyman thinks up to 100,000 City jobs could be affected in a hard Brexit scenario whereby a trading agreement with the EU is either absent or negligible. By comparison, if the Brexit is soft and we’re still in the European Economic Area and passporting continues gently unabated, Oliver Wyman says that number could be 8,000, or less.

Not everyone’s afraid of a hard Brexit though. Barnabas Reynolds isn’t, and if anyone’s well placed to judge the Brexit effect, it’s probably him.

Reynolds is head of the global financial institutions advisory & financial regulatory group at U.S. law firm Shearman & Sterling in London. He’s also global co-head of financial institutions for the firm. And he’s a self-appointed bulwark against claims that the City of London stands to disintegrate if the UK crashes out of the European Union without a decent alternative trade agreement in place.

“A “no deal” situation wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing for the City,” Reynolds tells us. “To suggest that it would is to misunderstand the nature of the financial services business. Clients come to the City of London to do business of their own volition. This is how the City has operated for centuries. There is nothing in European law to say that people could not come to London to do business after Brexit if they so chose. Nor is there anything to prevent European banks from setting up London subsidiaries from which to do that business. After all, this is where the liquidity and the expertise are.”

In Reynolds’ eyes, therefore, the loss of the passporting arrangement which has allowed banks regulated in London to operate branch offices in the EU would be a pin-prick rather than a dismemberment. Without branch offices, Reynolds admits that banks in London might be compelled to set up newly-regulated operations in Europe, but he argues that these will be mostly marketing entities. He says the actual business of trading and the management of risk will still take place in the UK, under new UK-regulated subsidiaries of EU banks if necessary..

“There are an awful lot of reasons why people come to the City of London to do business,” says Reynolds. “These aren’t going to disappear overnight.”

From Reynolds’ perspective, passporting is overrated. “Passporting expanded the conceptual perimeter of the City,” he says. “It made it possible for banks based in London to service customers in their home countries, but that came at a price and the price was legislation that was harmonized with the European Union.”

The way Reynolds sees it, the EU’s approach to financial services legislation is misguided. “The European Union makes rules,” he says. “They have a very Cartesian approach – they want to map their ideal environment out in an intellectual way, but this comes at the cost of a mass of red tape and a regime that’s not very market friendly.”

Distinct from the EU, Reynolds argues that the City of London can revert to its historic “standards-based” approach to regulation, which he claims is both safer for tax-payers and friendlier for businesses.

Of course, this won’t happen if the UK opts for an equivalence deal in which London banks are given access to EU markets if and only if EU regulations are emulated exactly. In fact, Reynolds says this would be the worst of all worlds. “The UK doesn’t want to be in a gilded EU cage as a rule taker,” he says. “In this case, we would be better off walking away.”

For Reynolds, the best outcome for the UK post-Brexit is a form of equivalence based upon adherence by the UK and the EU to mutually agreed international principles rather than submission to EU-prescribed rules. “Instead of the status quo whereby the EU legislates for the City, we would work on high level principles at an international level and would ensure that neither jurisdiction is polluting the other in terms of systemic risk.”

Without this, Reynolds says London shouldn’t be fearful of doing its own thing: “A third of the City was destroyed in World War Two,” he says. “It recovered from that and the City can recover from Brexit.”

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While investment banks start to welcome the new class of summer analysts, those with a few years’ experience under their belts may be looking for their first lateral move. So-called ‘first bouncers’ venturing into the job market – either by choice, or by force – still face intense competition for places. This is how they can slip up.

1. Being arrogant

Probably the worst personal trait to show is arrogance, according to Janet Raiffa, an investment banking career coach, the former head of campus recruiting at Goldman Sachs and a former associate director in the Career Management Center at Columbia Business School.

Every candidate has weaknesses, so don’t pretend that you don’t.

“Many top firms suffer from reputations of arrogance, and so they are particularly worried about hiring analysts or associates who play to this stereotype,” she said.

2. Overscheduling and underpreparing

Too many junior banking candidates go into the interview and dazzle the interviewer based on their impressive resume and the force of their personality alone, rather than doing the necessary homework in advance.

“It’s not unusual for some folks to schedule two or three or more meetings, calls or informational interviews in a day, and when you do that you don’t have enough bandwidth to do sufficient research on the organization and communicate how you will add value,” said Roy Cohen, career coach and the author of The Wall Street Professional’s Survival Guide.

“The way you uniquely distinguish yourself is through preparation, and if you book yourself too much and spread yourself too thin, then you’ll be unable to prepare sufficiently,” he said.

3. Being sloppy

In any type of correspondence or communication with recruiters, HR executives and hiring managers, typos and sloppy grammar are typically deal-breakers.

“Such mistakes may be a generational byproduct of text messaging, writing with emojis and in shorthand,” Cohen said. “You have to be really careful that your stuff is proofed and error-free, especially junior bankers, because everything you do is expected to be flawless and precise. Mistakes are not tolerated.”

4. Being too casual

Another big one is being too casual in an interview because you’ve developed a relationship during the recruiting process, Raiffa said.

“I’ve heard about interviewees cursing in interviews, high-fiving, slouching or leaving cans behind for the interviewer to clean up,” she said.

5. Ignoring the ‘fit’ question

Many junior banking candidates lack precision in explaining why they want the job, why they’re a good fit for the firm and why they’re highly qualified for the role. In fact, the technical elements of the various job functions are increasingly less important than being armed with the softer skills that banks’ hiring managers value.

“That’s the trinity you have to communicate: why the job, why the company and why you,” Cohen said. “There’s intense competition for junior banking roles now, and the only way to distinguish yourself from other candidates is to convey your message on those three levels.”

6. Using jargon incorrectly

There are a time and a place for jargon in conversation to demonstrate facility and to signal insider status, as long as you use the term correctly, but the language in a formal resume or cover letter is another story. Novices may get tripped up by using industry jargon if they’re not entirely sure what they’re talking about.

7. Not casting a wide-enough net

Cohen said some junior candidates are overeager and don’t create enough buzz around themselves due to a lack of experience working with recruiters, or they get their heart set on a single bank and overlook good opportunities at less prestigious – but still high quality – firms.

“Creating demand and having a couple of irons in the fire is important,” Cohen said. “Talk about your level of activity with the recruiters you work with. If I know you have nothing else going on, then I’m not as impressed as if I know I can lose you to another firm.”

8. Trying to B.S. rather than owning up to something you don’t know

Sometimes junior banking candidates have a lack of understanding of what the specific duties and responsibilities for the role are and they get caught saying something inaccurate or irrelevant.

“Some junior bankers end up talking about something that’s not necessarily correct, and they dig a hole for themselves,” Cohen said. “If you don’t know something, admit it rather than BSing, and be able in your follow-up to show that you understand it by following up with some demonstrated insight that you gained: ‘I’ve researched the question that you brought up, and the following issues important for consideration.’”

9. Asking how much the job pays or how much vacation time you get

One big challenge in investment banking is that a lot of firms pay the same salaries for a certain level of experience, especially for analysts and associates. For junior bankers, typically compensation isn’t really up for negotiation, and it may be a major turnoff for the interviewer if you bring it up, especially before they’ve made you an official offer. The same goes for vacation time.

Further, junior bankers who leave for a new firm every time that they’re offered a raise risk being labeled as a job-hopper.

10. Badmouthing a current or former employer

It’s vital that you don’t launch into a tirade against your existing employer or a former one, because the hiring manager may think you’d do the same after leaving their firm.

11. Not looking at the big picture

You should have a long-term view of where you see your career heading – your current role won’t last forever, so know the various exit options, including banking competitors, corporate America, tech startups and the buy side, including hedge funds and private equity.

It would also behoove you to consider the impact of artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation on your intended career path.

12. Flirting with the interviewer

The interviewer may be extremely attractive, and you may have plenty of self-confidence, but this is a job interview, not a date, and acting unprofessionally, even if you feel that you’re being flattering, is a sure-fire way to sabotage your chances of getting the job.
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1. David Fong, markets summer analyst at Citi in London

2. Christopher “Lambie” Lanman, investment banking summer analyst at UBS in New York

3. Ranulph Tees, equity research summer analyst at J.P. in London

4. Caroline Ririe, IBD analyst at BAML in New York

5. Eloka Agu, investment banking summer analyst at Goldman Sachs in London

6. Andrew Camp, global markets summer analyst at J.P. Morgan in London

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1. In your early 20s you can earn three times more in investment banking than the average job

2. Banks are paying more to attract recalcitrant students

3. Pay for some 30-somethings has come down though

4. But you probably shouldn’t leave banking until you’re AT LEAST 34 years-old

5. However, most people in ‘banking’ don’t make this money

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1. Being arrogant

2. Overscheduling and underpreparing

3. Being sloppy

4. Being too casual

5. Ignoring the ‘fit’ question

6. Using jargon incorrectly

7. Not casting a wide-enough net

8. Trying to B.S. rather than owning up to something you don’t know

9. Asking how much the job pays or how much vacation time you get

10. Badmouthing a current or former employer

11. Not looking at the big picture

12. Flirting with the interviewer

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**5. However, most people in ‘banking’ don’t make this money**