What path can you go after if you join in the below role and finish the CFA?
Job Title: Fixed Income Portfolio Analyst Functional Area: Investment Management Minimum Years Experience in the Field: 02+ Years Job Description: Wellington Management Company, LLP is looking for a portfolio analyst to work with the Global Fixed Income Portfolio Management team. This individual will work closely with the Global Bond team to provide critical support in the execution of investment strategies across client portfolios. More specifically, this individual will work with portfolio managers and traders to implement foreign exchange, interest rate, and credit strategies across various client mandates, and will also monitor and analyze investment risk and manage cash in client portfolios.
The portfolio analyst will be based in Boston or London and will work with the team in providing support for their portfolio management activities.
Specific responsibilities will include:
• Interact closely with portfolio managers and traders to ensure timely and accurate execution of investment strategies across client portfolios; determine effective implementation of ideas across portfolio mandates with different constraints. • Rebalance portfolios in response to cash flows, benchmark changes, market price movements, and changes in client guidelines. • Monitor positions relative to client guidelines and verify transactions are consistent with guidelines. • Interact with many areas of the firm to improve processes and minimize operational risks. • Help monitor risk and performance across client portfolios; analyze risk exposures and key market sensitivities of positions in portfolios
Sounds like it. If you want to be a fixed income PM this would be a good starting point.
Edit: Wellington is huge and has a gigantic fixed income team. This is about as entry level as an analyst gets and I imagine they work your ass off. If you don’t mind that, yes, it could lead you down the PM path.
Wellington is a good AM company, but yes that is somewhat of an entry level role. You will not be making or researching investment decisions. You will be analyzing existing portfolio characteristics and probably generating a lot of reports.
Its not a bad job though. Probably pays 6 figures, and you will learn a lot about fixed income. The exit opportunities would depend on if you’re working on the trading desk or not. I get the feeling the answer is no, but I could be wrong. If you are on the desk, you could eventually move into a fixed PM role. Otherwise I’m not really sure what that could grow into. Maybe a lateral move into research or trading.
Edit: Wellington is big enough that there will probably be plenty of opportunities in other departments at the firm. In case you don’t see yourself advancing in that role.
I wasn’t sure about going through with the interview (save everyone the time), but it sounds like it’s worth trying for. Any idea what the phone interview will be like? I’m scheduled to interview with a “Quant Analyst” and I’m a bit concerned about how technical it could get
Phone interview will probably be very basic. Typical first interview to screen out idiots and psychpaths.
Beyond that, just brush up on fixed income. Anything you learned in an MBA class should be sufficient. If you didn’t really study it, try to find a slide deck from another MBA program class.
Most important is probably to know how to define duration in a few different ways, and how duration positioning affects a fixed income portfolio. Also know the basics about each asset class that goes into the Agg. I wouldn’t worry about the interview being too technical. They’re not going to ask you calculus.
I would read up on fed minutes, know what Treasuries are trading at, and have a general market outlook. Have a n idea when the Fed will raise rates. Understand how to position a portfolio based on your interest rate outlook, ie, be short duration in certain buckets and long elsewhere.
Also, in my opinion its always good to take an interview unless you’re 100% sure you’re wasting everyone’s time. ITs good experience and who knows what will come from it.
For someone interviewing for this role, would it be bad to show interest that you want to move to FI PM path when asked about long-term career goals? This starts like a good starting point towards it as others have mentioned.
I think a FI PM is not a bad long-term goal in an interview. Some people prefer to stay as just analysts if they don’t feel like composing portfolios.
I kinda wish I had given FI more serious consideration when I was younger. If you like macro thinking, there’s a lot more opportunities to do macro work in FI than Equities. Though a lot of FI is really just about getting a few extra basis points of yield while keeping some liability neutralized.
