and the winner is…
“Hedge fund employers rarely look for formal qualifications, beyond a strong undergraduate degree,” says Anthony Keizner, managing director and head of the hedge fund practice at headhunters Glocap. “There’s a general suspicion that further education takes someone away from investing in the markets, where they would have been better off learning ‘real life’ experiences on the job.”
Yeah, I’m talking to some hedgies, and I have zero academic qualifications.
Maybe they wants people with language skills.
Hedge funds want returns and capital. Nothing more.
Hedge funds want people who can make them money.
Easy-peasy.
In my experience they typically want ivies with MBAs. Anyone can finish a CFA but the education and network that come with an Ivy education is hard to come by.
But really how does that correlate with beating the market? Probably -.3?
As you can see, there’s apparently no real answer. because different managers at different funds look for different types.
do your best to make an impression with what you got, and hope for the best
Hedge funds is such a broad range of strategies. A quant fixed income fund would look for something very different than a fundamental long-short equity fund which would be different from discretionary or systematic macro.
But in general, anything that would make them more profitable is interesting to them, so high qualifications with low comp expectations might do it (but is less attractive than you’d think because they don’t want talent hired away).
There are basically two ways to make money for hedge funds: produce outperformance in the investment portfolio, or (assuming the hedge funds are small or new) be able to bring or attract investment capital to scale strategies up and put them on the map. This boils down to:
A) a demostrable track record of outperformance that is scalable and uses the strategies they employ or are expanding into would be one thing that piques their interest.
or
B) Having a network of investors is also interesting to them, if they are still small. Many funds will hire the children of rich people in the hopes of convincing them and their rich friends to invest with the fund. Parents often look at it as putting up bond to assure their children an entry into the industry.
Hedge Funds are like an NBA team. They don’t care who/what/how you are so long as you can make lots of baskets. Pure ability, not resume.
I have seen funds with people with resumes that match the faculty of mathematcis dept at MIT. Also have seen bunch of people with state level to private school (non ivy) undergrads.
Rahm Emanuel
Its funny to think about how some of the most gifted and brightest people in this industry have often sped forward in risk, blinded by arrogance, and have taken massive losses like LTCM.
^ Bill Ackman – MBA Harvard, allocates 20% of his portfolio to VRX when it’s priced like 80X P/E or whatever, seriously shit financial statements, doesn’t know anything about the company (apparently), doesn’t have the sense to close it out when he gets lucky with huge gains, takes catastrophic losses, doubles down.
This is how your kids end up in public school.