Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Weird happenings in the finance world

Why is Morgan Stanley buying up hedge fund in the dozens recently, when Goldman Sachs has just created a hedge fund clone that will emulate hedge fund investments for only max. 1% of annual fees (versus 2%+20% performance in current hedge funds)? Hedge fund fees are bound to go DOWN.

In other interesting events of the finance world, I met with a managing director yesterday who heads some trading desks for a large investment bank in the City. I know him through a personal contact so he was very honest. He told me he would never go into investment banking if he was in my position, that it wasn't intellectually challenging and had no future. He said the future is in technology/automation and in Asia, in nothing else. If I can't stop it, he said trading is the way to go, all else would be useless, boring and terrible. Trading he said was still the least bad option, but a horrible environment for women. Very honest advice, but also a bit surprising to come out of someone who is in the job himself.

In any case, I'm continuing my exploration of finance jobs and am slowly but surely finding out what I would like or not. On Friday Goldman Sachs is hosting a full day event for female MBAs in their offices that I'm attending, even though we have the accounting exam in the afternoon. The good thing about the exam is, there is less and less to study the lower you set your aspirations :-).

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Angie,

I am a LBS and Cambridge applicant. (Interviews all done, whew!) I have had very positive interactions with all the alums and students I have met from LBS. Unfortunately, I have not had any response from the Judge School to my requests to get in touch with female students. If you friend is willing to correspond with me, could you please pass on my email address? jamey1 at gmail.

Thanks so much!

Jamey

Anonymous said...

Hi Angie,

Did he mean that consulting would be much more interesting than IB? What are these weird finance fields you're talking about?

Anonymous said...

I have a different view.
Trading will get more automatized so, less brain.
On the other hand, IB is all about deals. You've been a consultant. You may think how to improve a company's value through a merger, how to gain a competitive advantage from that and so on.

Anonymous said...

Benny,

I disagree. Having worked in IB and in consulting I can tell you that in IB you don't use your brain at all. You make edits to powerpoint pages. Most of the deals you pitch make no sense, most of the MD-s just pitch companies so they have meetings to cultivate relationships for the future, and you know that 95% of your work will go to waste. Not very intellectual or motivating. The money is fantastic though.