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June 19, 2024 17 mins

As the $4.3 trillion hedge fund industry has boomed and competition for talent has intensified, firms are turning to a new strategy to get ahead: in-house boot camps. The goal is to mold promising new hires into future superstar traders.

Today on the show, Bloomberg’s Nishant Kumar joins host Sarah Holder to discuss what goes on inside these training programs — and what their rise means for the future of the industry.

Read more: Hedge Fund Talent Schools Are Looking for the Perfect Trader

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Bloomberg's Nishan Kumar has covered hedge funds for nearly fifteen years.

Speaker 1 (00:13):
This is the most exciting job on planet, given the
kind of people personalities in money, Boom and bust and A.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Shant says that historically hedge funds haven't had much trouble
finding workers.

Speaker 1 (00:29):
Well, it's a dream job, isn't it if you are
made for it.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
That is, last year, he says, more than eighty thousand
people applied just to intern at the top tier hedge
fund Citadel.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
Just zero point five percent of those applicants get selected
to be an intern. Forget about jobs, just to be
an intern at these firms. It's easier to get into
MIIT or Harvard, which has a success rate of around
three to four percent. Actually, so that's the audio are
talking about.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
It's not great odds, not.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
At all, not at all, but you know it has
its rewards. What do interns get paid at Citadel? It
could be as high as about nineteen thousand dollars per month.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
Nineteen thousand dollars a month.

Speaker 1 (01:21):
Yeah, I don't think many journeys get bid.

Speaker 2 (01:24):
That, certainly not.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
But that's just the start. That's just the start.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
Hedge funds have created dozens of billionaires in the last
twenty years as the industry has boomed. In two thousand
and eight, hedge funds managed about one point four trillion dollars.
Today they manage four point three trillion. They've more than
tripled their assets in less than two decades. These funds
typically practice riskier investment strategies with the hope of seeing

(01:57):
massive returns, and it's been paying off. All that money
flowing into hedge funds coffers has meant they've needed more
and more people to manage it, and a Shant says
in all out talent war has been royaling the world's
top hedge funds. That's led to the creation of something
unprecedented in the industry, in house hedge fund boot camps,

(02:21):
cutthroat training grounds meant to build out the next generation
of star hedge fund traders. In a sector that's gotten
very large, very fast. It sounds a little like it's
pulled straight out of a season of industry on HBO,
or maybe the other way around.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
I find industry to be a bit exaggerated.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
I've been watching a lot of industry lately yeah. Today
on the show, the lengths hedge funds are going to
cultivate top talent and what the rise of the hedge
fund boot camp means for one of the world's most
competitive industries. Hedge funds are pressure cookers, and Ashan says

(03:04):
not everyone is cut out for them.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
Talent is a given. You need to be super bright,
expert at your subjects. That's just the basic stuff. The
main qualities are temperament and if you can handle all
the stresses that come with it. You need to be
absolutely on your toes to survive in this truly Darwinian industry.

(03:32):
You are as good as your last trade, no matter
who you are.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
Part of what creates that Darwinian dynamic is that hedge
fund investments tend to be riskier, and if your portfolio
doesn't meet strict performance standards, the consequences are swift and severe.

Speaker 1 (03:51):
It's highly highly competitive. If you lose five percent at
some of these hedge fund your capital will be cut
into half. If you lose two percent more on top
of that, you are fired.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
That is a razor thin margin. To put that into perspective,
Nashan looked at the track record of one of the
world's most storied investors.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
Just imagine how likely it is for a stock to
move by seven percent in a day. If Warren Buffett
worked at one of these hedge funds and looking at
his stock price, he could have got fired on eight
occasions over the last more than ten years. So that's
how tough it is to survive in this industry.

Speaker 2 (04:39):
Those kinds of steaks, unlimited upside, with zero room for error,
create an extremely demanding environment sink or swim.

Speaker 1 (04:48):
And in the.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
Past, hedge funds have traditionally relied on a steady stream
of seasoned professionals, people who could walk in and be
trusted to successfully manage hundreds of millions or a billion
dollars worth of client money on day one.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
So if you look at the evolution of hedge fund
industry over the last three decades, most of the superstars
Beat Alan Howard, Michael Platt, Steve Cohen, Ken Griffin, all
these personalities worked at one or other investment banks.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
In other words, investment banks were a key part of
the hedge fund talent pipeline.

Speaker 1 (05:26):
They took risk with banks owned capital, they made billions
out of it for themselves and for their companies and
that was the true, real training ground for a lot
of these star traders.

Speaker 2 (05:40):
Nashan says, the financial crisis of two thousand and eight
started to change the game. Those higher risk oriented desks
at investment banks where today's hedge fund titans cut their teeth,
were rained in. But the industry boomed in the years
that followed, and there were still enough people who had
that banking background to propel hedge funds to new heights.

Speaker 1 (06:00):
A number of these prop traders from banks moved out
and started their own hedge funds, or they started to
work for other hedge funds.

Speaker 2 (06:11):
It was broadly speaking, a great time to be a
successful analyst or portfolio manager. These types of traders were
in high demand, and the way for hedge funds to
win was to have a better roster of superstar traders
than their competitors.

Speaker 1 (06:27):
All these large hedge funds, they have dozens and dozens
of people who are just keeping a track of who
are the good people working at their rival, not only
portfolio managers, but even the analyst Who are the great
analysts who are just emerging, who could be a great

(06:49):
portfolio manager in future, and they are looking at the
right opportunity to attack them and convince them to switch.
So the party lasted for a few years because you know,
there were still many traders to pick from.

Speaker 2 (07:05):
But as the pipeline problem eventually caught up to the
firm's talent started getting scarcer and convincing people to switch
started getting much more expensive. I asked Naseean, just how
much more expensive?

Speaker 1 (07:18):
I mean, cordiners, like I knew about someone getting paid
more than one hundred and twenty million in guaranteed. I'm
not sure that's one off case. There might be a
few others like that. I've heard that, Like, there have
been a few cases of fifteen million dollar plus payouts,
and ten to fifteen million is becoming more frequent. So

(07:42):
just think about it. You leave your job, agree to
join your rival, and your rival is saying, okay, I'll
pay you ten million dollars even before you start making
money for me.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
This worked for a while, but in more recent years,
Nashan says a new trend has emerged, in part because
the industry has shifted away from its focus on superstar talents.

Speaker 1 (08:11):
So the problem with individual traders is you are relying
on the intelligence of one person to take the right
call and be right all the time. It doesn't happen
that way. If you look at returns of some of
those individual hetch fund managers, they will have a few
great years and then they will blow up. Like we

(08:35):
see several dozen cases of this kind every year. Even
the rock star traders, they will keep making money and
then lose everything in one year.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
One strategy that's taken hold at dominant firms like er
point seventy two or Millennium or Citadel is to build
huge teams of traders.

Speaker 1 (08:56):
Find all these bright individuals and put them together and
bind them in chains that look, you can't lose money.
Of course, make as much money as you want, but
just you can't lose money. And if you combine a
number of those individuals intelligently, and if you risk manage
them properly, give them all the resources to prosper give

(09:19):
them enough capital to manage, the end result is quite good.

Speaker 2 (09:25):
That new approach has helped some top firms see returns
of ten percent or better. It gives them an edge.
According to data compiled by Bloomberg, the average hedge fund
had a return of about eight percent last year. But
this strategy relies on having a lot of capable people,
people who have only grown harder and harder to find

(09:45):
since the investment bank training ground disappeared. The talent is
so scarce at this point it's impacting how much money
hedge funds can accept.

Speaker 1 (09:54):
I wrote a story and I tracked top twenty of
these large hedge funds. The majority of them are no
longer accepting new capital. That's only because they can't hire
people who could manage those additional capital. So this is
called the capacity issue in the industry.

Speaker 2 (10:14):
That's why, for the first time, hedge funds are trying
a new strategy. Rather than assembling teams of elite investing mercenaries,
they're building their own armies, and that means they're putting
these someday managers through basic training. So what happens at
hedge fund training camps and what does the shift mean

(10:34):
for the industry. That's after the break Over the last
twenty years, as the industry grew and traditional pathways to
hedge funds dried up, the field got more competitive and
hedge funds found themselves entrenched in a poaching war. So

(10:58):
they decided to try something new. Instead of finding the
perfect trader, they wanted to create the perfect trader from scratch.
The Academy is our program to take investment talent without
any background or experience and turn them into long short
investors at our firm. That's a clip from the Point
seventy two Academy podcast. It's a training series produced by

(11:21):
the Point seventy two Hedge Fund that gives a taste
of how their program molds promising new hires into formidable investors.
How does a hedge fund boot camp do that? What
happens inside those walls.

Speaker 1 (11:36):
So it's a long process. It's training slash mentoring slash
on the job experience. So of course in turns are fresh,
so they will have more classroom teachings or more formal
kind of teaching. If you are an analyst who has

(12:00):
joined one of these programs, more like on the job experience.
If you are a portfolio manager, say junior portfolio manager
or senior portfolio manager, who is being trained to become
a portfolio manager, that would be like managing real money
with certain constraint with someone overlooking you. That sort of approach.

(12:25):
So it could be as simple as you know, talking
to experienced portfolio managers, giving them that opportunity to talk
to some of these experienced people and learn from them,
learn about their successes, their mistakes. You know, how they
behave in a certain market conditions, how they look at securities.

(12:49):
You know, what kind of questions they ask when they
meet management, what kind of body language they observe. That
these are simple things, but when you learn from a pro,
you can really inherit those qualities. And if you keep
on doing it repeatedly, you sort of become a person

(13:10):
like him, or even better than him.

Speaker 2 (13:12):
And how are these trainees being assessed? How can you excel?

Speaker 1 (13:16):
So everyone is looking for different things. The inflection points
that when is a person ready to manage a billion
dollars or money? And it really varies. So, for example,
Hedgeman's would like to see in you whether you are

(13:38):
able to build a team around you, whether you have
capacity to risk real dollars on ideas generated by someone else.
Once you do it, maybe you know over a period
of times, at twelve months, which is the case at
Ballyasni for example, a minimum of twelve months where you

(14:01):
need to prove yourself, then you might be ready to
take over as a portfolio manager.

Speaker 2 (14:10):
So how has this conveyor belt of talent or assembly
line of talent worked out. So far for hedge funds.

Speaker 1 (14:16):
So far, so good. Actually, if you look at point
seventy two, more than half of their stock pickers come
through their training program. The average tenure life of a
trader at point seventy two has been six years. Now,
that's their data. If you look at hetch funds that

(14:37):
have shot, their life has been six point six years.
So hetche funes don't survive that long. Forget about individual traders.
Let's take Phil Lee, who is the head of one
of the stocks trading unit at Citadel. He joined the
firm as an analyst and within ten years, yes, he

(15:01):
rose to become the head of that business. Wow, that's
an incredible journey. So you know, these training programs are
genuinely producing talent. They're genuinely making people stay longer and
giving hedge funds a real chance that they can find

(15:22):
another way of hiring people rather than just throwing investors'
money at the next hot star trader.

Speaker 2 (15:30):
What does the rise of these boot camps mean for
the industry.

Speaker 1 (15:34):
It's a better way of managing money. See, all of
these is funded ultimately by end investors. Maybe it's your
and my pension fund. Of every dollar that a hedge
fund makes, some of these hedgehunds make, not all sixty
cents goes to pay for talent, to run their businesses

(15:55):
and to pay for themselves. If that can be minimized
little bit, either through growing your talent in house or
reducing competition as a result, reducing this war for talent,
then maybe there will be more money left for investors.
So that's what at stake here.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
This episode was produced by David Fox and Jessica Beck.
It was edited by Aaron Edwards and James Boxel. It
was mixed by Blake Maples. It was fact checked by
Adriana Tapia. Naomi Shaven and Kim Gettleson are our senior producers.
Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. The Cool Beemsterbor is

(16:41):
our executive producer. Sat Bowman is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts.
If you liked the episode, make sure to subscribe and
review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It
helps people find the show. Thanks so much for listening.
We'll be back tomorrow.
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