UK
What the hottest new hedge fund in London would look for, were it hiring
8 February 2010
Hedge fund start-ups are rising again - according to the Wall Street Journal, 173 funds were launched in the third quarter of last year. But not all hedge funds are born equal.
In December, Belay Partners, a long/short European equities fund, was born to two members of the European hedge fund aristocracy: Daoud Zekrya and Harry Tyser. Zekrya formerly managed the Core fund at Marshall Wace; Tyser previously ran New Star's Firefly hedge fund.
Zeykra and Tyser launched Belay with Andrew Wall, its chief operating officer who formerly worked for Talaris Capital and Gradient Capital.
Wall informed us that Belay currently employs less than 10 people and isn’t hiring. He also said they’ve received a lot of (>20) “quality CVs.” However, he didn’t totally rule out expansion in the future. And as a veteran hedge fund COO, Wall said this is what he looks for….
1) Exceptional academics
Most of the people who send in their CVs on spec are comparatively junior, says Wall: “You don’t tend to get experienced people touting their CVs around.” Equally, many of these junior people are, “exceptional,” from “top universities and business schools.” The implication is that if you’re not equally exceptional you will struggle to get noticed.
2) Evidence of effort
If you’re sending in a CV on spec, it will help your cause if you can show that you’ve bothered to find something about the company you’re applying to.
“If someone sends me an email titled, ‘Dear Sir’ and it’s sent to our info address, it suggests they haven’t really done all that much research on us,” says Wall. “It’s not difficult when we’re a regulated company to find out our names and email addresses.”
3) Relevant experience, to a degree
If he’s hiring juniors to do number crunching work or to start a new ‘suite of products,’ Wall says he’s interested in people, “with an understanding of our industry.”
“We don’t want to be teaching anyone to suck eggs,” he says. “The juniors we’d be interested in will have been working already, have done internships, or written theses on investing.”
Many of these juniors will come from banks. However, Wall says too much banking experience can be a bad thing if it leads to an ‘institutional’ way of doing things.
Wall says he’d never hire a portfolio manager or analyst on the back of a CV alone; they need a proven track record and will probably come via contacts in the market.
4) Less than six months out
Wall says he’s keeping all the CVs that are arriving in his inbox. However, he says he’s unlikely to hoard them for too long: “If someone’s been out of the market for more than six months, we’d wonder why that was.”
Not looking at people simply because they have been out of work for a certain length of time suggests a lack of faith in your own judgement: "nobody else has hired him, so there must be something wrong." If you applied the same logic to investment decisions, you would get sucked into every bubble going...
Egghead 09 Feb 2010
RECOMMEND
Recommended 2 times | Alert Moderator