Financial Advisor

The Key to Making it in Wealth Management: Who’s Your Daddy?

Analytical skills, business savvy and a great work ethic: these are not the things that will get a job in wealth management as a twenty-something. Rather, you need to know a host of rich people – family and friends, mostly – who are willing to do you a personal favor. Succeeding as an entry-level financial […]

Why you should work in the green zone

Late Lunchtime Links: London bankers are overworked elitist snobs. J.P. Morgan shunting people into compliance

If you’re an investment banker in Paris, Frankfurt or Milan and you’re thinking of moving to London for the glitz, glamour, and weather, don’t. A new blog in the Guardian suggests that investment banking careers in the City of London aren’t nearly as heavy on excitement as people from more provincial financial centres might suppose. […]

Saudi-Kingdomtower

How expat bankers can still succeed in Saudi

Saudi Arabia has long been viewed as a hardship posting for expat financial services professionals, but as opportunities shrink in other Middle East locations the kingdom has continued to offer jobs. However, a new push to recruit local candidates has meant it’s become an uphill struggle for foreigners to move in, but expat expertise is […]

Leave Morgan Stanley, join Nomura?

DeRegt’s not alone in fleeing Morgan Stanley. Nomura hiring everywhere

Morgan Stanley’s fixed income business is in a state of upheaval, but anyone thrown off balance at the U.S. bank can seek solace at Nomura, which says it’s hiring fixed income professionals worldwide. In an unusual example of reverse nepotism in financial services, Ken deRegt, the 57 year old head of Morgan Stanley’s fixed income business, […]

New York

U.S. Investment Bankers Trump U.K. Rivals on their Own Turf

U.S. investment banks have been clobbering their U.K. rivals for well over a year, generating near-record revenue share while their European counterparts continue to struggle. It’s mostly market conditions, experts say. A new report belittles that theory. American-based banks have taken more investment banking fees from U.K. clients year-to-date than hometown British banks, earning a […]

Booze

Older financial professionals seek solace from stress

Self-medicating is a young man’s game, unless you’re stressed out and working on Wall Street, apparently. Results of a new eFinancialCareers survey suggest that the longer you work in financial services, the more likely you are to rely on mood changers to manage stress. U.S. respondents were given 14 different options to indicate how they […]

Stained glass window

Ex-bankers advise on spirituality: channel Archangels, avoid alcohol

Investment bankers and God don’t have a great history. Lloyd Blankfein was much maligned after famously claiming to be doing God’s work in a Sunday Times article of 2009.  The Bible famously says rich men have as much chance of getting to heaven as camels have of squeezing through the eyes of needles. And more […]

Autistic_girl

Quants and techies get social, autistic hires fall by the wayside

Quantitative hedge funds, derivatives desks and the programming teams of investment banks have supposedly long provided happy homes to people with autism, which are able to put their systematic mindsets to good use. However, the announcement from SAP that it intends to hire 640 people with autism to programme and test its products highlights an […]

The secret of high pressure sales

Late Lunchtime Links: Secret ‘golden pitchbook’ gets public airing

A top secret ‘golden pitchbook’ dating back to Bear Stearns circa 1980 has surfaced on Buzzfeed. It is not a pitchbook in the M&A all-nighter sense of the term. It is a pitchbook in the sense of selling securities to retail clients – although it could equally be applied to selling anything to anyone, anywhere. Fundamentally, […]

David Karp, not a banker (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Meet the ex-head of UBS credit trading prowling for the next Tumblr

Until March 2013, Damien Regent was a fairly typical investment banker. Up at dawn, he worked 12 hour days as UBS’s co-head of financial credit trading in London. Two months ago, all that changed. Unleashed from UBS following the bank’s decision to pull back from fixed income, Regent has reinvented himself as an angel investor. […]