Over the last couple of years there have been plenty of anecdotes about high paid front office staff leaving London to move to Frankfurt and Paris as a result of Brexit, but hard data is always difficult to come by. Now we’ve finally got some figures, from the compulsory report on “high earners” published by the European Banking Authority every year. They have confirmed that, for the 2019 pay year, the number of bankers earning €1m (US$1.17m) or more fell in the UK by 95, while rising in the rest of Europe by 140.

It could be said that these numbers are out of date. Given the trends in both trading and deal revenue for 2020 and 2021, it’s likely that both London and the Euro area financial capitals will have seen substantial increases in the number of seven figure earners. But it’s also arguable that for this precise reason, the 2019 numbers are more informative. The year before the pandemic was pretty mediocre for overall compensation, but not...

I'm part of the banking and capital markets consulting team at a Big Four firm in London. Seven years after graduating, I'm a manager. My salary is now £75k ($103k).

I'm frankly waiting for the right opportunity to get out. We've all been watching the increases in junior banker salaries here, and it's clear that our own salaries have slipped further and further behind. Our graduates (1-2 years) are paid c.£28k- £32k; our senior consultants, (2-5 years) are paid £38k - £45k; our managers (5-8 years) are paid £60k-75k. Only senior managers with eight years + experience start to scrape £100k. 

If you work in equity research, you probably need to be a CFA Charterholder. But while having the CFA® Charter may be sufficient for getting a junior job in research, as you get more senior you might need a little something extra. 

This appears to have been the experience of James Hubbard, an oil and gas equity research analyst who joined Deutsche Bank in London from Numis last November. Hubbard became a Charterholder in 2015, while he was working for Macquarie as the head of energy and resources research for Asia, but this was not the end of his epic of studying on the side. 

Has Goldman Sachs done enough to prevent a post-bonus exodus of the juniors in its investment banking division? Have other banks? All will soon become clear: bonuses are due to be paid at the end of this month.

Analysts at U.S. investment banks and Deutsche are paid on a different timescale to senior bankers, whose bonuses are paid at the end of the year. Goldman juniors say the bank has already announced its analyst bonuses for 2020-2021, and that payment is due on around August 27th. Goldman didn't respond to a request to verify this.

If you're under-stimulated by assembling pitch books for senior bankers or writing mildly excoriating research reports on listed stocks, and are wondering which other areas of finance might be more fulfilling, a 37 year-old former paramedic seems to be onto something. 

Nathan Anderson is what's known as an activist short seller. His passion in life isn't befriending the C-Suite and advising on deals, but identifying scams perpetrated by "outrageous companies." And he makes a living out of it.

The stream is running dry. The flow of money-oriented junior talent that used to leave leading universities for Wall Street is slowing and I swear it's going to be a defining problem for banks going forward.

I spent over two decades as a trader at leading investment banks both in the City of London and on Wall Street and I now work on the buy-side. I know what young people used to be like and I have first-hand experience of what they're like now. The change is huge.

As we noted yesterday, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has discovered a taste for hiring associates from investment banks as it builds out in Europe. It's not the only crypto firm with a massive appetite for recruitment. 

Bitpanda, the Vienna-based cryptocurrency trading platform backed by Peter Thiel, which has just raised $263m is hiring with a zeal that's unheard of in traditional asset classes. It currently employs just over 500 people, up from around 200 this time last year, and has over 150 new jobs open - implying that another 30% expansion in headcount is baked-in.

Millennium, the multi strategy hedge fund that's turned into one of the industry's big hirers has lost some of its senior technology staff after a spate of recruitment last year. 

Sridhar Nimmagadda, the former head of technology R&D at Millennium in New York City resurfaced at Point72 as head of technology innovation in May 2021. Nimmagadda was at Millennium for nearly 14 years after joining from Merrill Lynch in 2007. At Point72 he says he'll be exploring everything from quantum technology, to applied artificial intelligence, and machine-brain interfaces.

Duncan Robinson isn't exactly a new addition at Standard Chartered. - He joined the bank's Singapore office in 2018 after leaving Deutsche Bank, and has been global head of credit flow trading ever since. 

However, some are blaming Robinson for a recent clear out of Standard Chartered's London emerging markets desk.

JPMorgan launched an apprenticeship programme for its UK markets business in 2019. Standard Chartered has recently done the same. - Six students have just started a level six apprenticeship programme to become traders and salespeople on the bank's London trading floor. 

"We weren't focused on CV's but on hiring people with the skill sets and ambitions to fit into roles in origination, sales and trading," says Henrik Raber, head of Standard Chartered's capital markets business. "There have been opportunities for apprentices to join operation and support areas of banks, but our new scheme is differentiated because it's specifically targeted at bringing apprentices into the front office. The apprentices are embedded in the front office from the start, and this is where they will make their careers." 

Although the new trading floor apprenticeships aren't focused on students with impeccable CVs, Standard Chartered has had to be very choosy about who it...

Last summer I was an intern at J.P. Morgan. At the end of the internship, I got a job offer. I did none of the things you're supposed to do to get a "conversion".

Firstly, I didn't suck up. I made a point of speaking the truth. For example, countless traders asked me why I wanted to work there. HR people say you need to fit into the culture and show you believe in the firm's values. I couldn't disagree more. - If everyone does this, you'll blend into the crowd. You'll stand out by speaking your mind. This is why whenever a senior trader asked me what I was doing at J.P.M., I answered with complete brutality.  “I just want to work in a cool environment and pocket a nice wage,” I told one senior trader. He was stunned and at first I thought I'd blown it, but then he grasped my hand and congratulated me on being the first intern to answer the question truthfully.

JPMorgan launched an apprenticeship programme for its UK markets business in 2019. Standard Chartered has recently done the same. - Six students have just started a level six apprenticeship programme to become traders and salespeople on the bank's London trading floor. 

"We weren't focused on CV's but on hiring people with the skill sets and ambitions to fit into roles in origination, sales and trading," says Henrik Raber, head of Standard Chartered's capital markets business. "There have been opportunities for apprentices to join operation and support areas of banks, but our new scheme is differentiated because it's specifically targeted at bringing apprentices into the front office. The apprentices are embedded in the front office from the start, and this is where they will make their careers." 

Although the new trading floor apprenticeships aren't focused on students with impeccable CVs, Standard Chartered has had to be very choosy about who it...

Barclays is building out a distressed debt team in Hong Kong after luring a banker from Goldman Sachs with a big promotion.

The bank has appointed Mani Joseph as a managing director and head of Asia Special Situations and given him responsibility to build out a team in the region.

Banks have long had a preference for hiring students from wealthy backgrounds, particularly into client facing roles where the likelihood is that clients will be similarly well-padded. But they may not want to hire anyone too well provided for in case they go the same way as Michael Thomas, the scourge of the Manhattan moneyed classes who died this week. 

Thomas worked for Lehman Brothers in the 1960s and 1970s. He became both a partner and the head of M&A at the bank, but quit within a year of his big promotion. “I believe working on Wall Street is the most degrading form of activity that one could imagine,” he informed the Washington Post twenty years later.

As Credit Suisse struggles to recover from its $5.5bn loss relating to Archegos Capital, it's the Swiss bank's equities sales and trading business that has most to lose. After all, while U.S. banks pour money into technology underpinning their prime broking businesses in a battle for equities share from quant hedge funds that generate the biggest revenues, it's in prime broking in particular that Credit Suisse is now cutting back. 

After years of investment into the equities business and the gradual erosion of a once market leading electronic trading franchise, the turnaround leaves Credit Suisse's equities salespeople and traders looking exposed. 

Thakur joined H1 this month according to his LinkedIn profile. He previously spent nearly seven years at Goldman Sachs, where he was responsible for compliance engineering and surveillance technology. In 2017 he made a presentation on machine learning systems for compliance surveillance at banks at an NYC conference.

Prior to Goldman, Thakur spent nearly seven years working on Google's search engine.

Search firm Octavius Finance says data scientists in finance can make the most money working for hedge funds. Their salary and bonus survey earlier this year found that senior data roles in quant hedge funds can pay salaries of £180k+ plus bonuses of £360k, or £560k ($777k) in total. It's not clear how much Thakur will earn at H1, but the start-up paid a recently-hired solutions manager a salary of $130k according to the H1B salary database. 

Thakur isn't the only senior banking technologist moving on. Joseph Hammer, the global...

Good news – you passed the 1st test, your resume has been accepted and they want a 1st round interview with you. A 1st round interview is just another screening tool to narrow the resume file further. Make sure you treat it as such.

Having conducted 250-300 1st round interviews in my sixteen years in banking, of which around half were spent at Goldman Sachs, this is what I recommend:

I've spent this summer as an intern on the equities floor of a major U.S. investment bank in London. I thought I wanted to work in equities when I graduated, but my experience is making me seriously reconsider. 

At least half the people here seem to be divorced. They're money-making bots who have somehow lost their humanity and genuinely don't care about or can't relate to the interns. The equities floor here is ranked as one of the top on the Street, but culturally it's terrible. 

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase may be shifting away from the sorts of digital asset securities that are governed by U.S. securities law, but it's still hiring plenty of people from investment banks. 

The top jobs at Coinbase in London are filled by people with finance experience, some of whom have already been there a while. - Head of EMEA sales, Guillaume Chatain, previously spent nearly 10 years working for JPMorgan's private bank where he was latterly head of equities for Asia; head of institutional coverage for EMEA Andrew Robinson previously worked in equity sales at Jefferies, Nomura and Lehman; head of EMEA and APAC trading execution Gurvinder Sandhu previously worked for Jane Street. However, there are signs that Coinbase is now building out its junior ranks with associate-level hires from investment banks too.

Until last Friday, Miles Routledge seemed to be the average second year university student wanting to go into finance and prone to making slightly grandiose claims about their achievements. Now, he's becoming well known for something else that will definitely differentiate him, but maybe not in a good way.

Routledge, whose Facebook account says he's an investment banking intern (but who actually spent the past summer interning in wealth management at somewhere called Infinity Financial Solutions), and who says he runs the investment banking society at Britain's Loughborough University, where he's a physics student scoring top grades, flew out to Afghanistan on August 13th for a holiday.

If you're wondering whether it's really worth the long slog to becoming a CFA Charterholder, Paul Grice, a Charterholder since 1998 might reinvigorate your motivation for studying the increasingly difficult exams.

Aged 56, Grice has achieved the sort of lifestyle that makes 900+ hours of studying seem worthwhile.

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This year, I took Level I of the CFA® Exams in May. Like many other candidates, I failed. I am an Asian candidate, and I believe that my treatment in the exam hall contributed to my lack of success. 

I have a Chinese passport and as soon as I showed this to the exam proctor, her treatment of me changed. 

If you work as a technologist in an investment bank, you might feel like you're part of a Formula One team. But if you work as a technologist at Palantir, you'll be like Frodo Baggins on a quest to save humanity.

So said Palantir's chief operating officer Shyam Sankar during an impassioned investor call yesterday. "We at Palantir, we're an artist colony, extraordinarily and exquisitely flat," said Sankar. "We do the hard thing and the brave thing because that's the right thing for our customers," he added, before going on to refer to participants in Palantir's Hackweeks as Hobbits and members of a charismatic fellowship locked into an existential battle against chaos. "The entropy of the universe is against you, you have to wake up every day and fight for it."