So you've worked for Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan for over a decade? Congratulations. I'm sure you must be super-talented. Please, however, don't make the presumption that you're more talented than I am just because you've hung around a top tier bank for your entire career. In fact, the opposite may be the case. 

In my own long (and varied) career in finance, I've found that the people who can make it at multiple banks, like Morgan Stanley, HSBC and Credit Suisse are far more likely to be highly talented than those who've been at one bulge bracket like JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs their entire career. If you've spent your whole time hanging around on a phenomenal platform, the chances are that it's the platform and not you that's the top performer. Conversely, if you can demonstrate success in multiple environments, your success is more likely to be your own. - And you should be able to ask for more in compensation.

Whenever an employer is complaining about how difficult it is to attract exactly the right kind of talent, the first question that should come to anybody’s mind is “have you tried offering more money”. According to a number of headhunters interviewed by Business Insider, after a long period of making speeches and recording inspirational YouTube videos about their commitment to diversity, some of the biggest names in private equity and asset management have finally got round to doing the only thing that’s bound to work.

This is obviously a pretty sensitive area. It’s perhaps surprising that so many people are prepared to be quoted by name, and understandable that everyone wants to talk about “diverse candidates” and “under-represented groups” rather than say out loud exactly which personal characteristics people are prepared to pay up for. But they’re explicitly saying that the premium is there now, and it can be as much as 20% to 30% per cent.

It's interview season for junior jobs in investment banks. If you're a graduate trying to get a first role as an analyst or intern in bank next year, I have some advice for you. - Think very carefully about what you are actually good at and passionate about, not what you think you should be good at and passionate about.

Passion will get you the job. Ticking imagined boxes will not.

After an extremely disappointing set of results for Level I of the CFA® exams, it now turns out that Level II has also seen its worst pass rates for a decade. There have been plenty of theories advanced in the last couple of weeks about why things were so bad this year, most of them to do with technical issues with respect to the mechanics of the testing system. But what if it’s a lot simpler than that?

With any test, the biggest driver of performance is the extent to which you’re able to prepare. And it’s hard to find time to study when you’re working 80-hour weeks. Most years, investment banks (and accountancy firms, consultants and other financial sector employers of large numbers of CFA candidates) recognise this by giving people study leave. And most years, there are some unfortunate young people who get their study leave cancelled at short notice because there’s a deal on, and they’re bitter about it. We’ve even noticed a phenomenon of “CFA...

The Big Four: KPMG, EY, Deloitte and PWC; as their collective name suggests, these guys are huge. But what’s it really like to work for the Big Four? Here, we take a look at what it takes to get a job with a top financial services firm, and explore how they differ, and how they don’t.

Unless they’re just hanging around for a couple of years’ socialising and resume-building before heading off to private equity, young Goldman Sachs bankers tend to aspire to the small and elite teams which make investments with the firm’s own capital – “special situations”, “merchant banking”, “principal strategic investments”. You have all the fun of working at Goldman, plus all the fun of making investments – what’s not to like? Except that David Solomon has pledged to get rid of you.

Or at least, he’s said that he wants to substantially reduce the proportion of Goldman’s earnings which comes from these areas. Shareholders have this prejudice against gains on investments, seeing them as volatile and unsustainable. In the last quarter, the bank had the champagne problem of being unable to achieve progress toward this goal, as in a hot market with plenty of IPOs, the gains on Goldman’s portfolio were growing faster than they could be realised. But...

Tatton told us at the time that Concurnas was born of his revelation that day-to-day engineering problems at JPMorgan were centered around building reliable scalable high performance distributed concurrent systems."Concurnas has been engineered to be an easy to program language, just like Python - but better," Tatton said. "Concurnas runs on Java - this way it offers the incredible performance of Java and use of all the existing free Java based software that's available." It also offers support for the 'domain specific languages' (DSLs) which inevitably get built into trading systems as developers invent their own nomenclature for describing a trading problem. "This is unusual - few programming languages offer any DSL support," Tatton added. 

It's not clear that Concurnas has actually taken off. - Julia is probably a better language to learn if you're looking for something obscure to add to your repertoire. 

However, inventing the language...

Nomura may have seen revenues in its fixed income sales and trading business plummet 43% year-on-year in its fiscal first quarter, but it still appears to have pulling power.

The Japanese bank is understood to have recruited Brent Cook, a veteran London macro trader who's spent over seven years hanging out in Sydney Australia, where he was latterly in charge of the strategic trading group for Macquarie. Cook is coming back to London, and he's coming back for winter - presumably after a period of gardening leave.

Nomura may have seen revenues in its fixed income sales and trading business plummet 43% year-on-year in its fiscal first quarter, but it still appears to have pulling power.

The Japanese bank is understood to have recruited Brent Cook, a veteran London macro trader who's spent over seven years hanging out in Sydney Australia, where he was latterly in charge of the strategic trading group for Macquarie. Cook is coming back to London, and he's coming back for winter - presumably after a period of gardening leave.

Please take a moment to contribute. When we get to an ideal number of responses (5k+), we'll start sharing the information on the site.

Based on the responses we've had so far, we can share a few brief snippets: despite all the talk of increasing salaries, most of you haven't had a pay rise of late; the industry is divided roughly equally between people who think they're paid fairly, people who don't think they're paid enough and people who aren't sure; and most people don't seem to be working the fabled 80-hour weeks.

To give us a more complete picture, please add your details. The survey link is here in case you missed all the opportunities to click on it above.... Thank you.

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or...

Please take a moment to contribute. When we get to an ideal number of responses (5k+), we'll start sharing the information on the site.

Based on the responses we've had so far, we can share a few brief snippets: despite all the talk of increasing salaries, most of you haven't had a pay rise of late; the industry is divided roughly equally between people who think they're paid fairly, people who don't think they're paid enough and people who aren't sure; and most people don't seem to be working the fabled 80-hour weeks.

To give us a more complete picture, please add your details. The survey link is here in case you missed all the opportunities to click on it above.... Thank you.

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or...

SocGen's equities sales and trading revenues were €758m in the second quarter of 2021, up from just €142m a year earlier. Net income for the entire global markets and investor solutions business was €268m, up from a loss of €27m in the second quarter of 2020.

SocGen is back.

Except, it's more than just back. - Equities sales and trading revenues in the second quarter of 2021 were higher than in any second quarter for the past four years. Profits in the global markets and solutions business were at their highest since the second quarter of 2018.

This is partly down to buoyant markets. - Bank of America and Citi reported year-on-year increases of 37% and 33% in their equities sales and trading revenues in the second quarter. SocGen itself today attributed its equities success to "favourable" market conditions and a "normalisation of the environment."

However, SocGen was able to take advantage of strong markets...

Credit Suisse doesn't seem able to stretch to this. Financial News reported yesterday that the Swiss bank is still contemplating a junior salary rise which would take its first years to $100k, its second years to $105k and its third years to $110k. While this is in line with most other banks on the Street, those other banks increased salaries before Goldman raised the bar. Having seen Goldman's new levels, Credit Suisse is effectively hesitating before paying its third year analysts salaries the same as Goldman's first years. It's not a good look.

Then again, salaries aren't the only form of pay in investment banking. Credit Suisse's earlier generosity took the form of a $20k 'special bonus' to all its investment bankers below vice president level, meaning that Credit Suisse juniors are already $20k up this year. Plus, it's not clear whether Goldman will reduce juniors' bonuses in proportion to their higher salaries, leaving everyone no better...

I am a CFA® Charterholder, and I am in approval of the recent 25% pass rate for the CFA Level I exam. I would like to urge CFA Institute to keep pass rates close to 25% going forwards to ensure the prestige of the certification.

I appreciate that it's difficult when students who invest considerable time and money fail the exams simply to maintain a low passing percentage. However, there's little doubt that the CFA exams have been becoming easier and that more students have been enrolling every year. While this has generated high revenues for CFA Institute, it has been at the cost of the decreasing prestige of the CFA Charter. 

It's been a year since we reported that Alessandro Cipollini, a former macro trader at ExodusPoint Capital Management was launching his own macro fund, Ermitage Capital Management LLP. Twelve months on, sources say he's been busy hiring. 

Cipollini declined to comment for this article, but he's understood to have recruited a handful of senior infrastructure and risk professionals to the new fund, which already has a commitment of $1bn in assets under management and is expected to add a further $400m early next year. 

It's a common complaint among women who take maternity leave from markets jobs in banks that when they come back to work, their best clients have been allocated to someone else - typically a man. When a man in a markets job takes five months of paternity leave, it's therefore worth taking note. And when yet another man leaves his job to look after his daughter, it might be considered a trend.

Richard Hollingworth didn't respond to a request to comment for this article, but according to his LinkedIn profile, Hollingworth left his fixed income sales job around to two weeks ago to become a full time carer for his daughter. 

HSBC is undergoing a metamorphosis. In the presentation accompanying its results today, the HSBC said it wants to "digitise at scale" as one of the core pillars of its new strategy. It's hiked technology spending by 18% to $3bn since 2018, has twice as many live cloud services as before, and is "scaling its digital capabilities globally" to improve customer experience.

In practice, this means HSBC needs some more digital transformation specialists. It already hired Catherine Zhou as global head of venture, digital innovation and partnerships, and Kate Platonova as chief data and architecture officer, based in London and New York, respectively, last November, and now it's made another big hire in London.

As a result, Goldman now occupies the salary top slot with Bank of America and the comparatively little known boutique William Blair. The Goldman Sachs salary discount for juniors seems to be a thing of the past.

Goldman has also hiked second year analyst salaries to the top of the market, and has positioned its associate salaries at $150k. The associate salaries don't look so generous - until you remember that Goldman's associates are mostly just the same as third year analysts anyway.

Unlike Citi, Barclays and Bank of America, Goldman doesn't appear to have hiked salaries for its vice presidents (VPs). This could cause a few issues as VPs at the firm see the differential eroded between their own salaries and those of juniors.

Goldman's analysts are due to receive their August bonuses in the coming weeks. Until now, the firm had been suggesting that it would hold salaries steady and increase bonuses instead (one Goldman insider told the Financial...

As a result, Goldman now occupies the salary top slot with Bank of America and the comparatively little known boutique William Blair. The Goldman Sachs salary discount for juniors seems to be a thing of the past.

Goldman has also hiked second year analyst salaries to the top of the market, and has positioned its associate salaries at $150k. The associate salaries don't look so generous - until you remember that Goldman's associates are mostly just the same as third year analysts anyway.

Unlike Citi, Barclays and Bank of America, Goldman doesn't appear to have hiked salaries for its vice presidents (VPs). This could cause a few issues as VPs at the firm see the differential eroded between their own salaries and those of juniors.

Goldman's analysts are due to receive their August bonuses in the coming weeks. Until now, the firm had been suggesting that it would hold salaries steady and increase bonuses instead (one Goldman insider told the Financial...

Rarely must a group of wronged people feel more validated. Having cut costs and trimmed staff across its global markets business for the past few years, Credit Suisse is now hiring some of them back again at elevated prices. 

So said the Financial Times on Friday. The FT reported that the rehiring is happening mostly in risk, where former chief risk officer Lara Warner, who was let go in April after the $5.5bn Archegos loss, had subjugated risk managers to technologists and blurred risk management reporting lines. 40% of senior Credit Suisse managers left in the two years preceding the Archegos horror. 

HSBC still has plenty of costs to cut. As per its giant cost-cutting plan announced in February 2020, HSBC wants to achieve cost savings of between $5bn and $5.5bn between 2020 and 2022, but it's only generated $2bn of these so far. This isn't preventing the bank from increasing bonuses for the bankers and traders in its global banking and markets (GB&M) business. 

In its second quarter results, released today, HSBC says it increased global bonus accruals in GB&M by $300m in the first half of the year compared to the same period of 2020. Around $100m of this seems to have gone to bankers and traders in London, where HSBC  spent 37% more on compensation than last year. By comparison, spending on pay for their colleagues in Hong Kong rose 17%. In America, it fell. 

In March Yang Ruo, a managing director in Citigroup’s  Technology, media and telecoms investment banking team, became the latest senior banker to join the exodus when he was tapped by Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu to join as its CFO. At the time, Xiaohongshu which is also known as Little Red Book,  was said to be considering a $10bn listing in New York.

But following a clampdown by the Chinese government which announced plans to increase its scrutiny of foreign listings by Chinese tech companies, Little Red Book has shelved its listing plans. 

HSBC still has plenty of costs to cut. As per its giant cost-cutting plan announced in February 2020, HSBC wants to achieve cost savings of between $5bn and $5.5bn between 2020 and 2022, but it's only generated $2bn of these so far. This isn't preventing the bank from increasing bonuses for the bankers and traders in its global banking and markets (GB&M) business. 

In its second quarter results, released today, HSBC says it increased global bonus accruals in GB&M by $300m in the first half of the year compared to the same period of 2020. Around $100m of this seems to have gone to bankers and traders in London, where HSBC  spent 37% more on compensation than last year. By comparison, spending on pay for their colleagues in Hong Kong rose 17%. In America, it fell. 

Don’t bother calling your contact at Carlyle Group in the week beginning 16 August – they won’t be there.  The company is taking a leaf out of the books of Victorian cotton mill owners and shutting down the whole firm for a week to let everyone have some time off.  According to human resources head Bruce Larson, it’s part of a firmwide emphasis on wellbeing and health which has also seen “Wellness Wednesdays”, Peloton clubs and a $750 “wellbeing stipend” which employees are meant to spend on gym memberships or mindfulness podcasts (although Carlyle doesn’t actually track this, so you can spend it on booze or hamburgers if you like).

The firmwide week off seems like an attractively Gordian solution to the key problem Carlyle was facing in trying to improve conditions for its employees – in an employee survey, only 64% of them said they felt able to take time off when they needed to.  Junior private equity executives are often in a...