How much am I worth? Head of equities, bulge bracket firm

A panel of specialist headhunters give their assessment of typical London pay packages: head of equities trading, bulge bracket firm - salary 120,000-150,000, or up to 250,000 in exceptional cases: bonus: 200%-500%

The FTSE 100 index may have rallied in the past few days, but it remains below 3,800 and its brief dip below 3,300 last week put the wind up equities traders.

Stock values can hardly be said to have broken out of their downward trend and the index is little more than half of its December 1999 peak.

There is talk of another 15,000 City of London redundancies by year-end and equity traders fear more of their number could be axed. CSFB, for example, is widely expected to cut some of its equities staff globally in the next few weeks.

'At the moment in these thin markets equity traders are happy to be in employment,' says Simon Harding of Longbridge Associates, adding that days of guaranteed bonuses are long gone and lock-ins have all but disappeared.

He says profit forecasts have been dramatically adjusted downwards, taking projected bonus payments with them.

'With the severe culling that has taken place in the front office over the past two years, we estimate that two in five traders have lost their jobs,' says Mikayla Owen, head of equity trading at Napier Scott.

As with animals in the wild, the best senior equities traders have found that adaptation is the key. Risk aversion has become something to be prized, cutting margins increasingly a way of life.

There has also been extra emphasis on keeping the client as happy as market circumstances permit, while many firms are also making it a priority to reduce trading and execution costs.

So against such a dire backdrop, what sort of person makes a good head of equities trading? Aside from patience (and an abiding belief that good days will return to the market once again), headhunters say necessary qualities include strong leadership skills, team building ability and what Napier Scott's Owen describes as aggressive conviction.

As one might expect, those head of equities trading still in situ are the best of the bunch, the crème de la crème of the business.

'Those who have survived are certainly the fittest and indubitably the best,' says Owen, adding that many have developed into a new type of trader: the bear market trader. This is someone who rejects the salesman's old adage that traders can only make money in bull markets and can sniff out opportunities even where there appear to be none.

Such people can still expect to be handsomely rewarded.

Mark Horlock, who handles equities and equity-linked products at Alexander Mann Global Markets (AMGM) says equity trading heads are now being paid mostly for their control of losses and management of risk, which tend not to generate huge bonuses.

However he believes that those whose teams 'buck the trend and out-perform the competition can expect to be paid beyond the top end of the current standard bracket.'

In hard cash terms, he says this means a bonus of 500% or more for a favoured few.

Owen agrees, suggesting top packages range up to 3m depending on the ranking of the house, but with amounts over 1m being generally stock-based.

Not bad work if you can get it - but few can. Almost all headhunters agree that recruitment of equity trading heads - and of senior equity traders - will remain light this year, despite evidence of under-staffing in some leading houses.

Figures and commentary by Alexander Mann Global Markets (AMGM), Napier Scott Executive Search and Longbridge Associates.