A lot of fairly boring hedge fund-related jobs coming soon
Regulatory and governmental changes regularly create new jobs - take Sarbanes Oxley and accountants, or the revision of the Community Reinvestment Act and the subprime mortgage market. New regulations regarding hedge funds look set to do the same for admin professionals.
As of September, all hedge funds globally will be required by the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) to collect data on everything from managers' names, to...number of funds, equity owners, names of auditors and custodians, recent performance, redemptions, total assets under management, the value of long and short positions in different assets, geographic spread, liquidity of a fund's assets, the value of borrowings, net credit counterparty risk, and...top 10 positions.
While this looks like a hedge fund manager's nightmare, it's a bureaucrat's dream.
The market for hedge fund administration types is already looking up. In Ireland, where much of this work takes place, one recruiter recently told us that, "A rush of new business is creating demand for both hedge fund accountants and business change professionals."
The pay is far from spectacular (although perfectly reasonable for Dublin) at €40-100k.
In fact, jobs in hedge fund bureaucracy were on a roll, even before IOSCO intervened.
"A lot of what is being proposed is already being demanded by investors," says John Godden of hedge fund consultancy IGS Group. "The move to managed accounts has massively increased the number of people involved in hedge fund infrastructure - administrative and risk monitoring work is mounting up massively. It's all 50-100k a year stuff."
Among the big beneficiaries is understood to be Butterfield Fulcrum, a hedge fund administrator which recently launched a managed account platform to provide daily reconciliations, profit and loss and risk reporting and allow investors to monitor daily performance against investor guidelines. According to Godden, Butterfield's hiring 'a number of people' to help it deal with the move to the managed account infrastructure.
