Morning Coffee: RBC on hiring push in M&A, equity research. Man made $24k a minute in 2013
After a long period of ‘bedding down’, it seems that RBC Capital Markets is hiring again in Europe. The Canadian investment bank recruited heavily in London after the financial crisis, but has been a less voracious recruiter in recent years as it waited for the hires it made to prove themselves. Now it’s back.
Financial News reports that RBC is entering stage two of its strategic expansion. It’s looking for advisory bankers to create teams covering healthcare and telecoms and media and technology. It also wants to appoint country bankers in continental Europe and to add sponsor coverage (bankers to cover private equity funds) and corporate broking. The new sector bankers will be accompanied by matching hires in equity research.
If you want to work at RBC, the person to know there seem to be Joshua Critchley, an ex-Goldman banker, and head of European investment banking.
Separately, hedge fund managers appear to make unbelievably large amounts of money. Yesterday’s ranking of the highest paid hedge fund managers by Institutional Investor Magazine suggested that David Tepper of Appaloosa Management made himself $3.5bn last year, followed by Steve Cohen of SAC Capital Advisors, who made $2.4bn. The worst paid hedge fund manager on the list was Paul Tudor Jones who made a mere $600m and has been complaining recently that life has never been tougher for macro fund managers.
Based on 10 hour working days, 5 days a week, a full 52 weeks a year, Tepper earned $1.5m an hour and $24k a minute in 2013. If this sounds too infeasible to be true, maybe it is. Bloomberg journalist Matt Levine points out that the managers’ pay calculations seem to come from facile calculations based on 1) the amount of money each hedge fund manager started with, times 2) the return on their fund, plus 3) a bit extra for fees. If so, the figures represent paper profits rather than actual income. This may help explain how it is that Steve Cohen, despite allegedly making $2.4bn last year, felt the need to take out a $1bn personal loan from Goldman Sachs to help get by.
Meanwhile:
Barclays needs to do a UBS. Its ROE in the investment bank was just 4.7%. (Breaking Views)
“We think the market has underestimated how much fixed income, currencies and commodities share Barclays will lose, particularly to US firms, as a result of further deleveraging, [business] mix and Balkanisation,” said Huw van Steenis, analyst at Morgan Stanley. (Financial Times)
Sergio Ermotti on UBS: "We are not in shrink mode." (Wall Street Journal)
Sign of the times: there was little mention of the investment bank in UBS’s presentation. (Financial News)
JPMorgan has named John Anderson and Mike Camacho as co-heads of global commodities, replacing Blythe Masters. Anderson has been JPMorgan’s Houston-based head of non-oil energy trading and Camacho has led EMEA commodities in London since 2012. (Bloomberg)
Citi has the polar vortex to thank for soaring commodities revenues. (Reuters)
George Osborne has promised to mount a new legal challenge to a European Union financial transactions tax after 11 countries, led by France and Germany, agreed to introduce the levy by 2016. (Telegraph)
Andrew Hubbard head of structured credit trading at Credit Suisse in the U.S., left the bank amid a slump in the market in which he specializes. (Bloomberg)
This is turning out to be a good year for European private equity. Disposals are at a record high. (WSJ)
Wall Street CEOs (including John Mack) who have gay sons, are championing change. (WSJ)
Why JPMorgan’s trading business will be stuffed in the second quarter and Bank of America’s won’t. (WSJ)
You can wear this suit on a bike, or to a meeting. (Businessweek)
Things you must never do with your cover letter. (Guardian)
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