How to leave banking and get a $317k hedge fund job before 30
Banking pays well. But people in banks like leaving for hedge funds.
One of those is Romaan Qayyum. An inflation trader at UBS since he graduated in 2015 (with only a brief stint at Barclays in that time), which makes him around 29 years-old right now, presumably. After around eight years' as an inflation trader at both Barclays and UBS, Qayyum joined BlueCrest last week. He’ll be a portfolio manager for Mike Platt’s firm, and based in London.
BlueCrest is not, strictly speaking, a hedge fund, but rather a family office for Platt. Nonetheless, it operates as a hedge fund in many ways – including eye-watering pay packages. By our calculations (using UK government data), it pays an average of £255k ($317k) per head to its 250 employees. But the numbers can also get way, way higher than that.
BlueCrest’s portfolio managers earn some 30% of PnL they generate, whilst traders at banks earn around 5%. New portfolio managers are typically set up with a capital allocation between $100m and $1bn. BlueCrest had a return of 153% in 2022, per the Washington Post. That’s anywhere between $46m and $460m, depending on capital allocation.
BlueCrest has added a number of portfolio managers this year already. As we reported last week, Samuel Horwood joined BlueCrest from Goldman. Rodrigo Ostik left Mizuho in March to portfolio manage, as did Tuo Wang and Kunal Mistry from Nomura and NatWest before him.
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