Morning Coffee: Top private equity firm calls 4.30am meetings to battle complacency. Why hedge funds want ECM professionals

Working for private equity firm Apollo can be lucrative. The H1B visa database, which shows how much firms pay their H1B visa holders in the US, says that Apollo pays its New York associates salaries alone of $200k and its principals $300k. Not so long ago, this was being supplemented by a $300k bonus. 

Get Morning Coffee ☕ in your inbox. Sign up here.

As junior bankers know, however, earning big money comes at a cost. Apollo traditionally had a reputation for 20-hour days and 3am meetings. Co-founder Josh Harris inhabited the phrase, "Some people play golf. Some people play tennis. I work,” and displayed petulance when people didn't respond to his Saturday morning emails within 10 minutes.

Harris left Apollo in October 2022. It's now run by Marc Rowan, another co-founder. Brown is supposed to be a bit nicer and to be seeding his vibes throughout the firm. Maybe not. Business Insider noted that at Apollo's investor day this week, Rowan declared that he's using techniques like 4.30am meetings to give employees a jolt.

"We have woken the team up at 4:30am in the morning for meetings to prove to them that we need to do a wake-up call and something different," Rowan informed investors. In the same vein, he said that Apollo has called in outside speakers to "scare the bejesus" out of its people and has told them "cautionary tales."

It sounds peculiar, and Apollo is not elaborating further. We can only assume that Apollo thinks its employees have been getting too comfortable, or that something bad is coming. Maybe both. At a private equity event in Milan yesterday, Giampiero Mazza, a managing partner at CVC, reportedly said that, “A lot of managers sitting on assets bought at high multiples don’t really want to face reality.” This looks like Apollo's method of forcing confrontation.

Separately, hedge funds keep hiring equity capital markets professionals. Citadel hired Goldman Sachs' London syndicate head Mark Maislish to be head of ECM in February (he left again in April, seemingly for a start-up), Jain Global hired Nitin Dewan as its head of ECM in March, LMR hired Andrew Liebeskind from Citadel last year and Liebeskind has just left again for ExodusPoint.

Hedge funds' interest in ECM professionals looks fortuitous at a time when ECM isn't going well in banks. However, ECM in a hedge fund is not the same as ECM in a bank. It's mostly about block trading stocks from IPOs or in secondary markets. The Financial Times notes that at the top end, the job is "highly relationship driven" - the ECM guys in the hedge funds need to know the ECM guys in the banks, who then allocate the blocks to them. However, it clearly helps to know a lot of ECM bankers, so if you work in ECM now and want to move to a hedge fund, you should probably start being very nice to your colleagues. 

Meanwhile...

The Christmas party may be off at HSBC. The bank has curtailed more travel and cancelled internal events as it tries to save $2bn. (Bloomberg) 

Ian Weir, an ex-sales trader for Asia Pacific markets at Citi based in London won an unfair dismissal case after claiming he has scapegoated for Citi's regulatory failures. Citi was supposed to be giving him his job back, but Weir has just settled instead. (Bloomberg) 

ECM bankers in Europe are rushing to get deals done before the US election. “We’ve seen a lot less primary issuance from listed companies than the market would like,” said Aloke Gupte, co-head of ECM International at JPMorgan Chase & Co. (Bloomberg) 

Ed Eisler was a particularly "brilliant guy" amidst a lot of brilliant guys at Goldman Sachs according to Lloyd Blankfein, but his hedge fund Eisler Capital isn't going so well. People keep leaving. It might be related to Sam Wisnia's alleged 'total surveillance of its trading teams’ wagers and constant interventions.' (Bloomberg) 

Citadel's flagship Wellington fund trailed peers in September, finishing flat but it is up nearly 10% on the year. Schonfeld is up the most this year at 13.1%. (Business Insider) 

Oaktree Capital wants to grow in Europe and to enter new areas like asset backed finance. (Financial News) 

Andrea Orcel says he's surprised that Unicredit's bid for Commerzbank is so disliked. . “We bought that stake transparently, with respect to our position and our intentions, in a process that was also transparent. We had every reason to assume that this was a welcome investment.” (Economist) 

JPMorgan is expanding its asset management business in Canada and will be adding 20 jobs in 18 months. (Reuters) 

More than a fifth of Canary Wharf offices are now empty. (FT) 

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. Signal also available.

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 away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libellous (in which case it won’t.)