Morning Coffee: Ex-Goldman Sachs techie isn’t scared to get his hands dirty. Misery of the low-status forecasters

Being a Chief Technology Officer at a big bank or hedge fund is a curious job, with a mixture of glamour and grunge.  On one hand, you’re making decisions on the future, keeping up with the cutting edge of technology and investing millions, even billions of dollars in cool new kit. But on the other hand, you’re responsible for a lot of stuff that is pointedly referred to as “plumbing”, with all the prestige implied.  It’s by no means unknown for a CTO to be used personally as the first line of tech support for a grumpy CEO who doesn’t want to deal with the ordinary help desk.

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

But it seems that Ilya Gaysinskiy, the new CTO at Point72 is prepared to treat these two impostors just the same.  One of his first moves after arriving from Goldman Sachs in September last year was to recruit Vladimir Zhukov (a fellow former Goldman MD working at Stripe) to be Point72’s head of AI, ML and data.  That’s the cutting edge dealmaking stuff.

At the other end of the scale, his top priority at present is to build out a hub in Bengaluru and expand Point72’s existing presence in Warsaw, to create a “follow-the-sun support model” to keep the systems ticking over 24/7.  These are still pretty good jobs, many of them working on mission critical and high-spec trading systems  rather than fielding questions about Excel and email.  But they’re still very much plumbing.

This is the key skill needed to rise into management ranks, and it’s one which many techies struggle to achieve.  Although a high level of understanding of technology is important, an understanding of technology systems is absolutely vital. Gaysinskiy still considers himself to be a “strong coder”, but he’s not going to be able to do much for Point72 by writing code himself.  (And increasingly, apparently, he says that “AI is starting to get better at this than me”.)

Instead, his job is to recruit good people and give them a structure to work within. He’s trying to create a campus recruitment program for engineers which, while it might not be quite as platinum-plated as the famous “Point72 Academy”, is still aimed at “attracting and building talent in the same ways”.  He’s also engaged in surveying the firm’s tech staff to get ideas about which languages and apps they ought to be using, and even straightforwardly asking them which investments they would allocate the budget to.

People’s answers to that kind of question might say a lot about the future of their career.  Hardcore coders might regard it as none of their business, which is fine, but means they’ll be on the coding track forever.  Ambitious types might make suggestions of the latest high performance hardware or cloud solutions.  But the ones who really have the potential to get into the C-Suite will be the junior techies who understand that the right answer might be “a new shed somewhere”, or “redundant cooling systems”.  Plumbing.

Elsewhere, one of the greatest status symbols in banking is the Bloomberg terminal. They’re extremely useful but ferociously expensive and so they tend to be rationed quite carefully by cost conscious banks.  If you’re not a trader, then in order to have one you need to be very important indeed; most research departments, for example, have reconciled their analysts to sharing a single terminal between a dozen or so teams.

But as the saying goes, there’s always someone worse off than yourself.  The UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility, an extremely important and market-moving team of fiscal forecasters, don’t have a Bloomberg at all.  They have to walk half a kilometre over to the main offices of HM Treasury, presumably queue up to use the Bloomberg there and then … write down the prices they were looking for?  Take a photo of the screen with their phone?  Government buildings are usually pretty negative on the carrying of USB sticks in and out, but perhaps the OBR have special permission.

The payments expert Patrick McKenzie once said “No organisation which makes its people pay for coffee wants to win”.  This might be an even greater false economy.  As many banks have found out to their cost over the years, getting market information is expensive, but not getting it can be really expensive. If the forecasters ever make a mistake because it was raining and they didn’t fancy the walk, the cost would probably pay for several centuries’ worth of terminal charges.

Meanwhile …

If you’re an MBA graduate and you get a job managing a small business that someone else owns, then that used to just be called “getting a job”.  But in the new world, there’s something called a “search fund” – a small partnership that buys a small business to manage it better – and now you’re in “mini-private equity”.  You can even start up your own search fund with your own savings and employ yourself.  Presumably the new name for nepo babies will be “family office search fund partners”. (Business Insider)

Centerbridge Capital have done better than the characters in The Godfather; when they found out the Italian lender they were buying from Oaktree was under administration at the request of the anti-Mafia authority, it wasn’t so much “an offer you can’t refuse” as “litigation to terminate the deal”. (Bloomberg)

Three MDs from Numis, Deutsche and Clearwater have given a vote of confidence in the UK market by starting a new boutique to focus on mid-market deals. (Financial News)

One day, artificial intelligence might reduce the need for management consultants to write generic reports and recycle people’s ideas back to them.  But this is not that day.  Demand for AI-related services drove a 10% revenue increase at BCG, and they’ve hired 1,000 more staff to meet the demand. (Bloomberg)

The “One Vision Futures Fund” sounds like it might be sovereign wealth.  In fact, it’s even more secretive than most Gulf investment vehicles, and it exists purely to finance the Duke University basketball team. (WSJ)

Hedge funds have scaled back bets, but the “Trump trade” portfolio of businesses most exposed to tariffs included some of the best performing stocks last week. Good luck everyone, it looks like it might be a busy day. (Reuters)

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.)