American hedge fund drops its average pay in London to only $580k
Hedge funds have a reputation for paying very, very well. American firms in London also have a reputation for paying very well, too. But what do you get when you stick them together? If you ask Sculptor Capital Management, then “meh”.
Accounts for Sculptor Capital Management’s London-based subsidiary, Sculptor Capital Management Europe Limited, were released earlier this week. They show that average pay at the fund was £428k ($580k) per person in 2024, a whisker down from the £438k ($594k) average it paid in 2023. It is, however, down more substantially on the £476k ($645k) it paid on average in 2022.
The decrease in pay was likely due to a decrease in revenue. In 2023, the fund made £38m ($52m) in London; in 2024, it made just £35m ($44m).
Headcount at the firm has stayed flat since 2022: it had 41 people in total then, 41 in total in 2023, and 41 in total in 2024. The number of “investment professionals” across the years, however, increased – from 23 in 2022 and 2023 to 25 in 2024.
Crucially, Sculptor doesn’t break out pay for its portfolio managers, so the compensation packages are likely to include them, too. When we looked at London’s best-paying hedge funds, average compensation was in the $300k to $500k range, with portfolio managers making several million. The lack of broken-out PMs in the Sculptor figures is therefore not a good sign for overall average pay.
Sculptor Capital Management was once upon a time known as Och-Ziff Capital Management. It changed its name twice – in 2017 to OZ Capital and then in 2019 to Sculptor Capital Management. Bloomberg noted in 2019 that there was a client capital exodus after a court case that year related to bribing officials in Libya and the DRC. Presumably that was a coincidence.
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