The Eisler Capital quant who left his 12 hour a day job for 16-hour days instead
Wen Cheng has left the room at hedge fund Eisler Capital in New York. Having joined as a quant strategist from Bank of America in 2022, he spent nearly three years at Eisler and has now left to do something very different instead. Cheng - who was a quant focused on the mortgage market at Eisler - will now be pursuing his new "passion," which is converting hotels into apartments in New York City.
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It's a career pivot that doesn't appear to bring lifestyle benefits. At Eisler, Cheng says he worked 10-12 hour days. Now that he's converting hotels into apartments, he works from 8am to 12pm, which is not an improvement. However, Cheng says he's now doing what he loves and is taking "ownership" of his time, instead of lending it to an employer in return for a salary.
Cheng says there's some overlap between working for a hedge fund and converting hotels. "We do a lot of financial analysis on the valuation of the property," he says of his hotel purchases. "I personally do not do any physical conversion work like replacing carpets etc, that is for contractors. But we do need to walk through the properties to check their condition. - How does the roof look, what's the parking lot like, for example."
As a hedge fund quant, Cheng says his main stressors typically involved fixing things, "in a very short amount of time, sometimes it needed to be in minutes." This is more highly pressured than in bank, where Cheng says you can have days to fix problems. In his new job, he says the most stressful thing is money: "In the initial years, there is basically little to no cash-flow, so I will be burning my prior savings every day."
How much do you need to save in order to quit your finance job and convert hotels into apartments? Cheng declined to say. But he says he didn't save much at Eisler as might be supposed. "The cost of living in New York his high," he tells us. "I made more money at Eisler comparing to my prior job but saved little if anything at all."
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