Morning Coffee: Investment fund seeks 26-year-old on $240k for horror job. HSBC carbon traders left in the cold as the world warms

Are you a recent graduate with between two and five years’ experience?  Do you have “a chip on your shoulder and something to prove”?  Have you been wondering whether you really have a “clear path to becoming an investing legend in your own right”?  Do you watch a lot of “grindset” YouTube videos?  Here’s the kind of job posting that you don’t see every day.

It’s from a “fast-growing high performance hedge fund”, where the founder wants a “hybrid Research Co-ordinator/Chief of Staff” to follow him around taking notes for more than 16 hours a day, every day of the week, with a definite promise of no work/life balance. 

Or, in principle, follow her around – the ad doesn’t specify. It also doesn’t give anything like enough clues to guess which hedge fund legend we’re talking about, although the fact that it’s someone who wants an apprentice but is advertising online rather than using their own contacts suggests it's new money (potentially cryptocurrency) rather than established Wall Street.

But the main feature of the ad is that it wants to be really clear that “This role is not suitable for those seeking work-life balance or conventional management styles.” (Underlining in original).  It’s an “extremely demanding role with an unconventional structure” in which you’ll be expected to “receive direct, unfiltered feedback requiring immediate adjustments”. 

On the other hand, the base salary could be as high as $240k, with bonuses as high as $1m by year three, “depending on your skill level and value add”.  And the mystery hedge fund founder is promising an “all expenses paid lifestyle”, “exposure to an elite network of investors” and “apprenticeship … opportunity to dramatically accelerate your career”. Combined with “potential tax advantages” because although the founder travels worldwide, they’re based in Puerto Rico. (Don’t take that one to the bank).

This job is a bit like a Swiss football crowd – you can see the pluses, but there are some massive red flags.  It’s not wholly unlike the job that Carrie Sun did for Chase Coleman at Tiger Global and wrote her book about.  She seems to have genuinely gained from the job and had experiences which couldn’t be gotten elsewhere, but it also quickly burned her out.  And although she’s a successful author today, she doesn’t appear to be on the path to investment legend status.

The truth of the matter is that “Chief of Staff” and “Research Co-ordinator” are two jobs, not one.  If you’re meant to “Capture and synthesize information from 20+ daily meetings/calls” and “Drive execution of research initiatives and special projects” then you don’t have time to “Transform founder's impromptu ideas/sketches into actionable documents”, or at least, not to do so properly. 

The subtext very much suggests the job is to attend to the whims of a hyperactive personality, while getting yelled at for not playing a role in a structured and growing business. And the repeated warning that you need to “handle whatever needs to be done, no matter how mundane or complex” and have “no ego about doing whatever tasks are needed” should also be taken as ominous.  Particularly since Puerto Rico is regularly hit by hurricanes...

Elsewhere, it might have been thought that things were beginning to speed up for the carbon trading market, with the agreement of a global deal on market rules at the COP29 conference this week.  But HSBC doesn’t seem to agree.  Having launched with some quite aggressive hiring a couple of years ago, they have now abandoned plans to build a dedicated carbon trading desk, with the people being assigned elsewhere.

It's not necessarily a decision with read through to the rest of the carbon credits market, although that market has had a tough time in the last year as greenwashing went out of fashion, and might be looking at a tougher one next year given the political climate.  HSBC might just have realised that trying to break into a new franchise is like making a rugby tackle – you have to do it with complete commitment to follow through, or you’re much better off not trying.  A bank which is going through a major strategic reorganisation in its existing markets is just not really in a position to be trying to convince people it’s here to stay in new ones.

Meanwhile …

Deloitte is cutting another 180 staff from its London advisory practice … (FT)

… but half of them might fall on their feet, as Continuum Advisory Partners is a boutique set up by former Deloitte partners, and it wants to grow from 40 front office staff to 130 in reasonably short order. (Financial News)

Marc Rowan is being talked about as a possible Treasury Secretary in the next administration, but what happens to Apollo if he takes the job, halfway through a five year plan? Insiders are apparently pretty adamant that “return of Leon Black or Josh Harris” is absolutely out of the question. (Business Insider)

David Solomon of Goldman Sachs has gone to Hong Kong, to tactfully explain to an investment summit that the myriad difficulties connected in getting capital out of China are connected to the growing reluctance of global investors to put any more in. (SCMP)

Dropping your bankers’ advisory mandate shortly before agreeing a deal is a distressingly common practice among corporate clients, so the bankers usually have contractual terms to protect themselves.  Jarden is suing a client “on a point of principle” to enforce such a contract in Australia; apparently the client is going to fight back by disparaging the work they did. (AFR)

Maurizio Cattelan’s instalment art piece “Comedian” (the one with a banana taped to a wall) is coming up for auction.  The winning bidder will get instructions on how to maintain it by changing the banana and tape – if it’s a hedge fund billionaire art collector, might this be one of the “mundane” duties of their chief of staff / research coordinator? (WSJ)

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