The Hedgie

Ok, so here is the much delayed scoop on my new job. It’s not that I haven’t had the time (I worked a blissful 55 hours last week), it’s just that I’ve been too busy enjoying my newfound free time.
There has been much inquiry into what it is exactly that I do every day. That is – what is my routine? The honest answer is that there isn’t a typical day. This is a phrase one hears very often, and a lot of bankers will say that because it sounds much better than “depends on who decided to rape me today” but the fact is in banking you’re working in either Excel or Powerpoint/Word making models and pitchbooks. The type of model and underlying company stops mattering after you’ve done them all twenty times over till 3AM. The key difference between working at the quant hedgie and investment banking is that whereas in the latter I could painfully see myself becoming ever more robotic and melancholy here I’m becoming smarter and every day. At this rate my brain will soon be sharper than a coke addict’s razor blade.
At the hedge fund my only routine is morning P&L when I mark-to-market our positions (which can take 30 minutes or 3 hours depending on how many new trades I have to account for, and whether or not our broker messed up) and execute new trades as dictated by my Portfolio Managers and our black box model. The P&L models themselves are about as complex as anything you’ll see at a bank – VLOOKUPs and VBA macros galore.
After that I may spend the rest of the day on a project that one of the PMs asked me to do (I’m rarely told what to do here, since everyone is extremely polite). The projects vary across all aspects of running a fund: so far I’ve been asked to write an optimization function for one of our models, research a way to trade global term structure volatility and come up with various investment hypotheses. The best part is that I never feel like a grunt here – all of my work is genuinely interesting to do and receives immediate feedback.
When I don’t have a project however, which is about half the time, I am free to learn about whatever I want. It’s free time to get smart on sexy topics in quant finance and think of ways to turn them into profit for the fund. Getting paid [extremely well] to learn about the things I am so passionate about is a great feeling, I believe it’s called joy – but I’ve forgotten after working in IB for 4 months.
I’m done with my day whenever I feel like it’s time to go, which tends to fall between 6 and 7. Since we don’t trade intraday the whole atmosphere is extremely relaxed – hourlong lunches away from the desk and leaving early to go out on Friday is not only accepted but outright encouraged. In short, I haven’t been this happy with a job since I worked for a fashion house where part of my duties involved interviewing models and attending open-bar fashion shows.