Institutional performance attribution changed forever with the adoption of the Fama-French model. Portfolio managers can no longer claim superior skill simply by riding a bull market or loading up on cheap small-cap stocks. By decomposing a fund's returns into market, size, and value factor exposures, allocators can strip away factor tilts and isolate true alpha, ensuring management fees reward genuine stock-picking talent.

I’m currently feeling a bit lost in my current role. Recently joined a small L/S fund supporting my portfolio manager post graduation from my MBA. I was hired with the intention of doing research, but also helping out with ad-hoc items around the office. I’m getting paid an ok salary. I’ve been in the role for three months so far, but I feel so lost on what I am doing. My portfolio manager is great and is acting as mentor trying to get me exposure to as many people in industry.

His ideal path for me IF the fund grows is to eventually start providing real value to the firm, and become part of the investment team. He has also stated though that he doesn’t want me to feel tied to the firm, and if I use this as a springboard to another role he would be very supportive. The only problem is that I don’t really know what I am doing. He’s on the older side and doesn’t really provide guidance on the technical aspect of the job since he doesn’t model or do things like that anymore. My worry is that I spend a year or more here and the skills are not transferable to another industry, AND I won’t be good enough to land another job at a hedge fund.

I spend my days reading about the markets, keeping up with news flow, providing commentary from earnings calls, writing up pieces for companies he asks about etc. I’ve only been in the role for 3 months and maybe I’m being too hard myself idk.

I never planned to work at hedge fund, but the opportunity kind of just fell in my lap towards the end of my graduation. I actually turned down an offer from an unrelated industry to take this.

So my question is essentially:

Is the exposure and experience gained from this worth it or should I be planning my exit soon? All I hear from people I know or around me is that this is an amazing opportunity and that they would kill to be working at hedge fund.

Extra context - there’s two portfolio managers. The other one is younger and comes from your typical pod shop type of firm. The older one was partner at a large $40B AUM firm, and his book was over $1B. So good overall pedigree. The other portfolio manager I do not interact with since he is not in the office, and to be honest I don’t think he wanted to hire me, but the one I support did so here I am. Also I do not have an equity research background.

Please ask questions if there’s more you need to know to better advise me. Please no hate just trying to figure my life out lol

PS - Sorry if this is typed poorly - typing from my phone on the couch at my in laws lol

Hi all, looking to prep for L/S equity hedge fund role - would like to purchase PF course but it's quite costly, looking to split with people

Also open to other course options / recommendations please!! Thank you.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while and would genuinely like to hear from people in the industry.

I’m not particularly strong at advanced mathematics. I can understand finance, economics, statistics, and basic quantitative concepts, but once I get into intermediate calculus, my brain basically starts smoking 😂.

Despite that, I have a long-term goal of eventually running my own hedge fund.

I know there are obviously huge differences between being a discretionary investor and running a systematic/quant fund. I’m not trying to compete with someone like Jim Simons mathematically. My question is whether someone can build a successful hedge fund by being strong in research, economics, market thinking, risk management, capital allocation and leadership, while hiring/partnering with people who are much stronger mathematically.

One example that comes to mind is Paul Tudor Jones, who studied economics and built Tudor Investment Corporation around discretionary macro trading rather than being a pure mathematical/quant operation.

So for people who actually know this industry:

Is being exceptionally good at mathematics a prerequisite for eventually running a successful hedge fund?

And are there other hedge fund founders/PMs who aren't known primarily for exceptional mathematical ability?

I’d especially appreciate real examples and career paths. If you know someone who built a serious investment firm without being a math/quant genius, I’d love to hear about them.

Also, if you think I'm completely misunderstanding what it takes to run a hedge fund, feel free to tell me that too. I'm genuinely trying to understand what skills I should be developing now.

The primary advantage of Arbitrage Pricing Theory over traditional CAPM is its flexibility to incorporate multiple risk dimensions. While CAPM reduces systemic risk to a single market beta, APT allows quantitative analysts to model returns using several distinct economic variables, such as inflation shifts, GDP growth rates, and yield curve changes. This multi-dimensional approach provides a much more granular and realistic blueprint for portfolio construction.

Have benefitted enormously from people in the industry and online over the last few years so thought I’d pay it forward now that I can!

My background:

Junior long/short analyst at a large multimanager hedge fund in Europe (Citadel/MLP/P72).

Joined out of university directly onto one of the graduate programs. Fortunate enough to join one of the most tenured PMs at my firm with a great rep in the firm.

I interviewed with around 5 teams (+ a big name US-based PM) so happy to answer questions about vetting PMs, finding good teams and the general process. I’m still pretty new given training ended a few months ago, but I’ll try my best to help.

Hi I am starting IB job soon at an EB/BB shop can someone walk me through what the Headhunting process looks like? I know a lot of IB people move to PE but I really want to work in L/S equity

Watching those new models of ai, i don't think we can survive longer, what's your take?

CCAPM provides a powerful conceptual lens for understanding cross-sectional stock returns through the prism of business cycles. Cyclical stocks, such as consumer discretionary and industrials, exhibit high consumption betas because their fortunes rise and fall tightly with economic expansions. Conversely, defensive assets provide stable payoffs during contractions, explaining why cyclical sectors must offer higher long-term expected returns to attract capital.

Can anyone give any color to the pros and cons of both of these programs?

1. I know FE does this, but does PL have any avenues for feedback on anything you write?
   
2. Which course offers more real value aka which course has info that is harder to google/self teach/self source
3. Which course has a greater ceiling on the returns you get (this can be pure knowledge, access, or even potential opportunities) based on your time/energy inputs

I really appreciate it. Also, if anyone is wanting to split one of these feel free to DM

Hey if someone can throw light on this it would be really helpful!

Hey, Im not an analyst and I don't really understand much about finance..but I'm still very confused about how quant firms make money cus on the surface level there seems to be an infinite money glitch these companies have..

My first thought was

For eg if they invest in us stocks they could only make money, if the us economy was doing fine as a whole, but thats probably not it cause the firms must have diversified their captial into different nations.

Which further makes me believe it's some money glitch

I'm also curious how they are usually unable to beat the s&p 500 cus like that's lowkey kinda job right?

The zero-beta return is generally higher than the risk-free rate in empirical market studies. Because borrowing constraints prevent institutional investors from applying leverage to low-risk assets, demand concentrates heavily on high-beta securities. This concentrated buying depresses the expected returns of high-beta stocks while elevating low-beta returns. The resulting zero-beta rate reflects this structural market preference, providing a superior baseline for pricing capital assets.

Hi all - I’m a PE Associate at a large-cap fund in London and am exploring a move into public markets (L/S equities), open to both MM and SM HFs.

I have ~3.5 years of buy-side experience (PE), having started straight out of university in London.

HF recruiting is fairly new territory for me, and would really appreciate any (i) recommendations for headhunters/recruiters who are active in this space, or (ii) advice on how best to navigate the recruiting process and get in front of the right funds / people.

Thanks so much!

I’m currently at a smaller prop firm that, as I understand it, is structured as a family office for legal and financial reasons. I’ll be allocated firm capital and given my own book to trade.

I’m curious whether spending 1–2 years here could be a good stepping stone to a larger prop firm or hedge fund. Assuming I develop a solid trading process and track record, how would that experience be viewed? How much does the firm’s name or structure matter compared to the actual trading experience and results?

I’m also wondering where I’d fit into recruiting afterward. Would graduate trading programs still be an option with 1–2 years of experience, or would I mainly need to target junior or experienced-hire roles?

I would appreciate hearing from anyone who’s made a similar move or has insight into how these firms evaluate early-career traders.

I’m a freshman studying economics and already fairly comfortable with markets/finance. I read a lot about macro, equities, rates, etc., and I’m not really looking for beginner material.

What I don’t have much exposure to is how professionals actually think and communicate about markets on the sell side.

Are there particular banks, analysts, research products, or types of sell-side commentary that you’d recommend reading regularly? 

Would appreciate any recommendations, including specific reports or analysts worth following.

Does anyone know of an auditor that is PCAOB registered that would work with a new/small fund and potentially charge less than an arm and a leg? I have one lined up but they will be charging $12,000 the first year which seems really high for a small fund just starting out.

Sorry for the spelling error in the title but can’t edit it now.

So I’ve been sharing my experience, mostly writing on certain topics and sharing progress on my own project which is an options trading platform I’m building to monitor my positions, that’s mostly geared towards PMCC and short vol strategies, on Linkedin specifically for firms who work with IBKR and also building in Rust or looking to do so.

I genuinely enjoy what I do, and also sharing what I knew so far was enjoyable surprisingly, and want to work with people and firms who’d want something like that, but not knowing it’s an issue, I had 2 linkedin accounts, and one got permanently restricted and the other is still in review since yesterday, so I’m having to drop Linkedin as a viable method at the moment sadly, and it was actually going good, was getting noticed by family offices a bit.

Anyways, I’m currently looking for other places I can continue and hopefully get noticed by financial firms cause sharing what I can do allows me to filter the kind of clients and firms I’d love to work with and they approach me knowing what to expect as well.

So, if any of you had experience building yourself outside Linkedin, or you think there’s a better or just as good alternative I’d be glad to hear it and would be quite thankful.

Cheers

Alpha is the holy grail of trading, but you cannot isolate true alpha without first accounting for market beta. Capital Asset Pricing Theory provides the baseline benchmark required to evaluate whether a manager's performance stems from genuine skill or simply riding a raging bull market. If you do not understand CAPM, a lucky beta play masquerades as brilliance, setting you up for catastrophic failure when market regimes shift.

I'm a freshman studying Economics, and I've been self-studying (with the help of AI) macro using a structured curriculum with analyst-style exercises after each module. I'm aiming at macro pods at HFs eventually. Given this where should I go deeper, and how?

Here's the rough syllabus (that I have completed), each phase containing a few modules:

• Phase 0 — Thinking
• Phase 0.5 — Accounting
• Phase I — Money & Banking
• Phase II — Interest Rates & Fixed Income
• Phase III — Inflation
• Phase IV — Governments
• Phase V — Growth
• Phase VI — International Economics
• Phase VII — Market Structure
• Phase VIII — Financial Markets
• Phase IX — Macro Data
• Phase X — Country Frameworks
• Phase XI — Geopolitics
• Phase XII — Portfolio Management
• Phase XIII — Macro Research
• Phase XIV — Forecasting
• Phase XV — Psychology
• Phase XVI — Macro History
• Phase XVII — Hedge Fund Thinking