It used to be clear that Goldman was the place to be if you’re a trader. Now it’s not. Goldman’s traders continued to make some of the biggest money in the third quarter. However, they also made losses on more days than rivals. The 10Q submissions of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley paint a predictable picture of worsening conditions, increasing trading losses and erratic profitability. On one measure, Goldman... Read more

Recruiters are having a hard time. Although there are jobs out there, they are generally exceeded by candidates. And the candidates don’t seem to match the jobs. “We still have a flow of roles across the business, but clients have very high expectations, and the resumes we’re getting don’t match them,” complains a director at one front office recruitment firm. “People sending in their resumes aren’t the top performers.” As such, both... Read more

If you’re looking for a job and you can’t find one, you may be feeling a little concerned – especially if you’ve been looking unsuccessfully for some time. If this concern leaks into your resume, it will prove counterproductive: no one wants to hire someone who smells of desperation, no matter how faint the odor. Recruiters have methods of spotting desperation in resumes. You need to know these and you need... Read more

One recruitment professional claims to have identified the secret of eternal employability in financial services: advanced Excel skills. “There is always steady demand for people with advanced Excel,” says Dominic Connor at P&D Quant Recruitment. “It is an excellent safety net for when it hits the pan.” Connor points out that Excel is ubiquitous in banks, where it’s used for everything from risk reporting to pricing to HR spreadsheets. Generally, practitioners aren’t... Read more

Internal recruiters in investment banks do not like search firms. They consider them expensive, duplicitous and delusional. And they would like to renegotiate their fees. No internal recruiter is going to say any of this on the record. Off the record, however, is another matter. “Search firms seem to be stuck in a different era,” complains the EMEA head of recruitment at one bank. “They’re still being extremely bullish and are... Read more

Banks’ third quarter results are not what they seem. As the Financial News points out, when the effects of DVA (debt valuation adjustment – or the gains from the reduced cost of buying back banks’ own debt) are eliminated, U.S. banks’ "cumulative pre-tax profits" disappear entirely and their revenues fall by a third. Banks don’t volunteer their historical revenue figures without DVA, making it difficult to ascertain precisely how well they’re... Read more

Equities headhunters point to a new trend: culling expensive senior staff and promoting juniors, who then end up having an excessive amount of work to do. Search firm Sheffield Haworth issued a "Viewpoint" document on the cash equities industry, saying that “equity salesmen are forced to cover more accounts and analysts to research more stocks as pressure on businesses to ‘sweat the assets’ starts to bite.” Sheffield Haworth also observed that “junior... Read more

When Vikram Pandit spoke on Citi’s conference call, he suggested that no one really knows what’s coming next in terms of investment banking revenues. “The entire market now is still searching to see what the new secular normal is,” he claimed. Bankers at Goldman and Bank of America/Merrill Lynch need to hope the new "secular normal" is not represented by the recent quarter. In Q3, both Goldman Sachs and Bank of... Read more

If you are a college student who wants to get a job in investment banking, there is something you must know. And it is not the meaning of contango or how to do a DCF. What you absolutely must know is this: if you want to succeed at getting a place in an investment bank, you need to work at it FROM THE MOMENT YOU ARRIVE AT COLLEGE. It is not... Read more

Things have definitely taken a turn for the worse in investment banking. In the third quarter, investment banking fees at J.P. Morgan fell to their lowest level since 2005, and dealmaking in EMEA was at its lowest since the first quarter of 2010. However, this does not mean some people are not busy. A lack of done deals does not mean a lack of pitching for deals, with all its attendant work... Read more

J.P. Morgan’s Q3 results were out yesterday. So were Google’s. As places to work, one is looking a little more exciting than the other. Why you might want to go for Google instead After yesterday’s results were announced, shares in J.P. Morgan fell 4.8 percent, and shares in other U.S. banks declined. Shares in Google, on the other hand, rose 6 percent. Google’s revenues are up 33 percent year over... Read more

When it comes to possible job elimination because of the Volcker Rule, Wall Street's loss could be London's gain, according to Douglas Landy, a solicitor at Allen & Overy in New York, who looked at yesterday's draft copy of the Volcker Rule and implied London might be a beneficiary. Writing in the New York Times, Landy points out that the draft Rule still allows proprietary trading as long as it’s “done... Read more

How do you get your resume seen in a market where hardly any banks are hiring and every job is attracting innumerable applications? The answer, according to banks’ in-house recruiters, is simple: look for the keywords pertaining to skills and experience in the job description and repeat those words in your resume. Although heads of recruitment at leading banks insist the resumes submitted through their Web sites really are read by human... Read more

There’s a growing possibility that a lot of very talented, very highly qualified financial services professionals might be looking for jobs in the next six months. What can you do if you find yourself among them and competing for positions that require fewer years of experience than you have? 1) Make it absolutely clear that you really want the job If you are applying for a job you could have done five... Read more

How bad is it out there? Very, according to various analyst reports on the state of the banking industry. Nor will it get better soon. Analysts at Bernstein Research issued a note on Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley suggesting that the revenue recovery they’d predicted for 2012 won’t happen until 2013. Analysts at BarCap in the U.S. issued a similarly gloomy prognostication for the quarter just gone: they think revenues at... Read more

What would happen if traders at investment banks weren’t paid on the profit generated by their book and paid only according to a) the fees paid by clients and b) the spread they earn from market making? This is what’s currently on the table in a new draft of the Volcker Rule. Bloomberg reported this week that a draft of the rule currently being circulated among regulators contains the provision that market-making... Read more

2012 is shaping up to be an unfortunate year to graduate if you want to work in an investment bank. Three disruptive forces are at work. First, banks have made comparatively few offers to last year’s interns. Second, some (but not all) banks have filled all their front office graduate places with the interns they did make offers to. And third, uncertainty about the markets in 2012 is making banks wary... Read more

How can you get a new job in front office investment banking when the world is full of layoff talk and bonus pool protection and even JPMorgan is saying third quarter markets revenues will be down 30%? Answer: you need the right sort of resume. We asked seven headhunters to specify the sorts of resumes they’d most like to walk through the door in the coming moments. This is what they... Read more

Trading in investment banks is foundering due to the Volcker Rule. Hedge funds are having a bad year due to bad markets. But high speed trading is expected to grow. Even though a recently leaked MiFid II document suggests high speed trading will be regulated in future, high speed trading remains a growth market. A report from the Tabb Group predicts it will shake up the options trading market in the... Read more

If you don’t do this now, you could regret it later. September is a comparatively quiet time of the year for headhunters and recruiters. They are milling around quietly, gently schmoozing clients and surfing the internet. In a few months they will be frantically fighting for jobs to fill in 2012 while fending off waves of the newly unemployed. If you want to get a headhunter/recruiter on your side, now... Read more