Morning Coffee: Grumbling Goldman Sachs analyst & Goldman quant receive dubious accolade. Citi promoted a very small MD class

It’s out!  The Forbes “30 under 30” finance list has a slightly mixed track record – admittedly, it has identified several high-flyers who went on to become billionaires, but the alumni also include Sam Bankman-Fried, Charlie Javice and several others who ended up in jail.  All in all, it’s probably an honour worth having if you can get it, but anyone in that position should be prepared for a little bit of good-natured ribbing from their friends and colleagues.

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This year, we notice that Chris Hladczuk has made the list.  He’s being honoured as cofounder of a fintech called Hanover Park, which apparently does AI-enabled fund accounting.  But he’s more famous in the world of finance for his viral social media opposition to work-life balance.  Back in 2023, shortly after having decided that he’d learned enough in his first year on the Goldman Sachs analyst program, he opined that “Work-life balance in your 20s is an easy way to guarantee a mediocre career”. 

As a piece of rage-bait for non-bankers, it was pretty perfectly calibrated.  And he continued to double down, while also praising Goldman for teaching him to work hard and pay attention to detail.  It must have worked, as he’s attracted $27m of venture capital attention since.

Other people took a route to the “30 under 30” list that didn’t involve dropping out of Goldman Sachs, though.  Camila Solis-Camara (who has a strange resemblance to the actress who plays Yasmin in “Industry” on HBO) joined as an emerging markets derivatives trader in 2018, and is now “Global Head of Client Portfolio Management for Goldman Sach’s Quantitative Strategies Group’s factor investing business”. 

To a certain extent, this is a demonstration of how client facing businesses tend toward title inflation – a Vice President with a fifteen word title that contains at least three separate clauses might be doing very well, but they’re unlikely to actually be the head of a material business unit.  But there’s $50bn of smart beta money in portfolios managed by her group, so she’s likely to be a high-flyer.  Congratulations to all 30 honorees, and make sure to stay on the straight and narrow.

Also, congratulations to the new Managing Director class at Citi.  Apparently, they were informed on a call and given some bits of advice by existing senior management, and then put through a sort of school assembly-like process, where each division had a meeting to read out the new MDs’ names in a roll call.  It was probably less awkward than it sounds, and the memories of the happy event will last awhile.

What also might have made the experience special for the Class of 2025 is that there really weren’t very many of them.  Only 276 bankers got tapped up this year, the smallest since 2020.  Reflecting their revenue success, Andy Morton’s markets division got the lion’s share of the promotions – 55 new MDs, more than any other.  The banking division (run by Vis Raghavan, but including commercial banking as well as investment banking) got 45 promotions.

This might go some way toward explaining why it was such a small class.  Part of the reason will be that last year was unusually large (344 promotions, the usual size is more like 300).  But it’s also the case that Citi has been hiring fairly aggressively in the MD ranks on the banking side, often from JPMorgan. 

Meanwhile …

It’s a delicate exercise for a hedge fund, balancing the desire to embrace AI with the need to not give clients the impression that they’re paying top dollar for a chatbot to pick their stocks.  So although Citadel has an LLM tool available to its portfolio managers to search sell-side research and company filings for keywords and summarize conference calls, its use is wholly optional and, according to the CTO “We don't want PMs offloading their human investment judgment to AI”. (Business Insider)

Laura Golis, one of the top dealmakers at Macquarie, has left to become co-head of Jefferies’ Australian operations. (AFR)

“From some angles it forms the silhouette of a hulking bar chart. From others, it glowers like a coffin”. Having got rave reviews for its desk space and amenities, JPMorgan’s new building is not finding favour with architecture critics, who don’t like the excessive use of steel, the “vajazzled steeple” and “the impressive feat of making real stone look like fibreglass scenery” (Guardian)

JPMorgan needed to make some changes after Aloke Gupte and Alex Watkins went to Citi in July. They have now promoted Ashish Jhajharia to head of ECM for EMEA, Vittorio Rivaroli to head of continental European ECM and Paul Mihailovitch and Stefan Weiner to vice-chairs of capital markets. (Financial News)

Business school researchers have managed to persuade a Big Four accounting firm to let them sit in on hours of discussion in promotion committees, combined with dozens of interviews. Their conclusion is that objective performance in auditing is not what gets people promoted – it’s the willingness of a manager who has a good reputation themselves to put it on the line for you.  It’s unlikely that banking is any different. (Business Insider)

Colleen Brooks, formerly of JPM and Fortress, has opened a members’ club called “Moss” with her sister, over five floors of a midtown skyscraper.  If you can pay monthly membership of $280 to $745, plus a joining fee four times that much, it looks pretty sweet. (NY Post)

People who have had great results in losing weight on Ozempic are beginning to find out that a lot of what they have lost was muscle, and now they feel weak and tired all the time. (Vox)

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