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Tell me about it. Biggest BS ever: even very very good people often don't make it beyond being desk head where the partners siphon off their share. Even the places that say "share of the profits if you come to us!" usually don't offer you more than 2-3% of the returns (before tax, mind you) which you generate for them and you still have to deal with a lot of bureaucracy of the stuff above the pod structure (and pay for it of course). Starting up your own place is also now becoming effectively impossible unless you have mid double digit millions lying around because of all the rules and regulations and partnerships you need.
The money is very very good regardless but there's a difference between having real autonomy vs being a cog in the machine, which is what a lot of modern trading is becoming (remember, the models etc. you develop don't belong to you, they're company property so you can't just up and take them to a competitor firm without getting sued, and nobody (other than the aforementioned pod shops above with their own issues) is hiring you unless you agree that ownership of models isn't yours.
Above desk head it was always internal politics. It’s the same in every part of finance, in tech, etc. Some people don’t realize there were plenty of ultra-smart people in the 80s and 90s who also capped out far below the top because they couldn’t play the game. The ones whose names you know today are the survivors. A lot of the real autists with zero social skills who made it to mega billionaire status (Hohn, Rokos, the Two Sigma guys or one of them at least) were helped along because people who had those skills adopted them and essentially exploited them to get rich themselves.
Even in the quant space that means that smart people who seem to have the ability to handle clients, participate in sales (even if only as ‘the smart guy’) and play that role are most likely to make it to the top. It’s the same in every field. If you’re a really smart procedural lawyer who is kind of autistic you will often never make partner because the existing partnership knows you’re (a) unlikely to leave [autists hate change] and (b) probably can’t bullshit your way through the marketing exercise that is every non-technical part of an interview. Outside of the largest partnerships and public corporations where dilution is negligible an equity stake is often far more about being pushy than anything else.
I also think that like @Opt-out says the field is just too saturated with mathematically / spatially super smart IMO winners, who themselves can do a lot more with AI now than they could a few years ago in terms of speeding up implementation / backtesting / whatever. 40 years ago a lot of the white / Jewish top math grads aspired to a career in academia, the younger generation is more diverse and more financially motivated. The rest go to SpaceX. Meanwhile the dumb as bricks bond salespeople I know who would struggle to precisely define carry and roll or how the post libor forward rates curve is computed in a non wishy washy way, or the commodities guys whose market color consists of calling up their clients whenever some OSINT Twitter with a million followers posts a new satellite picture of a missile attack, somehow seem to continue to make tons of money.
Moving up internally is the same as always. It’s the specific ownership seats that are non-existent. You can still be Lloyd Blankenfien CEO of Goldman Sachs but you can’t be a K, K, or R in KKR. Because things have become institutionalized, scaled, and moated. Pure trading the last time you had a path like that was probably early 2000’s and then when banking got banned from prop trading it opened up a big path to scale as big competitors left the market. That window is likely dead now.
There are tons of ex top pod shop guys who have set up on their own over the last 5 years, often backed by the last place they worked. They usually don’t name the company after themselves, but that’s because this has been in decline since at least the 90s. Functionally they are in charge, they could rename ArcNextGammaWhatever to Miller Patel Sarkisian And Company, what’s the difference?
Yeah and whilst MPS & Co isn't GS today in 100 years from now you never know if MPS somehow manages to make it all that way as a brand. Somebody had to start it.
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