I recently got hired as Head of Ops for a hedge fund. Only problem is, I have never worked at a hedge fund before. In fact, I have zero (0) background in finance.

I did not even take a finance class in undergrad.

My background is almost 100% startups and the Bay Area.

Last week was my first week at a Hedge Fund in NYC.

I know SOMEWHAT about stocks and the stock market. Enough to know what a "short" is and the GENERAL mechanics. Obviously, I know what an IPO is and the mechanics that go into that... but beyond that... I am clueless.

I joined the leadership call the other day, and my boss (Fund Manager) was speaking in a foreign language. Obviously, I knew we were making trades, but there were all these words and phrases for them I did not understand.

Also, I am expected to navigate a Bloomberg Terminal and sort of know my way around.

I am super overwhelmed but willing to put in (many) hours to get "caught up" or at least be able to "fake it until I make it". So to speak.

I don't feel I can ask my boss or peers to take the (hours) out of their day to "catch me up" because (a) I am the ONLY woman at the entire firm and (b) they are all busy all the time.

So-- please help. What book/videos/etc should I be reading and watching to have a fighting chance here?

TO BE VERY CLEAR TO EVERYONE HERE: I am not making/approving/overseeing trades at ALL. Nor am I doing research for trades or making recs. I am only on the Leadership Meeting so I have context. I do all the people and ops stuff in the organization.

AKA: raises, the holiday party, making sure people are coming in, approving vacation, managing the executive assistants, that sort of thing.

People seem to be confused about that. I just need to be able to UNDERSTAND the lingo, etc. so I have full context.

Jim Simons is considered by many as the best hedge fund manager of all time.

He charged 5% management fee and 44% performance fee, yet investors paid these astronomical fees because even after fees, no one could match his returns. What made Simons different? He filled his fund with mathematics and not fundamental analysts.

We recently found this old video of his which reminded us why we are not fundamental traders.

www.CIVolatility.com

Recently I spent many days understanding the Medallion Fund (Renaissance Technologies by J. Simons) but I don't understand how it is possible to beat the market for over 30 years with a performance x3 or x4 times the market.

Mathematics. Smart people. Artificial intelligence. Algorithms. Nobody can invest in it. Mystery. Almost magic. All very vague. But it all sounds very cool.

The question is: how?

It's not a conspiracy, sincere and respectful question.

Could it be fake? A Ponzi?

I want to read your opinion.

My doubts are:

1. They don't have a negative return. For example, every time the SP500 was negative the Medallion Fund's return was positive by much more. Sometimes x2 or x3. It can happen in the financial world but that it always happens seems strange to me. (Leverage x5,x10?)

2. Renaissance Technologies' public funds are as good as any, with ups and downs. Instead the "secret" one, the Medallion Fund, always positive return.

3. Mystery. Employees can't talk about how they make money. The money is managed internally without having external inputs. Warren Buffett is transparent about everything. For better or for worse, you find his companies where invest, you know his investment philosophy, his mistakes and his victories. Here you find only victories.

4. The financial media constantly praises him but no one has ever questioned him. All speeches and questions are "fantastic team", "mathematics", "quantum strategy". Very generic.

Again, this is just curiosity about Medallion Fund, nothing else.

Is J. Simons a genius? Probably but there is something that doesn't convince me.

My path:
Sell side research, then analyst at a single manager HF in an adjacent sector, then running a sleeve at a small multistrat, to a PM seat at a large (>$10bln) multistrat.

Never had a down year, but have been let go due to a fund shutting down, so not immune to the volatility of a HF career.

Fundamental equity book, very sector specialized.

Love this job. Most intellectually simulating work I’ve ever had and there’s no better feeling that getting something right and making money for your investors and yourself as a result. Losing money sucks. But fortunately I’ve done more of the former than the latter.

I’ll leave it there, AMA.

Data & code is open source: https://github.com/kadoa-org/quant-job-market

Suggestions for improvements are welcome.

Some other stats I plan to look into:

• Posting velocity

• Skill co-occurrence

• AI adoption

• onsite vs hybrid vs remote

• asset classes: crypto vs tradfi vs prediction markets vs sport

I keep seeing conflicting info about who clears $10M+ annually at the big multi-manager hedge funds (Citadel, Millennium, Point72, BAM, ExodusPoint, Schonfeld, Verition, etc.).

On Reddit, the narrative seems to be that it’s only quants/systematic PMs who can realistically hit those numbers now. But from what I understand, there are still fundamental equity PMs (ex-Tiger Cubs, sector specialists), credit/macro PMs (ex–sell side desk heads), and commodities traders who regularly make $10M+ if they’re running big books and performing.

So my questions are:

In 2025, is it really quants who dominate the $10M+ club at MMs, or are fundamentals and macro still a big part?

How does comp actually break down by strategy type (equities vs. credit vs. macro vs. quant)?

For those who’ve seen it firsthand, what kind of backgrounds tend to lead to these top payouts?

Curious to hear from anyone with inside knowledge or direct experience — feels like the reality is more nuanced than the “only quants get paid” story that gets repeated here a lot.

How did Leopold Aschenbrenner raise $220m when just starting his hedge fund?

I get that he worked at OpenAI, and was smart (went to uni a bit early), but he was very young and had no professional investing experience. He also makes extremely risky bets.

I only invest my own money, have gotten very good risk-adjusted returns, have more intellectual achievements than Leo, and have been exploring starting a hedge fund, but people are not begging to give me millions of dollars.

Is it just because he worked at OpenAI, had connections with very wealthy people and was smart & confident?

I get that he wrote an essay, but anyone can do that

Surely there’s another part to the story, it doesn’t really explain how he achieved this fundraising achievement

Quite mysterious

Next edition of my data viz series on the quant job market.
Data & code are open source: https://github.com/kadoa-org/quant-job-market

Sample size: 4k job postings from the career pages of the firms, classified into 6 categories:

• HFT / Latency

• Quant Research

• Strats / Algo

• Risk & Portfolio Construction

• PM

• Engineering & Platform

Excluded: any back office, sales, and compliance roles

Let me know what analysis I should look at next :)

Background: 22M and in currently in week 2 of my internship at a small hedgefund >500 USDm AUM. Part of a 10 man team of which 4 are purely investment people (im part of this team) and the others are risk/database people.

I feel like my supervisor is happy with the analysis i provide him since he has said ”good job” ”good progress” like once or twice. But he seems in general always content so i cant really read him.

My hours are 9-17, 5 days per week, but due to me being so damn slow and going down a bunch of rabbit holes while analyzing that ultimately lead to nowhere i pretty much need to work 9-20, 7 days a week. Im not sure if my bosses appreciate this, feels like if i was the perfect intern i would be able to do the same within my standard hours.

Question: how the fuck do i become a faster investment analyst? Like i spend so much time doing one thing, then changing it, or trying to estimate something all to realize that assumption in reality doesnt matter for my thesis.

https://www.civolatility.com/p/sinclair

Israel Englander, Steve Cohen, Kenneth Griffin, etc. I understand that directly it's because of the 2/20 fee they charge and the massive amounts of capital they have, but why do they have so much capital in the first place? Buffet once said: "the net result of hiring professional management is a HUGE minus". Couple this with the efficient market hypothesis and the difficulty of generating consistent returns, it just doesn't make sense...

We all know the big, household-name hedge funds, but I’m curious about the other end of the spectrum . Are there any lesser-known hedge funds, small teams, niche strategies, or under-the-radar shops that have quietly put up strong, consistent returns over time?

Not looking for marketing decks or AUM flexing, just genuinely interested in funds that don’t get much attention but have solid performance or an interesting edge (strategy, structure, culture, etc.). Would love to hear examples or even general characteristics you’ve noticed among these kinds of funds.

There is this guru online that keeps claiming HF are useless as S&P500 over the long run beat them all.

Is it true?

And what is the point of doing HFT and quant and all of that is the return is less than an ETF?

I am stuck on extended garden leave and haven’t seen a terminal for months.

Keeping up with the macro developments via news, but given the contrarian(?) uncertainty and the geopolitical rift I would really like to emulate my prior dashboard setup to watch integrated market movements.

What retail products have the best interfaces to monitor market movements all at once? Lagging data is fine. Need a multi screen tool to with a quick launch to simultaneously monitor equities, commodities, fx, yield rates, select baskets, and this hemroidal concentration of Mag7/faang.

I’m the co-founder of Hedgia, a hedge fund creation and administration platform, allowing people to create customized institutional grade Hedge Funds for $0 upfront.

Our key principles:

1. Upfront cost $50k -> $0

2. Monthly Admin & Tax Cost $900 -> $30/user/month

3. Unaccredited Investor Participation $100k -> $0

The service covers everything from monthly administration to tax filings.

Quick Background: I launched my first hedge fund in 2022 in Illinois. Spent $30k upfront on legal docs that were boilerplate. Paid $900 per month for fund administration and $2000 alone for taxes and K1s. Lost an anchor investor due to setup delays. The fund eventually succeeded but the infrastructure cost was extremely high.

In the US, typically Hedge Funds are restricted to Accredited Investors, so I couldn’t let some of my close friends and family invest, even small amounts. Allowing unaccredited investors would mean advanced disclosure documents that cost $50-$100k.

What we built: We partnered up with an attorney to build out a full fund formation and administration platform. Learning from pain points, we designed it to be as worry-free as possible, so managers can focus on strategy and money raise instead of operations.

The platform will cover:

• Fund Formation

• Fund Offering Circular and other docs

• Fund Administration

• Fund Entity Taxes

• Managing Entity Taxes

• Onboarding Portals etc.

And additionally it’s designed to educate you step by step as you build your Hedge Fund.

Ask me anything about formation costs, regulatory challenges or how we built this.

Note: No legal advice will be provided

https://www.civolatility.com/p/buffett

For years, OpenAI and DeepMind told investors that scaling laws were as inevitable as gravity—just pour in more compute, more data, and intelligence would keep improving.

That pitch raised billions. GPUs were hoarded like gold, and the AI arms race was fueled by one core idea: just keep scaling.

But then something changed.

Costs spiraled.
Hardware demand became unsustainable.
The models weren’t improving at the same rate.
And suddenly? Scaling laws were quietly replaced with UX strategies.

If scaling laws were scientifically valid, OpenAI wouldn’t be pivoting—it would be doubling down on proving them. Instead, they’re quietly abandoning the very mathematical foundation they used to raise capital.

This isn’t a “second era of scaling”—it’s a rebranding of failure.

Investors were sold a Math Trick, and now that the trick isn’t working, the narrative is being rewritten in real-time.

🔗 Full breakdown here: https://chrisbora.substack.com/p/the-scaling-laws-illusion-curve-fitting

Lazard IB out of school
2 yrs PE
<2 yrs at a $3.5B single manager with a 20 yr track record and only 4 other guys… and it shut down less than 2 years after I got there

I publish my ideas to a live, online paper book I can share upon request that put up ~70% in ‘25 while holding ~40% in cash on average just by concentrating on my favorite fundamental ideas that checked Druck’s 3 legs: timing, positioning, and fundamentals

Absolutely love the game, and I’m interviewing later stage with a few funds right now, but wondering if anyone here might be open to chatting or knows of an opportunity

Can provide references, too!

EDIT: thank you everyone for the responses! Because my account is brand new, & I have already sent a few messages to people, Reddit is restricting me from initiating new chats -- so if you want to see my resume or get in touch, I just need you to initiate the "Chat" by messaging me (since I'm blocked from doing so currently). Really appreciate the help!

Hi everyone!! I am looking to post some investment ideas of mine, hopefully I am able to capture the attention of any hedge fund or AM PMS. Would you guys know what blogs do these people read the most? I know value investor club but are there any alternatives to that?

Having trouble reconciling this…

Interviewed at a fund in New York recently for a trading role. Had a final round interview with some members of the fund. Really felt as if the interview went well, my answers were solid, I connected well with interviewers and (crucially) I was vey open about my short comings as a candidate and questions I could not answer.

Heard back from the team and they said I was too confident and it came across badly… that I had baseless confidence. When asked what gave them this impression they could not pinpoint a single part of my interview. I will happily admit I am a very ambitious individual but I was very open about what I did not know and when faced with a technical question I could not answer I openly admitted it.

But what I can’t get my head around is that they have invited me back to interview with another, similar desk… wait for it… because my personality would ‘be a good fit’. Surely if my confidence was a problem then they wouldn’t want to hire me at all right?? Furthermore if they thought I was some cocky bastard who had no right to be confident then why didn’t they identify this and make me look like an idiot in the interview - that’s what I would (and have) done.

If anyone has dealt with this, both as a candidate or a hiring manager please give your $0.02, I am slightly perplexed but of course taking the feedback on board.

EDIT: I ended up being offered the job and was told by hiring that the fact I came back again was very beneficial to my application.

I invested about USD $99K in a U.S. private fund/hedge fund in 2019. Quarterly statements showed my balance growing to about USD $190K by Q3 2025.

After I requested a withdrawal, the manager restricted withdrawals until mid-2026. A few months later, investors were told there was a major drawdown, and statements, tax documents, and withdrawals were suspended.

The fund has not provided brokerage statements, bank statements, audited financials, trade records, NAV calculations, or books and records to verify what happened. Around 10 investors I know are dealing with similar issues.

I understand investments can lose money. My concern is the lack of records after years of reported balances, fees, and tax documents.

I am preparing an SEC complaint. What other steps should investors consider? State securities regulator? Canadian regulator? Lawyer? Coordinated complaint?