Prime Brokerage

Question

Does anyone know anything about Prime Brokerage? 

From my understanding, it is a division of a BBB that handles backoffice duties for a Hedge Fund and charges them a fee. I hear it's a pretty hot market now especially with the success of HF's. 

Anyone know more details about career progression/salary etc?

3underscore · Answer

Right. I am going to be a damp towel on this one. 

You are doing things that HF's don't want to do themselves. Hell, they will pay you to do them for you.

I can't understand why anyone would think Prime Brokerage would be an interesting choice of career path - its more one that chooses you. Having said this, a friend works in Prim Brokerage, enjoys it, and earns pretty well (more than I do, certainly).

rhyme · Answer

I know nothing about it, but it sounds like an admistrative job by your description. Sounds horrifically boring.

Mark4124 · Answer

Depends on what you do in prime brokerage. Depending on what area you work in there could be sales and trading related duties or account manager type duties.

diegmat · Answer

You could prob make some decent dough if you started up a successful prime brokerage on your own. Otherwise, as others alluded to, not sure how viable a career path it is. 

More importantly, the correlation between the success of small hedge funds and prime brokerage revenues are probably approaching 1. As the hedge fund industry matures - prime brokerage won't be so hot.

lepium · Answer

I think the key word here is "backoffice". I know zilch of the financial industry, but in my industry whenever the backoffice word is mentioned it usually means the work some poor fellow needs to do after the hotshot closes a deal. Some young ones get recruited internally from backoffice to Jr. hotshot, but they are high potential recent grads who get the backoffice job as training. 

Hope it helps. L.

Prime Brokerage

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