And what’s the career path assuming you get your CFA along the way? Where else do people progress to within the asset management industry?
Better than McDonalds, worse than CEO. Career path is what you make of it. And what opportunities present themselves.
I understand that you can break into any role from anything through hustle and luck, but what is the natural progression from this role within the AM industry?
Depends what you want to end up doing in the investment field. Not a bad role to start with. Allows you to learn the industry I suppose. But pass your exams quickly and suck up as much knowledge as you can. The sooner you can leave the role assuming you want to do something else, the better. Definitely not a bad starting role though.
You’ll learn some good skills, excel, relevant performance metrics, different ways of assessing risk. Will not help you develop any investment acumen though and youll have no idea what it’s like to research a business, development an investment thesis, build and stress test financial models, structure a transaction, negotiate terms, etc. Most people have a desire to do deals…portfolio analytics is a sub-job for many analysts on deal teams…if its you’re only job, i guess youll be very good at it but like I said, it wont get you experience needed to work on deals if that’s your goal.
Depends on your firm. Mine has a risk management group that houses investment, operational, business, etc. The investment risk analysts have a junior and senior level, then risk manager, then risk principal. The risk managers often move to be PMs or co-PMs on index-based or active Quant strategies. Risk can be pretty quantitatively rigorous. Lots of engineering-level math, computer programming, simulation methods, and crafting the risk story based on analytics outcomes. Many risk professionals stay in risk for the long haul, but I have seen multiple people jump to money management.