Does California have a strong financial sector (specifically in asset or investment management)? If so, where in the state (LA, SF)? I hear a lot about NYC, Chicago and even Boston being good areas to move to to work in the industry, but rarely about LA (probably because of the time zone). Besides PIMCO in Newport and Wells Fargo in SF, any other big name employers in the area?
BGI, now bought by BlackRock is out in SF. Western Asset is in Pasadena. So yeah, there are some asset managers. I don’t have names, but I’ll bet there are a lot of Wealth Management shops in both LA and SF catering to the Hollywood wealthy and Silicon Valley bigwigs. Also a fair amount of VC in Silicon Valley. There might be a similar kind of VC-like work in LA, focused on investing in film ventures.
bchad has a nice summary. I would add that there are a lot of small hedge funds in the Bay Area and a few mega funds (Faralon comes to mind). There is also a decent sell-side community here focusing on tech (Citi and Goldman definitely have a presence, and I think Jefferies might). I am not familiar with LA.
LA - PIMCO (1tril), TCW (100bil), Western Asset (300bil), Oaktree (30bil), Capital America (700bil?), Sell-side banks, and a handfull of smaller buy side firms also RE and PE firms. SF - commerical banking, CRE, mellon financial, barclays aka blackrock ishares group (500bil), and a handful of PE firms. Also CalPERs is huge.
Tons of asset management in LA.
There are numerous VC/PE firms in Silicon Valley, Kleiner Perkins and Needham Capital in Menlo Park come to mind immediately.