Benefits of Hedge Fund Careers

By Richard Wilson

Job Vacancies, Employment Jobs, Employment

The hedge fund industry is a competitive industry with many highly trained professionals scrambling to get a position at a fund. This often leads people to ask, What are the Benefits of Hedge Fund Careers? The biggest benefits, in my mind, are compensation and a competitive work environment.

Compensation

Hedge fund firms offer one of the most competitive compensation structures around. This has led many financial professionals to leave even highly lucrative careers at investment banks and other firms to get an entry level job at a fund. This illustrates how attractive the compensation is at HFs. Even entry level employees often earn anywhere from $70,000 to $125,000 in annual total compensation. And as you climb the ladder in the HF firm the compensation only grows to where many of the top managers make more than $1 million a year. This has a powerful draw for financial professionals who are looking to make more than they would at an investment bank or other financial firm.

Competitive Work Environment

The HF industry offers a very competitive work environment that many find very enticing. At a fund you may be trading millions of dollars each week which draws the top talent who want to have a challenging and exciting career. This is why many of the top talent in the world find themselves in the HF industry. The idea of using complex trading strategies to produce impressive returns to investors and generate millions, even billions, of dollars in profit has a powerful draw for these individuals.

Graduates of some of the top business schools and universities in the world like Wharton and Harvard Business School often work for hedge funds because they know it is a highly competitive field that can reward you with an often times amazing compensation structure.