Life in a Boutique Firm: Pros and Cons for Women in Fund Management

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by Elizabeth Harrin (London)

There’s more to fund management than the big players like Santander and Jupiter.  Fixed income boutique firms might be smaller, but they are more agile and offer different career opportunities.

“In a boutique firm, people may find themselves wearing many hats,” says Carolyn Dolan, founding principal at New York-based Samson Capital Advisors.  Samson is a fast growing money management firm designed to meet the special needs of affluent families, foundations, corporations and endowments.  The firm currently manages over $5 billion.  “This can be good as well as bad.  It is good in that a person is exposed to various parts of the business.  The negative is that one may have to worry about things that are taken for granted at a larger firm.  For example, during the past two weeks I have worked closely with an attorney on the lease for our new space,” she adds.

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Ask-A-Career-Coach: How Do You Explain A Gap In Your Résumé?

jobsearchContributed by Caroline Ceniza-Levine of SixFigureStart

What do prospective employers really think when they see a gap in your résumé?

It depends on the length of the gap, the industry and function you are targeting, and how the gap compares to everything else in your marketing campaign.

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The Future of Hedge Funds

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by Liz O’Donnell (Boston)

New data from Hedge Fund Research, Inc., (HFRI) shows assets invested in the industry increased by $100 billion in the second quarter of 2009, ending at $1.43 trillion. This is the first quarterly increase in assets since second quarter of 2008. HFRI attributes the growth to gains shown during the quarter. The HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index returned 9.13 percent. This is the best quarterly gain since the last quarter of 1999, although still below the highest peak, reached in 1997. And while investors are still redeeming capital, the pace of the redemptions has slowed from recent years.

But looking past the most current returns, what does the future hold for the hedge fund industry given the tremendous impact of the global financial crisis and amid discussions of government regulations? And what about the outlook for women? Will the recent inflow mean more opportunities or will women still be virtually missing from the industry this time next year?

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Voices of Experience: Ann Oka, Senior Vice President, Supply Management, Sodexo Inc.

head_shot-ann_oka3001by Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)  

Shortly after graduating from high school, Ann Oka stuffed her clothes in some garbage bags, packed her record albums in a box and loaded up her $200 Vega for a three-week road trip across country with a high school friend.  Destination: sunny California, where she had lived before her parents had moved her to the East Coast.  The plan was to work for a year, establish residency, and start down the path to becoming a doctor.   

 

Oka, now the senior vice president of supply management at Sodexo Inc., explained, “I’ve always been stubborn, so while my parents were perfectly willing to pay for my college education, in my mind it was something I was going to do on my own.” Read more

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In Case You Missed It: Business News Round-up

martin1Contributed by Martin Mitchell of the Corporate Training Group

In case you were too busy to have kept up with all the news, contributor Martin Mitchell has gathered some important market events from last week to help you start this week well informed:

Economic Backdrop

  • The US non-farm payrolls report showed that the economy lost 247,000 jobs in July, below the median estimate of 320,000 from a Reuters’ survey of economists.
  • A separate survey of US households showed that the unemployment rate slipped from 9.5% in June to 9.4% in July.
  • Both the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee and the European Central Bank decided to keep their interest rates on hold at 0.5% and 1% respectively.
  • The Bank of England also announced that it will add a further £50bn to the £125bn it has already pumped into the financial system under its policy of quantitative easing.
  • Questions are being asked about the reliability of China’s GDP figures with first half numbers from the provincial authorities some 10% higher than those reported by the National Bureau of Statistics. At worst, there are worries that individuals in the provinces manufacture the figures to improve their career prospects.
  • Surveys showed that global manufacturing is on the rebound, with activity contracting at a significantly slower pace in the US and continental Europe, and UK industry back on a growth path.

Mergers and Acquisitions

  • Energy company Centrica won approval from the UK’s Office of Fair Trading to buy a 20% stake in British Energy from EDF for £2.3bn. However the deal involves half the deal being paid in cash and the other half via the sale of Centrica’s 51% stake in SPE, the Belgian utility company, to EDF. The SPE sale is still awaiting European Commission clearance.
  • Deutsche Bank is in advanced talks to take a stake in Sal Oppenheim, one of Europe’s biggest independent private banks. Sal Oppenheim has about €130bn under management.
  • Bank of New York Mellon is in advanced talks to buy the bulk of Insight Investment Management, one of the UK’s biggest fund managers. BNY Mellon won an auction for Insight, which is being sold by Lloyds banking Group. It is thought that the cost could be up to £250m to purchase the third-party business of Insight that has approximately £74bn under management.
  • British media company ITV is to sell Friends Reunited, the social networking site, to DC Thomson for £25m. It is less than 4 years since ITV bought Friends United for £170m.
  • Stagecoach and the Spanish-led consortium (the Cosmen family and CVC) bidding for UK travel company National Express have been told to ‘put up or shut up’ by the UK Takeover Panel. The bidders must make a firm offer by September 11th or walk away.
  • PepsiCo has agreed to take control of its two largest bottlers, Pepsi Bottling Group (PBG) and PepsiAmericas (PAS) in a $7.8bn deal. PepsiCo was advised by Centerview Partners, BofA Merrill Lynch and Citigroup. PBG was advised by Morgan Stanley and PAS by Goldman Sachs. Read more
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Professional Women Choosing to Remain Childless

by Marian Schembari (New York City)

 

In the past ten years, the number of women who choose to remain childless has practically doubled. According to an article published last month in the Telegraph, the tides are turning as it used to be poverty and low marriage rates that contributed to childlessness. Today, women with higher education, social class and professional qualifications are more likely to actively choose not to have children. 

 

And the numbers are going up. Research done by the Office for National Statistics (UK) shows that healthy women who are sexually active, living with long-term partners are the ones to decide not to become mothers. Apparently, 25% of women who are university educated remain childless by age 40. They also found that women in more skilled professions were four times less likely to have kids than women in more unskilled jobs.

 

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Queen of the City: Burning the Career Candle at Both Ends

Early Morning View of Big Ben“I am so sorry. Big Kiss.  My love to you and the girls.  Hold them close.” Catherine Bailey’s tragic last words to her husband just before the successful City lawyer and mother of three daughters drowned herself in the Thames earlier this year. 

 

The resulting heartbreak for her young family, and consternation and sadness among colleagues at her law firm has been widely covered in the UK press.  

 

Ms. Bailey was a partner dealing with banking and regulatory disputes, including Financial Services Authority investigations. The current economic crisis put her skills as a financial litigator to the forefront with a significantly increased workload.  Returning to work six months after the birth of her third daughter into an environment where partners regularly worked 60+ hours a week, Ms. Bailey would probably also have had to take home work in the evenings and over weekends to keep up. Read more

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NAFE Names Top Companies for Executive Women

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by Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)

 

The National Association for Female Executives has once again released their list of the top corporations for executive women-or as the site puts it, their “annual scrutiny of America’s corporations.” The 2009 list, which takes into account succession plans, metrics for managers, and commitment to bringing women into P&L posts, was expanded to include 50 companies instead of its usual ten. According to the organization, the pool of applicants increased so drastically over the past year that the expansion was necessary.

 

NAFE’s top ten list features some familiar faces, as well as a number of newcomers who made their presence and dedication to hiring and retaining female talent known this year. Here are the top ten companies for women, according to NAFE:

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Voice of Experience: Pam Flaherty, President, Citi Foundation

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by Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

 

At the age of 21, Pam Flaherty, President of Citi Foundation, was well on her way to achieving her childhood dream of becoming an ambassador. While waiting to get called up into a Foreign Service Officer class, she was accepted into the M.A. program in International Relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. It was there that she learned more about the realities of life in the Foreign Service and decided, for a variety of reasons, that “it was not the way [she] wanted to go.”

 

Fluent in Arabic and French and still enamored with all things international, she obtained a position as an assistant to a very senior international monetary advisor at Citi in New York. She explained, “Citi [was a good fit because it] is a global company and was very receptive to people with odd kinds of backgrounds.  I started out by doing economic research, which I knew a fair amount about [because economics was a heavy part of the requirements at John Hopkins].  But, from the moment I got here, I realized I was more intrigued by the business environment and solving business problems than by the research I was doing.”

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Ask-A-Career-Coach: How Do You Track Down Lost References?

Contributed by Caroline Ceniza-Levine of SixFigureStart

jobsearchI recently reached out to a former superior and found that she had been let go. In this day and age where people up and down the corporate ladder are being laid off, what do I do when the people I worked with are no longer there to act as professional references?

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