What’s in a title? How hedge funds and their employees use the industry’s lack of consistency to their advantage

The well-publicized battle between David Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital and its former employee James Fishback can seem, to industry outsiders especially, a bit trivial.

While Fishback’s most recent legal filing claims age discrimination and asks for at least $5 million from his old firm, the genesis of the messy dispute involves Fishback’s title during the two-plus years he spent at Greenlight.

He said he was the firm’s head of macro. The firm said he was just an analyst — and an unproductive one at that. Lawsuits, spiteful tweets, and plenty of memes ensued.

While the disagreement is on the extreme end of the spectrum, hedge-fund industry veterans say title confusion, inflation, and misalignment are rampant.

Titles within banks and private equity firms follow a de facto industry standard. A managing director at Morgan Stanley does more or less the same thing an MD at Goldman Sachs does.

This is not the case in the hedge-fund world.

While the biggest managers have become more institutional, the $4.3 trillion industry is more opaque and founder-led than other sections of finance.

Hedge funds are a disparate group spanning firms with thousands of people worldwide and new launches with a pair of analysts and a Bloomberg terminal. This lack of uniformity and the relentless war for talent has firms and employees alike taking advantage of the ambiguity.

Fishback, for example, references not an offer letter or an internal HR system to prove his title in his legal filings but an email sent to a third party by Greenlight’s chief operating officer offhandedly referring to Fishback as the firm’s “head of macro.”

Recruiters and hiring managers at big-name funds say candidates constantly give themselves more prestigious-sounding titles on LinkedIn. A dozen headhunters, fund executives, consultants, and others who spoke with B-17 argued that as firms build out the non-investment sides of their businesses to support their growth, titles will only get more inflated.

“It’s extremely tough to know who’s real and who isn’t,” said one longtime recruiter who mostly focuses on quant firms and large multistrategy managers.

“An MD title at the banks, that means something. An MD title at a hedge fund doesn’t mean anything.”

Global heads, chairmen, investment officers, and more

As one person who works in a hiring position at a large multistrategy firm told B-17, “titles are free” — and firms use them. Industry insiders said a title could be a carrot for recruiting or retention, especially as the biggest funds become more institutional and add more non-investment roles to their firms.

More than 200 people who work at the $64 billion firm Citadel have a title on LinkedIn that deems them the “head” of some part of the business, for example. That’s roughly one out of every 14 people within the hedge fund — and doesn’t include its founder, Ken Griffin; its chief operating officer, Gerald Beeson; and others on the leadership team.

A person close to the Miami-based firm said Citadel’s flat structure means that no matter an individual’s title, the internal expectations to produce are very high.

This person added that Citadel’s pursuit of top external talent — the firm just hired Apple’s top recruiter, Sjoerd Gehring, to be its chief people officer, and it poached Google’s Paul Darrah this year to be its chief workplace officer — means some accomplished employees receive big titles to match their experience.

Jose Gamez, for example, spent nearly 20 years working as a chef at several Four Seasons hotels, including five years leading the kitchen at the one in Palm Beach that Citadel Securities took over during the pandemic. He’s now the global head of culinary and executive chef for Citadel and Citadel Securities.

Even for investing talent, titles can be tricky to understand from the outside, in many cases, because of the differing internal structures across the industry that obscure who actually makes trading decisions.

Rokos has two dozen employees with the title “investment officer” in their LinkedIn profiles. A person familiar with the London-based firm said that while these employees sit somewhere between an analyst and a portfolio manager, the fact that its billionaire founder, Chris Rokos, makes all investment calls for the fund complicates titles. The manager declined to comment.

At the newly launched Jain Global, there is a chairman of fundamental equities, Paul Enright, and a chief investment officer of fundamental equities, Townie Wells. Wells, a person familiar with the matter said, manages a portfolio on top of running the business, while Enright is more focused on mentorship and talent development.

The chairman title is uncommon in hedge funds, especially for an individual business within a multistrategy manager, but the person close to Jain said it was what made the most sense for Enright, a former Viking Global portfolio manager who had been running his own money for years and decided to come back to the industry to work at the new fund.

Firms can also tweak common industry titles internally.

Millennium, for example, has ditched the sub-PM title, elevating those who once held that role to PM. These individuals, though, report to a senior PM, who can oversee several PMs within a pod.

A person close to the firm said that as Millennium has grown, individual investing teams have become broader, necessitating more structure. All the teams at Millennium — there are more than 300 — are led by a senior PM, and it’s not uncommon for PMs working under a senior PM to own part of the book and take risk themselves.

In some cases, however, a PM’s responsibilities can be more akin to those of a senior analyst or a sub-PM — but a PM title sounds better to external candidates.

“People will join because they want to be a PM,” one recruiter said. “They know the power in that title.”

Keeping it under wraps

Plenty of funds intentionally keep roles vague and closely monitor what their team members are publicly sharing about themselves.

At Coatue, executives sign off on what employees put as their title on LinkedIn, people familiar with the firm’s operations said. Members of Tiger Global’s front-office team use “investor” as their title on LinkedIn instead of a more specific role.

Quants like Marshall Wace, D.E. Shaw, and Two Sigma are famously guarded about their internal workings. At each firm, dozens of employees use catchall titles like “quantitative researcher” that can span experience levels.

Both sides can be frustrating, especially for headhunters and business development pros at large firms trying to grow their teams.

Oversharing or exaggerating titles can lead to inflated salaries and outside offers that aren’t commensurate with a prospect’s actual experience. Vague titles, on the other hand, can leave allocators struggling to understand what exactly their fees are paying for. Internally, employees who lack ownership of a specific sector or business find that their end-of-year bonuses are left to the whim of the founder.

Fund executives and recruiters alike believe that the industry’s institutionalization will eventually codify titles across firms. Talent-development programs at firms like Point72 and more structured career-development paths at managers like Elliott already feel more like private equity or banking than the Wild West hedge-fund days of yore.

Don Steinbrugge, the CEO of the hedge-fund consultancy Agecroft Partners, said lofty-sounding roles without equivalent responsibilities — like a vice president of a bank — would have their match in hedge funds.

“Titles are something that’s very important to people. It’s something that impacts their reputation in the industry,” Steinbrugge said.

“Over time, people will have titles that sound more important.”