Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine writes today about how titles...

Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine writes today about how titles are helpful in the investment and hedge fund industry. Why does this remind me of another Matt, who used to call himself a director at a small now-listed Nasdaq hedger? (Now it's just "Head of M&A.")

"I cannot stress enough how important the head-of-something thing is. As a fairly junior vice president I would regularly go into client meetings with some senior relationship banker whom I had just met and who had no real idea of who I was, to talk about some weird derivative trade, and the banker would always introduce me to the client as like “this is Matt, he’s our global head of” whatever the weird trade was. … These headships were not, like, written down anywhere. No vote was taken, no corporate resolutions passed to make me the head of whatever I was the head of that day. It was marketing: If a relationship banker was taking me to pitch some weird thing to a client, then the client would be happier and the relationship banker would be happier and I would be happier if we all agreed that I was the bank’s leading expert and fully empowered manager of whatever weird thing I was pitching.

"I worked at a big investment bank, with thousands of employees, many of whom were, like me, the heads of a short list of obscure businesses. At a single-manager hedge fund things are a bit different:There are probably only like a couple of dozen employees.Titles are probably less important: There are fewer of you, and the job is less about marketing and more about results; most people would probably rather be called “an analyst” and get paid a lot than be called “head of consumer retail” and be paid less.But there’s still some use for titles: You might get your due diligence calls returned quicker if you are the “head of consumer retail” than if you are just “an analyst.”Those titles can be granted at least as informally as they are at a bank: Your boss can say “here’s Matt, he’s the head of consumer retail,” and who is going to disagree?Because there are fewer employees, the titles can be bigger. Being the head of consumer retail at an investment bank is a big job! There are a lot of investment bankers covering the consumer retail sector, and they all report to you; a lot of people would like to be the head of consumer retail but only one person (maybe two) gets to be it. At a hedge fund with a dozen analysts, probably each analyst will have her own fairly large coverage universe. If you’re the analyst covering consumer retail companies, then you are also the “head of consumer retail.” Who else could it be? You are the head of a team of one, but that’s a pretty common experience in the financial industry."

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-05-20/the-endless-shrimp-investigation?srnd=homepage-americas&sref=UBXEvm0h