Chinese hedge fund offers £218k starting salary to rival big banks : CityAM

Ubiquant, a China-based fund managing $8bn (£5.8bn) of assets, has bumped up starting salaries in a bid to compete with big banks.

JP Morgan, Barclays and Citigroup all upped starting salaries to $100k amid rising market wealth and complaints from new starters about working 100-hour weeks during the pandemic. Amid growing competition Goldman Sachs and Guggenheim Partners inched ahead by paying junior bankers $110k.

These offerings seem meagre, however, compared to the $300k starting salary offered to new starters by Ubiquant in the hope of luring graduates away from global banks.

A shortage of top talent in China, driven by the attraction of studying and working abroad, has given entry-level finance hires the upper hand.

According to Eric Zhu, a Shanghai-based recruiter for Morgan McKinley, explained that both the attractions of day trading and international travel makes it harder to hire new starters. In comments to Bloomberg Zhu said, “it’s hard to hire top talent like those that can already develop good strategies as they would prefer to trade themselves.”

With the US and UK among the top destinations for Chinese international students, China-based funds and banks have been left short of STEM graduates needed to write trading algorithms.

Travel restrictions as a result of the pandemic are helping to reverse the trend by keeping students in the country and China based funds and banks have quickly seized on the opportunity by upping salaries.

Clearly, the strategy of offering mega bucks to new starters is working as Ubiquant reportedly received 300 applications in the latest recruitment round for its newly launched year-long internship scheme.