Morning Coffee: Hedge fund intern sues for $20m after being driven to tears. Now Citi are hiring traders from JPMorgan as well as bankers
As Rufus Miles once said, “where you stand often depends on where you sit”. He wasn’t necessarily talking about trading floors, but it’s well known that seating plans can have an extraordinary effect on performance. Some seats are much better than others, some people are more sensitive to noise, and some people really hate it when you walk behind their back. Putting the wrong person in a chair next to the route from the vending machine to the toilets can absolutely destroy their productivity.
That seems to have happened to Andrew Pardo, a former intern at hedge fund Point72, who thought he had overcome the PTSD brought on by a terrible childhood, only to have it flare back up when he was assigned to a desk next to a “high traffic walking route”. Things seem to have spiralled from there – he was unable to complete his first internship assignment, he didn’t go on a group trip to Chicago, and he was quickly removed from the program. On being fired, he burst into tears and was apparently told “We can’t send you to a portfolio manager…like this”. Now he’s suing Point72 for not accommodating his mental health condition. Pardo gave up his return offer to work on Bank of America's investment banking team to go take up the Point72 role; he wants $20m.
The complaint makes interesting reading, not least because it’s stuffed full of a lot of accusations of questionable behaviour, many of which are less than obviously relevant to the actual case. Pardo suggests, for example, that Point72’s campus recruitment at the University of Michigan comes “exclusively” from an elitist student investment society which screens for “cultural fit”. (Although he then says that he got onto the internship program himself without joining this society). He also claims that there’s a culture at Point72 of hard drinking and hazing interns, including prank-calling them to accuse them of cheating on financial models before giving them a return offer.
Of course, it’s a very bad idea to take one side of the story from a litigation complaint as gospel, and Pardo didn’t actually go to any of the intern happy hours he’s complaining about. As well as potentially exaggerating events and passing on rumours as fact, there is a tendency for people who feel they’ve been wronged to describe what they wished they had said and done, rather than what actually happened.
Point72 are denying all his claims. In Pardo’s version of events, he was absolutely clear about the need for his PTSD to be accommodated, and the Point72 HR and internship staff callously ignored his requests and treated him as an inconvenience. But it’s conceivable that the people on the other side of the story might have seen it very differently; they might have thought they were doing their best to help an underperforming intern who had come up with a strange-sounding complaint with no warning. As there’s live litigation, Point72 aren’t getting into details, but they’ve said that “This complaint, for which the plaintiff is demanding $20 million in damages in connection with his summer internship, is ridiculous and without merit”.
As always, it’s very rare to find winners in employment courts. Pardo thinks that $20m of damage has been done to his career and health; he still has flashbacks and panic attacks. Even if he were to win this sum (minus his lawyers’ fees), it might not feel like much of a victory compared to having a normal banking career. In retrospect, he might have been better off going to Bank of America instead.
Elsewhere, Citigroup’s head of global rates trading, Deirdre Dunn, has been moving pieces around the chessboard. She’s given the co-heads of nonlinear trading some geographical responsibilities (for “Japan” and “Everywhere else”, reflecting the sudden shift in volatility and profitability of yen options). And she’s brought in Tom Prickett to be the EMEA head of G10 rates trading.
Prickett was last heard of in January, when he stepped down from a corresponding job at JPMorgan, after informing the global head of rates that he wanted “to explore a new role”. And he’s not the only former JPM veteran that Citi’s sales and trading business has recruited recently; Paul Glezer came on board in June to be head of systematic trading.
On the investment banking side, it’s quite clear why Citi is taking so much top talent from JPMorgan – they are typically recruiting people that Vis Raghavan knows and likes. But on the trading side it’s less clear. Maybe that’s just where the best traders are found?
Meanwhile …
Although she has hired a lot of expensive Managing Directors over the last year, Jane Fraser knows as well as Jamie Dimon that there are some accounts so big that the CEO has to pitch in; she’s been over at the White House with a satchel of PowerPoints over the potential IPOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (Bloomberg)
The Seoul office of BCG has implemented a “hard stop” at 1am, although employees there claim this just means that you get thrown out the office and have to finish at home. When someone asked whether 18-hour work days were “normal”, other Korean consultants reminisce about 4am finishes. (Reddit)
Normally when a CEO accuses research analysts of talking “utter rubbish” and setting up a “boiler room operation” in an angry LinkedIn post, it’s a very bad sign. But since Numis has also said things about THG plc which they’ve later regretted, there might be two sides to Matt Moulding’s feud with them. (The Times)
Remember that summer work parties are networking events; if there are colleagues you actually like, it’s better to invite them to a proper party. Also, beware of the low level hangover that results from precisely four glasses of white wine with nothing to eat but canapes. (FT)
Abdel Garraoui was a Vice President at JP Morgan, but claims that even the life of a junior banker wasn’t as tough as running his family’s olive oil business. (Africa News Agency)
The difference between bankers and VCs is that one group hide behind pseudonyms to post memes and the other are proud to host hour-long podcasts under their own names. (Bloomberg)
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