I’m Rupak Ghose. I spent 12 years working as a financials research at Credit Suisse and am now an advisor and substacker covering hedge funds, trading firms and market infrastructure. I’ll be here from June 25th to July 1st, answering your questions on pod shops, electronic market makers, banks and more.
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Hi. It’s interesting that you were a top ranked analyst in a bank. I have applied for jobs in equity research. Can you say why you’re not a researcher still?
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Hey Rupak. Possibly a bit left field of a question and understandable if you don’t want to answer it - but is your substack doing so well enough to replace a multi-decade career in finance?
I’ve been considering opening one as a little side hustle.
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Hi Rupak. Big fan of your sub. Do you think Jane Street is pulling away from all the other trading houses with its big GPU investments? Seems like the rest are being left in the dust
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Rupak, everyone is talking about GenAI, nondeterministic by its nature, but in high-volume trading and market infrastructure, deterministic systems and raw execution speed still rule the day. Where are you actually seeing AI move the needle right now for hedge funds and infrastructure providers? Is it legitimately generating alpha, or is it mostly just speeding up data ingestion and cutting back-office costs
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Hi Rupak!
Question for you - I saw you wrote about the AI boom looking like like the telecoms bubble. Has your opinion changed since then? How?
Also - did you get a chance to use Fable/Mythos? What did you think of it?
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Hi, equity research has its advantages as a junior; front office salaries but with more access to interesting work like speaking directly to clients, writing reports often under your own name. A flatter structure than investment banking or consulting.
but the industry has changed a lot since I started a few decades ago:
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Compensation levels at senior levels has halved in nominal terms over last 2 decades,
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regulation and compliance has increased massively,
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it is now seen as cost centre not revenue centre internally and externally so not as respected,
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it is no more independent of banking than before. In fact the buy side client pays little for it and is heavily concentrated with pod shops so you basically working for bankers indirectly
Hi,
so the short answer is no. It make a fraction of what I did in my best corporate seats. But:
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There is a skew of pay just like running your own biz or any creative industry. So Citrini is making $10m a year as the no 1 finance Substack. I have only just put the paywall up. Check it out:)
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To be candid finance is a pyramid structure so there are less senior and interesting roles for older people like me than juniors,
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Mine is largely personal choice driven- independence of writing what I want to, building a biz and I have 2 young kids so lifestyle,
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Hi, so Jane Street has a lot of GPUs but so do HRT, Jump and few others. I think they are pushing it more as advertising/talent marketing in the war for best quant research/technical talent. Jane Street’s biggest success is being so dominant in ETFs and they punt a lot more and in big size successfully than peers…partly arbitrage and partly directional. In that way as competitors to multi-strategy hedge funds as HFTs
I think it continues to have similarities. At some point capex will run ahead of usage - maybe given cost of token usage for corporates. But the late 90s 2 thing relevant:
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sometimes markets move ahead of the reality and then the adoption (eg smartphones) happens a little later so mismatch between asset prices and adoption,
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winners are not always the first or obvious ones - remember telcos the infrastructure level of the internet and biz models like AOL were super hot stocks and died and never came back but Google was born during the down years and others pivoted/expanded from niches eg Amazon
So it is involved in parsing through the huge amount of data to find signals in quant research. It is now being tested on the execution of very short term trades within tight risk buckets.
I haven’t used the new Anthropic items u referenced so watching from outside
Hi Rupak - someone usually asks this in the AMAs and I always find it interesting to aggregate people’s opinions so:
If you were 21/22 again, a fresh-faced young graduate, what in the world would you do, and where in the world would you choose to live?
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Great question.
If only I was 22 again 
I really would travel and try and get a job with a company that involved working in many very different countries either on trips or rotations. I don’t know if finance or big tech firms offer that.
Also to build a few deep skills along the way that intersect…those should be mixture of top skills (could be Ai coding, trading, quant research) but something different. Remember the 2005 Steve Jobs Stanford university address where he talked about learning calligraphy in his spare time as 20 year old and that shaped Apple products.
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Thank you for your answer!
Hi Rupak - my brother is applying to universities next year and was asking me for advice.
I told him to study what he wants, what he’s passionate about and comfortable studying for many hours a week (to get a 2:1, at the end of the day) and to focus on extra-curriculars more than anything else.
Now that he has the chance to get your advice - is there anything you would add/change on that?
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Hello Rupak.
Just a little question - how far do you think finance as an industry went in “institutionalizing” you? Do you think the lifestyle permanently changes someone? Do you still do little things, or have little habits carried over from your career?
Thank you
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To be candid I think I would push him towards the common subjects - STEM, computer science, economics etc. History and languages are great at top universities only for getting into finance. But extra-circulars are big differentiators. And it doesn’t have to internships only at banks. Top level sports or chess or volunteering in useful area can make u stand out
I think u adapt. But one anecdote. I used to get up at 5.30am to get to trading floor and research for 12 years. I hated morning lectures at university and I still hate early mornings!
Keep interests outside is super important. Finance is usually a decade or two career for many with pivot later