Morning Coffee: New JPMorgan MD confesses to annoying his wife with lists. PhD economist with big ideas buckles during hedge fund "interview"

How do you get to promoted to managing director (MD) at JPMorgan?  One tip seems to be (despite what Jamie Dimon says) that you shouldn’t hang around the office all the time – of five freshly promoted MDs surveyed by Business Insider, four were out and about at birthday celebrations, family visits or just down at the pub when they got the news. 

This probably reflects one general truth about promotions, which is that the person who is nervously hanging around waiting for the phone to ring is probably not going to get it. When investment banks bump someone up to MD, it’s hardly ever a marginal decision; you should really only be going in front of the promotion board if you’ve got an absolutely watertight case.

Which makes the advice given by the class of ’25 a bit thin and unsatisfying, truth be known.  There are only a few ways that you can rephrase “manage an important business line successfully and make sure you get the credit for it”.  And the only other ways to get promoted are “be incredibly evil, political and conniving” or “threaten to resign just at the moment when the firm needs you most”, neither of which are things anyone will admit to.

And so people fill in space by talking about extremely generic good practices like “focusing on finding a solution instead of giving up” or “always looking for a way to improve processes”. Two of them, separately, say the cursedly bland words that “every day is different”. 

One new JPMorgan MD, though, does admit to a personal quirk. Shakir Iqbal, JPMorgan's Dubai-based head of cash equity sales, tells BI that he's a big list maker. "I live and die by my to-do lists," he declares, adding this applies equally in his personal life. - "It annoys my wife at times, but if it's not "The List" it will never happen!"  

This is a welcome foible.  The other MDs suggest that talking like a human LinkedIn post might also be a point to emulate – if you want to do well in a corporation, you need to be as corporate as possible.  And it’s also noticeable that although some of the JPM crowd talk about “shameless networking” and others are more subtly euphemistic, they all seem to have spent a lot of time and effort “building the case internally” for their promotion before getting it.  While it’s difficult to know the secret of success, trying to do a good job and just hoping that someone will notice is the surest path to failure.

Elsewhere, a not uncommon anxiety dream for buy-siders is to find yourself inexplicably having to give a presentation from the sell side, to a room of angry investors who have lost money on one of your recommendations.  Stephen Miran, a former senior strategist for Hudson Bay Capital and current Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, seems to have lived the nightmare this week.

The FT says Miran held a meeting with “leading bond investors” (including hedge funds like Citadel and Balyasny and therefore probably at least some of the players in the basis trade) to “reassure” them about the Trump administration’s policy direction, following “a bout of intense tumult” in the markets.

It didn’t go well. In scenes akin to an aggressive interview with a potential PM, Miran was described as “out of his depth” and “incoherent.” Someone said that he “fell apart” when asked questions and that “When you’re with an audience that knows a lot, the talking points are taken apart pretty quickly”.  Anyone who has been in an awful interview or really bad presentation themselves will feel their blood pressure rise just thinking about it.

The description of Miran himself feels like it might be a bit unfair.  He’s not intrinsically out of his depth – he has a PhD in economics from Harvard and has worked in economic research at the US Treasury as well as having spent ten years in investment.  And Hudson Bay Capital isn’t quite in the top tier of multistrategy hedge funds, but it’s not a trivial operation and has about $20bn of assets under management.  Miran has actually written a 41-page, academic-looking “Users Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System”.

But, as sell siders know and buy siders fear, credentials and publications don’t really matter so much when you’re facing an angry mob.  What matters is that some numbers went down when they should have been going up, and everyone blames you. 

In a situation like this, all that anyone can do is sit there, sweat a bit, take your lumps and wait for the meeting to end.  Then hope that things recover enough to be able to move on to the next recommendation. There’s no sympathy in cases like this, and the Wall Street code of honour wouldn’t ask for it.  However interesting your economic thesis, you can’t argue with the market.

Meanwhile …

Analysing the secret sauce that could make Steve Schurr worth more than $100m to Millennium is also quite frustrating – his process appears to be “do a lot of fundamental research and be really good at it”.  Of course, the value of someone at that level is not really to do with individual stock-picking prowess; it’s the ability to manage others to do so, and to identify good ideas. (Business Insider)

A former biotech analyst from Lazard has founded Rogo, an LLM chatbot that is meant to either replace investment bankers, or to help juniors by automating grunt-work.  The founder doesn’t think this will reduce employment, as “Banks that adopt AI will win more deals, will generate more revenue and will be higher revenue per employee and they’ll want more bankers” (FT)

UBS is still ambitious in US M&A.  It’s hired Kelvin Quezada, a 20-year veteran of Barclays, to be an MD in the “Unified Global Banking” team which pitches investment banking transactions to wealth management cllients. (Reuters)

A “private room” certainly sounds classier than a “dark pool”, but apparently it’s the same kind of thing, and Citadel Securities has warned the SEC that this kind of off-exchange trading needs to be regulated. (Bloomberg)

Bankers used to pride themselves on travelling light, with just a change of clothes and a sack of IPO prospectuses.  Now business travellers are taking advantage of battery technology to bring along blenders, garment steamers and all manner of utensils. (WSJ)

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