What to Know Before You Begin Your Buy-Side Job Search
Buy-side aspirants jump straight into spending money on courses/books, firing off résumés, and cold emailing hedge fund founders. The truth? You should have known a few things before you did any of that—because once you start the process unprepared, it’s hard to recover.
The single most valuable skill cannot be taught
The one skill that actually gets you paid in this industry can’t be taught. There’s no secret book, no crash course, no “10-hour sit-down with a PM” that will suddenly make you good at finding money-making ideas. That’s the game: consistently coming up with long and short stock ideas that actually work and every situation has its idiosyncracies.
Everything else? Can be taught. Modeling and valuation are so commoditized you can learn them on YouTube. They’re useful—but only if you understand what drives a business. Research process? You’ll figure it out by looking at companies every day, making mistakes, and tweaking your approach. You can always build on top of successful investors’ process if you like. Even pitching is just practice, your real challenge is building sensible theses.
What can’t be taught is the variant view—seeing the world differently than consensus. Pattern recognition helps, but every setup is unique. And no course will teach you how people and markets really react. Buying one secret book / course or getting the CFA won’t suddenly make you a great investor (I think CFA is so shallow that it doesn’t even make you technically prepared).
What you can do is speed things up: learn the technicals quickly, then dive into as many real situations as possible. Watch stocks daily, study what moves them, and let the learning compound. A great way is to follow a subsector like you’re the lead sell-side analyst. For example, cover the semicap equipment names, model them, build forecasts, figure out what they’re worth, then track how earnings and news prove you right—or wrong. Then repeat in an adjacent subsector like AMD and Nvidia. That builds expertise and gives you a transferable playbook for any industry.
Once you land a buy-side seat, the crash course begins. Your PM is putting real money behind your calls. Some will work. Some will blow up. Both teach you fast.
As Robert Hagstrom said, investing is “the last liberal art.” It’s math, finance, psychology, history, anthropology, philosophy, economics and other disciplines—pulled together into conviction that the future will look different than the market expects. That’s your only real edge. It makes the job fun, but also brutally hard. And no one can hand you that skill other than your desire to acquire it.
So, read a lot but focus mostly on non-investing books, and do work on names. Don’t stay in your comfort zone, start doing the job you want to get today.
It’s not about “the math”
Aspirants love to obsess over modeling, but at the end of the day, it’s just adding numbers. Investment bankers in particular fall into this trap—they’re used to cranking out models where the “answer” is already set (by their MDs), so the numbers don’t mean much. The real challenge isn’t plugging in cells—it’s knowing what numbers even belong there.
You could spend years watching modeling tutorials and still miss the point. The hard part is coming up with better assumptions, and those only come from actually understanding the industry: its history, peers, current trends, and where the future could diverge from consensus.
That’s why going super deep on models rarely gives you an edge. For most investing styles, you’ll get more out of studying industries than chasing the “perfect” spreadsheet. You want to know: what drives revenue, how do businesses in this space make money, and why might the future play out differently than the market thinks?
Your action item: learn industries. Stay curious. Build a mental library of how different sectors generate cash. Once you see the patterns, the math takes care of itself.
Plenty of experienced investors will tell you they can see the variant view in their head without ever opening Excel—which should make it clear: it’s not the math that makes the money.
It’s up or out
Investment management, the buy-side, isn’t a “doing” industry—it’s a thinking and decision-making one. Clients don’t care how many tabs you have in Excel or how pretty your charts look. They care about one thing: do you make them money?
On the buy-side, you get maybe a year or two of grace period. After that, if you don’t have strong opinions or consistently generate money-making ideas, you’re gone. There’s no shortage of people who can build models. The shortage is people who can generate P&L. That’s the job.
In most corporate gigs, you can hide behind busy work or politics. Not here. Hedge funds run lean, PMs were once analysts, and many still do research. Everyone is self-sufficient. You only have a seat if you add value. Technical skills get you in the door, but ideas are what keep you there.
Nobody’s going to remind you that every waking hour on the buy-side should be spent leveling up—going from “I can model” to “I can generate, analyze and pitch ideas on my own.” If you can’t, you’re dead weight. And in this industry, dead weight gets replaced fast.
That’s why I always tell candidates: prepare for the job, not just the interview. It’s hard to get in because it’s even harder to stay.
Stop fantasizing
The alphas work on their game. The betas fantasize.
Too many people waste time online asking questions that have zero impact on whether they’ll ever make it in this industry.
“What’s comp like? Which fund is the best? What’s the hottest strategy for the next five years?” None of that matters if you don’t have the skills to land a seat. All that energy should go into studying businesses, building ideas, and proving you can actually do the job.
Most people asking those questions will never get in. For the small group who do have a shot, stop fantasizing and start working. Even with a fancy background, nothing is guaranteed. You’ll be up against candidates who already have buy-side experience.
The bar is insanely high. This industry doesn’t hand out seats—you earn them. The advice never changes: work on your game, the only thing that matters.
Ignoring strategy fit and being impatient
One of the biggest mistakes I see? Ignoring strategy fit.
I know this firsthand. A strategy misfit and a failed shot at corporate left me no choice but to build a business helping people break into and succeed in public equity. And every day I still see candidates jump at any buy-side role they can get—impatient, thinking all hedge funds are the same. They’re not.
Reality check: there’s almost no straight path from undergrad to the buy-side. The one exception is multi-managers. But if that’s not a style you actually believe in, don’t chase it just because your classmates are.
Same with pitching the wrong idea to the wrong shop—like presenting an event-driven idea to a growth fund. That’s an instant fail.
I saw this first hand. During MBA, I was a school-year intern at a deep value fund in Midtown, I spent my time digging into fertilizer pipelines, steel mills, declining CPGs, distressed debt—the kind of names I’d never touch in my PA. From time to time, the full-time analysts would pitch the founder a growth stock, and of course those ideas went nowhere. If you didn’t realize it was a deep value shop and walked into the interview with a growthier pitch, your odds of getting an offer were instantly zero. Rookie mistake: not knowing your audience. The founder is set in his way, he will not suddenly change his mind.
Another issue is the “Tiger Cub or nothing” mindset. Here’s the harsh truth: unless you’re already at a top PE firm, a top IB, and a top-25 undergrad, your chances at a Tiger Cub are basically zero. I’ve analyzed educational and professional backgrounds of all Tiger Cub current and former investment team members—trust me. But that’s not a bad thing. Smaller funds can actually be a better fit, both professionally and culturally.
Also, stop chasing the biggest paycheck out of the gate. The real money comes later. Early on, solve for fit, mentorship, and stability. If you’re good, you’ll get paid. The market is efficient—if a seat pays crazy well, it’s usually because the lifestyle is brutal. That’s why multi-managers pay more: they demand 80–90 hour weeks, constant portfolio turnover, and the stress of trading every quarter like your life depends on it. Some people thrive there, but most burn out. Turnover is constant. Don’t let impatience or FOMO make that decision for you. Strategy fit matters more than speed to landing a seat.
Figure out your own investment style, then find the funds that align. That’s where you’ll actually perform at your best and can build a lasting career.
Expecting jobs to come to you
Here’s the irony: at most public equity investing firms, the job leads aren’t public.
If you’ve got the “perfect” background—Ivies (or equivalent) plus a stint in IB or PE—recruiters will come to you. They have access to the hidden seats and put you in front of hiring firms. But that pipeline is reserved for a tiny slice of résumés.
For everyone else, you have to dig up those leads yourself. That means lots of informational interviews, mastering networking etiquette, and reaching out to firms that actually fit your style. And that’s why strategy fit matters so much—try to appeal to every fund, and you’ll appeal to none.
Knowing what strategies exist helps you decide which funds are worth your time. That’s the point of my fund primers: they break down funds by style so you can focus on crafting high-quality stock pitches that fit your audience’s style.. Because the firms that take you seriously are the ones where there is a mutual fit.
So don’t just wait around—prepare pitches and market yourself through networking and informational interviews. It’s not scalable; you’ve got to do them one by one.
Your unpaid internship costs the firm
“I’m looking for a hedge fund internship, and I’m willing to work for free.”
Sorry to inform you: even unpaid interns cost a firm.
You need to be self-sufficient before you step in the door—yes, even if the role is unpaid. Every investor on the team started as a junior analyst who could take an idea from generation to conviction—price target, risk/reward, the whole package—without handholding. If your work needs to be redone, it’s faster for them to do it themselves.
That’s why your “work for free” doesn’t land. If you want the benefits of being at a fund—connections, mentorship, learning by osmosis—you need to prove you’re competent and reliable. Otherwise, you’re just a distraction.
Everything is sales
Sales is a big part of this job. That might sound odd, but it shouldn’t—most high-end careers involve sales in some form. IB MDs sell deal execution. MBB partners sell consulting projects. Law firm partners sell risk management and lawsuit defense.
PMs sell LPs on trusting them with capital, keeping them calm during drawdowns, and even “selling” the firm to talented analysts they want to recruit. Analysts sell their PMs on acting on their ideas, and they sell themselves to C-suite execs, IR teams, and industry experts to get the insights they need to build conviction.
The takeaway: communication is everything. Learn to cut down your words, get to the points that drive your theses and make your case clearly. Learn how to make people like you—add value in every interaction. At a bare minimum, do your homework. If the fund founder has been on a podcast, watch it. Read their Form ADV Part 2. Review the last few quarters of their 13Fs. That’s not “extra credit”—it’s table stakes. Skip it, and it will hurt you.
So work on it. Read, practice, take my course, watch videos. Don’t let weak sales skills be the thing that keeps you out of the buy-side.
I hope this helps. Now, get to work.
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