PUT simply, asset managers, also known as fund managers and investment managers, invest money on behalf of others. Your clients might be pension schemes, insurance companies, charities, private banks, the filthy rich or savers who invest in mutual funds.

Junior fund managers can expect a starting salary of up to £35,000 with an annual bonus of up to 50 per cent. This is an 8am-6pm job, minimum. London is sited between the two other major financial centres, so you start with the overnight news from Tokyo and don’t finish until trading in New York is well under way.

Your job is to know the markets and to make as much money as possible for your client within the agreed guidelines. Different clients have specific objectives — an emerging markets fund for investors with a big appetite for risk might favour Outer Mongolian yeti futures, but if the client’s a cancer charity then you don’t invest in tobacco companies, no matter how well they’re doing.

Big employers usually offer good training. “The large established asset managers, like Fidelity, Barclays Global Investors, Schroders and HSBC, run graduate schemes that rotate your training so you cover all aspects of fund management before specialising,” says Samantha Harrison, manager of the asset management team at Michael Page, a recruitment firm. Typically you will need a 2:1 from a good university and an accountancy qualification is a plus. “It shows that you can read a corporate balance sheet and that you know how businesses operate,” she says.

To be an effective asset manager you need to understand the dynamics of different asset classes, such as equities, bonds, gilts, commercial property and an increasingly complex range of alternative asset classes, which include commodities, credit derivatives and hedge funds (for a good jargon buster go to the student section at www.efinancialcareers.co.uk). “You’ll be a lateral thinker, interested in politics and world events,” says Andrew Chancellor, managing director of the recruitment company Robert Walters. “You’ll have travelled and have interests that indicate you are self-confident, have initiative and are a team player. A good way to learn about markets is to run a virtual portfolio to see which sectors and companies are most rewarding and why.”

Asset managers have style in the way they invest. Active managers aim to exploit anomalies in share prices — getting in and out of the game before the pack. Passive managers invest in the index, either buying all the relevant companies or a representative sample. Beyond the broad active-passive divide you might be a value or growth manager, looking for companies that are mispriced or seeking out today’s start-ups that you hope will be tomorrow’s big success stories.

Apart from the money, graduates say that they do it for the buzz. “I love the immediacy of the job. Every day there’s something that changes your view of a company,” one says. “It’s a very dynamic process: you talk to analysts, economists, company boards, everybody with information and opinions. But you’re the one deciding to invest or pull out. You have to second guess what the market’s going to do.”

An old-timer in the business — that’s 38, by the way — started as a fund manager before the graduates-only cult hit the City, when risk-taking extroverts with a street-market mentality got in and got on. He’s seen it all. “When you get it right and you outwit the market, it’s euphoric. Get it wrong — and things can go very badly wrong in this business — at best you’re out of a job. Worst-case scenario? You end up in prison or in a psychiatric ward — sometimes both.”



Debbie Harrison is a senior visiting Fellow at Cass Business School. Read previous articles in the series at www.cass.city. ac.uk/thetimes

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