Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Investment Banking Salary – News & Bios

Dow Kim - Merrill Lynch

How are you going to spend US$37 million?
Couple of posts ago, I mentioned that global heads’ and CEOs’ income has no ceiling. But is there a ballpark? Yes, Dow Kim, was reported to be paid US$37 million last year. In May 2007, one of the hottest news on Walls Street was his resignation from Merrill Lynch to set up his own hedge fund.

Dow Kim is the Co-President of the Global Markets and Investment Banking group at Merrill Lynch. What is the temptation of running a hedge fund? How much can a
hedge fund manager earn? Read this.

Really Big Bucks
In 2006, three hedge fund managers took home over $1 billion on the year, according to Alpha magazine's new list of the
top 25 fund earners. Read more.

Dow Kim started his career as a credit analyst/derivatives trader at Manufacturers Hanover Trust in 1985. In the first nine years of his career, he managed to survive through the merge with Chemical Bank. At the age of 28, he made himself the head of derivatives trading at Chemical Bank, Japan. At the age of 31, he was the head of derivative trading of Merrill Lynch in Japan. Today he is the second-highest-paid executive at Merrill Lynch, after the CEO Stan O’Neal.

If you are doing as good as Dow did, you can also make yourself a department head before 30. Department heads nowadays make between US$6.25 million and US$2.5 million depending on the size of the investment bank you work for – according to Investment Dealers’ Digest.

Dow Kim – Bio
1963 Born
1984 BSE, Wharton
1985 Credit Analyst, Derivatives Trader, Manufacturers Hanover Trust
1990 MBA, Wharton
1991 Head of Yen Options Trading, Japan, Chemical Bank
1994 Head of Derivative Trading, Japan, Merrill Lynch
2000 Head of Fixed Income, Japan / member of Management Committee, Merrill Lynch
2001 Head of Global Debt Markets, Merrill Lynch
2004 Co-President of the global Markets and Investment Banking group, Merrill Lynch

Dow Kim is an Executive Vice President of Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc. and President of the Global Markets and Investment Banking group. In this role, Dow shares responsibility for Merrill Lynch’s sales, trading and investment banking activities worldwide with Greg Fleming, who is also President of Global Markets & Investment Banking.

Prior to his current position, he was senior vice president and head of Global Debt Markets from 2001 to 2003, with responsibility for all debt sales, trading and origination activities on a global basis. Before that, he was managing director and head of the Global Enterprise Solutions Group, an integrated global derivatives and foreign exchange group from 2000 to 2001.

Prior to moving to New York in March 2000, Mr. Kim managed the firm’s integrated fixed income business in Japan for 3 years and was a member of the Executive Management Committee of Merrill Lynch Japan, Inc.

Mr. Kim joined Merrill Lynch in January 1994 to manage the Debt Derivatives Trading Desk in Japan, and subsequently served as a Managing Director and Head of Debt & Equity Derivatives there.

Prior to joining Merrill Lynch, Mr. Kim worked for Chemical Bank from 1991 to 1994 in Tokyo as a Vice President and Head of Yen Options Trading. From 1985 to 1991, he worked for Manufacturers Hanover Bank in New York as a credit analyst, a commercial banker and derivatives trader.

Born and raised in Korea as well as in Singapore and the U.S., Mr. Kim earned a BSE from The Wharton School in 1984. During nine years with Manufacturers Hanover/Chemical Bank, Mr. Kim took part in The Wharton Executive MBA Program and received an MBA degree in 1990. Mr. Kim also completed the Advanced Management Program at the Harvard Business School in
November 2000.

Source: Bloomberg


Answer to my previous question: What is Marshall Wace TOPS?
Most hedge fund managers trumpet the brilliance of their own trading strategies and, given half a chance, disparage their brokers’ ideas. For one thing, it helps to justify their high management fees. Even traditional fund managers have been building their own teams of analysts, to avoid having to rely on brokers.

So Marshall Wace, with $7.5bn under management, is something of an anti-hedge fund: it has become one of Europe’s largest hedge funds by championing the value of brokers’ ideas. The fund’s TOPS system captures the best “sell-side” strategies electronically and trades on them. Almost 200 brokerage firms feed ideas into the system and the best performers are rewarded with additional trading business.

Source: FT

More about TOPS

Are you preparing for an investment banking interview? Check this ebook – IB Interview Guide

Investment banking salary

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