The Insightful Troll

Rants and ruminations.

Wall Street Bonus Culture Is Ending

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Yet another industry is being eaten by software- looks like Wall Street is the latest casualty.

Roosevelt Bowman, who traded bonds at Lehman Brothers back in 2008, learned to code as the firm collapsed. More than a decade later and now senior investment strategist at AllianceBernstein Holdings LP’s private wealth-management division, he uses programming languages such as R and Python regularly in his job in New York.

At UBS, Purves is spearheading an effort to digitize the investment bank’s trading of fixed income and equities and as part of that he went on a course with Silicon Valley’s Singularity University to learn how experienced bankers can evolve and stay relevant. When it comes to new hires, Purves says, the best candidates are those that have the least to “unlearn.” They are team players with computer science skills who are often new to banking, he said.

Jack Miller, head of trading for Robert W. Baird & Co. in Milwaukee, agrees. For the first time last year, he included proficiency in coding as a requirement for a junior trader job, but hasn’t found anyone yet with the right mix of technical and people skills.

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