Morning Coffee: A 31-year-old trader ignored by finance recruiters is the new sensation. Switzerland is the new Dubai for bankers

If you’re trying to break into the world of hedge fund trading, but you don’t go to a “target school”, then you’re going to have a difficult time.  Only a small number of the biggest funds have a graduate program, and they tend to almost exclusively recruit from the top ranked universities. The rest of the industry usually hires more experienced people to be portfolio managers and traders, and it gets them by poaching from the sell side or from other funds; in other words, the route still has to run through an elite school.  If you’re a finance major at a small Christian college, like Christian Lamarco, you need to get creative.

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Even that doesn’t necessarily work.  Lamarco thought he might be able to show that he was the equal of Ivy League graduates by entering a national stock-picking contest and coming second.  But it seems Wall Street kept passing him over; he eventually got a job at an (unnamed) long-short equity fund in Chicago and stayed there for two years.  Then he decided that he needed to make his own luck, and founded Culper Research, a short-selling operation.

Lamarco seems to have done quite well in that tricky investment style – he won an award from Activist Insight in 2025.  He achieved an active and vocal community of haters on Reddit, a badge of honour for any short seller, and he had two employees.  But nothing had really caught fire until back in May, when Lamarco published a short-seller report on Nvidia, talking about the company having a “China problem” and speculating about an “uncomfortably close” relationship between the CEO and an executive at one of its customers.

That speculation appears to have been pretty close to the mark, and Nvidia stock has fallen from over $220 to around $180 (so far; the news came out yesterday that the board is investigating another affair as well).  Culper’s research has gone viral, and he has spent the last week avoiding social media and turning down TV interview requests.

So does this mean that he will now be heading for the big leagues? Probably not.  Hedge fund recruiters may now see him as “one that got away”, but Culper is established in his own fund and arguably doesn’t need the validation of a big multistrategy firm behind him. 

Short selling is also an approach that doesn’t necessarily work well in an institutional environment, as most of the targets are much smaller than Nvidia, meaning that it’s hard to deploy capital.  The research involved requires a lot of time and effort, and the subjects of reports often get litigious. Although the returns can be good and are largely uncorrelated to the market, they are lumpy and volatile.  It’s a lot easier to manage this kind of business if you’re your own boss.  So Christian Lamarco will probably just wait out his brief period of fame, and then go back to lucrative anonymity.

Elsewhere, the Alps have always had an appeal to tourists from the Gulf states.  Interlaken in Switzerland and Zell-am-See in Austria have marketed their crystal lakes and lush pastures as a welcome change of scene from the desert.  Now it seems that the mountain paradises are attempting to appeal to bankers too.

If you are based in Dubai and have $500m or more of client assets under management, a Swiss recruitment firm is saying that “You and your esteemed customers” are invited to “take full advantage of the world-famous Swiss Private Banking paradigm that provides both safety and professional excellence even during extremely challenging times”.  This is a somewhat euphemistic reference to the geopolitical risk situation. And although it seems that most bankers and hedge fund managers are largely unfazed, Jürg Knecht at headhunters Oprandi & Partner is betting that some of them, possibly those with young families, might consider relocating to a country with nicer neighbours.

Anyone making the move may find that the income tax rate is significantly greater than zero (even in famously low-tax cantons like Zug), and the nightlife is not quite as lively.  But the skiing is obviously a lot better, and the luxury shopping opportunities are about the same.  And you don’t have to worry so much about living next door to an influencer.

Meanwhile …

After scaling back in Hong Kong over the last three years, Nomura is apparently now holding internal discussions about beginning to hire again and build back its equity capital markets franchise.  The company is not commenting, but its reduced presence has probably hurt Nomura in Asian league tables given the strength of the Hong Kong IPO market. (Reuters)

Squarepoint Capital has its roots in quant trading, but a couple of years ago it set up a metal trading subsidiary and now it’s trying to make long term deals for part of the output of a tin mining company in the Democratic Republic of Congo. (Bloomberg)

Hamza Lemssouguer is showing the steely nerve that makes a good trader; despite the problems at Arini Capital, he has exchanged contracts on a $40m Georgian town house on Belgrave Square.  This is separate from the other premium property deal he made to move Arini’s head office into expensive new premises in Mayfair; he must be quite bullish on London real estate. (FT)

Rob Pulford will be retiring from Goldman Sachs, after nearly 20 years at the bank during which he reached the position of co-head of the global financial and strategic investors’ group.  He moved to a vice-chairman role last year. (Financial News)

“We asked ourselves, ‘Do we need other humans? Won’t they just slow us down?’”.  It is now possible to launch an entire company without any employees, as long as you don’t mind sounding a bit weird. (FT)

You might think that your work email inbox is mostly garbage and the Teams or Slack chat even worse, but AI companies regard it all as potentially valuable training data.  The mind boggles at what an AI trained on bankers’ WhatsApp groups and Bloomberg chats might be like. (WIRED)

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