Morning Coffee: Can 21-year-old bankers on $175k complain about 120 hour weeks? The riches of Steve Cohen

As we reported yesterday, the court case concerning Kathryn Shiber, a former 21-year-old investment banking analyst at boutique bank Centerview, turns up in a Manhattan federal court next week. Shiber says her three month stint at Centerview involved "discriminatory animus" and ruined her career and her mental health. She wants $5m in damages. 

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The court will be heard by a jury and much will depend upon the jury's sympathies, or not, with investment banking culture. As Business Insider notes, both Shiber and Centerview are touchy about who sits on the jury: Shiber seems to want people sympathetic to discrimination law; Centerview suggests asking whether people on the jury have ever asked for an accommodation at work due to a disability.

Shiber says she was disabled when she joined Centerview. A diagnosed anxiety disorder meant she needed eight hours sleep each night. Centerview tried to accommodate her, and then decided it couldn't. It abruptly fired her by Zoom, telling her that she couldn't do the job and should never have accepted it.

Much will depend, therefore, upon sympathy with Shiber's situation. And that will depend upon whether jurors judge that a 21-year-old likely earning over $175k a year while formatting PowerPoints, should have taken a job that makes getting a steady eight hours sleep a night a challenge. 

We don't know exactly how much Shiber was paid. However, Centerview is known as one of the most generous boutiques to work for. In 2023, Instagram account Litquidity said analysts at Centerview were earning an average of $205k in salaries plus bonuses, and that third year associates there were on $800k. The tacit expectation is that young people will work unusually long hours in return for such riches. Business Insider notes that Centerview's court depositions state that 60-120 hours are the norm, that 24 hour days are possible but rare, that hours can be erratic, and that junior bankers must check-in before signing off. 

In Shiber's defence, she says it wasn't the hours that were the problem. It was the sleep. She was willing to work from 9am to midnight seven days a week, so long as she slept eight hours a night. This implies 98 hour weeks, and only one hour a day outside of work. This wasn't enough for Centerview. Shiber claims that Centerview told her the job would, “require many 120-hour weeks over the 3 years which you should have known”

Shiber really wanted to be an analyst at Centerview and said it was her "dream." She received the job offer while she was a student at Dartmouth in quantitative social science and studio art and completed 50 hours of courses and six exams before joining. She says she was keen. She just didn't want to destroy her health with lack of sleep. Her case will help determine whether grinding on through is part of the junior banker deal.  

Separately Stevie-Steve Cohen made $9m a day last year, which was more than the $8.2m a day made by Izzy Englander at Millennium or the $6.4m a day made by Ken Griffin at Citadel. 

Cohen himself once worked 90 hour weeks and was predicted to die at his desk, but he has taken a step back in recent years and is now into gentle mentoring instead of relentless trading. His high earnings  were not the result of owning New York Mets, but of owning his multistrategy hedge fund, Point72. Bloomberg notes that Point72, which manages $45.7bn in assets, has 3,000 staff, 190 trading pods, and a quantitative business - Cubist - which employs 600 people.

With his money, Cohen could buy $1m hotdogs at a baseball game every day for year.

Meanwhile...

Damilare Ajao worked at Commerzbank and said a female employee grabbed his crotch. She didn't he was sentenced to 20 months in prison for making false allegations. That was cut to eight months even though he has “shown no remorse or understanding of what he has done is wrong.”(Bloomberg)

Shares in Blue Owl, Apollo, Blackstone, Ares and KKR all plunged yesterday. It was Blue Owl's fault: it restricted redemptions from a retail fund. Blue Owl's shares are down 15% so far this month. (Bloomberg) 

Blue Owl will permanently restrict retail investors from withdrawing cash from its inaugural private retail debt fund. It had said they could withdraw at quarterly interval, now it's promising episodic payments as it sells down assets in coming quarters and years. (Financial Times) 

It's a fine time to be a macro hedge fund manager. Asfandyar Nadeem, ex-Brevan Howard PM and founder of Deem Global says: “The current environment is so rich. It is global, differentiated, and deeply structural. And it rewards those willing to think seriously about governments — not as background noise, but as the primary drivers of markets once again.” (Bloomberg) 

BNP Paribas now has 21 people in Miami working with hedge funds and it wants to add more. (Bloomberg) 

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