Good company - Quantitative Trader Bluefin Companies Employee Review

Competitive compensation, snacks + meals, good work life balance, knowledgeable leadership, culture of open communication

proprietary tech requires learning specific knowledge.

Small company so you know everybody, and if there's a problem you can go directly to the individuals who should help. Work Life Balance is great, come in right before the market open, and then leave immediately after the market close.

Way too many issues. I really think this is a shop to avoid unless you're absolutely desperate. The lax Work Life Balance is the main reason everything is so outdated. This is largely due to laziness and a lack of desire to innovate, there is no desire to be a world class firm. The company is stale and is complacent with technology seemingly built in the early 2000s. Talent follows talent, and this place can't retain talent so it's very hard to recruit and attract new employees to keep up with the industry. Many traders step off the desk to go out to lunch in the middle of the trading session, that's just abnormal in this business. Many employees have a complete lack of urgency and a lack of attention to detail with their work, which is problematic in this industry. Firm has a ton of operational overhead so trading teams have a lot of unnecessary expenses dumped onto their balance sheets. There are a bunch of ethical concerns: 1. They will interview people just to get trade ideas to steal. If you get an interview with bluefin, please keep your trading secrets secret. There's a big chance they aren't serious about hiring you and just want to get free information. 2. They will hire talent to build out trading strategies just to pass it along to existing employees and then reassign newly hired talent to work on something else much less lucrative. They're stealing strategies, but these often don't work because the employees taking over the strategies aren't skilled traders. 3. I've heard they will nickel and dime desk heads with questionable costs, including deducting your interview/recruiting costs from before you joined the firm against your net trading profits. 4. There is a lot of joking about firing employees, this has gone on for years, and shows they don't really care about how their employees or how their employees gave up really good paying jobs to join bluefin. They are happy joking about ruining careers/lives. Quite hilarious, especially coming from partners who own $10m houses/condos in the hamptons/manhattan. 5. Many managers tell employees they don't have to read compliance documents and explicitly tell employees they can just sign it without reading. A really big red flag. Annual compliance review is a joke too lasting a mere 5 minutes. 6. I've seen maintenance individuals hired to make office repairs and then watch a senior person insist on not paying the maintenance person after the work was completed. If they don't want to pay a low skilled guy, imagine how cheap they are come bonus season. 7. If you complain about pay (which you will want to do), they will hire your replacement, make you train them, and then try to fire you. 8. Training for junior talent is extremely poor. There's virtually zero formal training programs, all training is from your desk leads, which can be hit or miss (mostly miss). Junior employees struggle to get jobs elsewhere because they don't develop skills. 9. The senior partners have a slew of childish and petty rivalries with "rival firms". A firm becomes a rival if a Bluefin employee leaves to join their firm. Bluefin's partners actively seek out talent from these rival firms, will give the talent false promises (capital, technology, payout percentages, resources, etc.) to lure them over and then neglect them as a way to somehow get back at the rival firm. 10. Firm has attempted to sue former employees for "violating" non-competes even though Bluefin has neglected to pay employees for sitting out, even though the employment contract explicitly states payment is due to enforce a non-compete. 11. The management had very little care about the law or worker safety during COVID. Very worrisome about your safety and career during that time period. The company is also struggling financially right now and have closed down a bunch of new businesses/offices (London office just closed, crypto business is shut, ETF business which has been neglected for years has finally shut down, etc.). They oddly don't have a lot of risk appetite to try new strategies, so they've been concentrating a larger and larger portion of the firm capital into a high risk strategy that will one day blow-up and be the demise of the firm, which the partners are probably ok with given many of them are half retired. Managers don't know how to trade, yet love to chime their opinions about why you must trade a certain way despite data/evidence showing their ideas will lose money and make the trade unprofitable. The firm is small and therefore doesn't have a lot of capital, so new individuals should be aware that they won't get the capital funding levels needed to scale up their strategies unless they can post very high sharpe ratios, which is difficult with the poor technology/infrastructure. Technology is extremely bad. Trading system is terrible/slow and doesn't connect to all venues/exchanges, and there is a lack of urgency even if this is necessary to expand/scale. The fills monitoring system literally takes 20 minutes to launch. Position System is non-existent outside of excel spreadsheets. Operational work is quite heavy as the firm has not invested in any automation, you will need to manually check the bank statements and reconcile almost daily.