A Primer on Pro Capital

And I promised y'all something about work, didn't I? Alrighty, here we go!

So I work at Pro Capital Ltd. which is a third party hedge fund marketer. By law, hedge funds (which are kinda like private mutual funds) are not allowed to market their products directly; they must use a marketer like my company. The marketer connects investors with fund managers. But perhaps I use the word 'company' a little too loosely. Basically, my 'company' is Oliver, the head guy, and his office assistant Una plus two to three interns. We all work in a relatively spacious, if not terribly cold from air-conditioning, room. I sit before two 19 inch screens which come in handy when I'm working.

The first day I arrived, John, on of the other interns, showed me a hedge fund book and some packets that I was to read for the day. I enthusiastically set about my task...for about four hours at which point I decided I had had enough of hedge funds. Well, it wasn't that bad, but reading on one subject all...day...long gets to be a little boring. The next day, I did the same thing, but by then I had figured out how to look like I was reading when I was actually just day dreaming. Looking back, those first two days foreshadowed the rest of my internship.

Oliver's business operates by doing searches on Bloomberg which is a financial database and finding suitable hedge funds to email inquiring if they are interested in having their fund marketed to UK, continental European, and Middle Eastern investors. Sounds kinda neat, yes? Um, no, not really. The mechanics are a little droll.

We begin by doing a search following Oliver's criteria for different fund characteristics like 3 month, 6 month, 1 year, 3 year, and 5 year returns as well as the fund's Sharpe ratio (a measure of payout for risk taken on). The resulting list of funds from Bloomberg is compared against the funds already present in Oliver's Hedge Fund Database. If a fund has never been entered, we print out the fund's description and its graph. Once enough fund printouts are compiled, we drop the whole stack on Oliver's desk, and he goes through them to see which ones he likes.

After we get back the 'chosen ones', we enter their information into the Hedge Fund Database, find a contact email, and send out a marketing inquiry email. All the while, we keep track of our activities on an Excel spreadsheet. If positive responses come back, which is maybe 10% of the time, we arrange conference calls. When the call time comes around, one of the interns usually sits in to 'learn' or really to take notes and enter them into the database later. If Oliver likes what's happening, he will continue communication, but by that point the interns' job is done.

Yep, that's what I do. Overall, it's exceedingly boring. Now comes what really happens at work:

I get in at 8:30 AM after 45 minute of transportation on the Tube, sit down at my computer, and pull up the internet to check my email. After about twenty minutes of that, I grab some printouts, open up the Hedge Fund database, and start a new entry. Each entry from the database to the sent email takes me at least half an hour. Yeah...each entry should take maybe ten minutes at the absolute maximum. When I'm not typing into the database or an email, I'm on the internet on facebook, TruView, Hotmail, or some other random site. Around noon, Oliver leaves for lunch/exercise and Una leaves twenty minutes later. That leaves a solid hour of unsupervised interns doing absolutely nothing.

Oliver and Una come back and I take off for lunch around 1:45ish. Thing about the french (my boss is french) is that they consider any lunch time shorter than an hour to be absolutely uncivilized, so we all get a full hour for lunch. I take my baguette sandwich and sides to the lunch park I found a few weeks ago to stand up for my hour and read from the books Ginger sent me. In fact, I just finished "The Magician's Nephew" and will start "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" tomorrow.

I get back to the office about 2:45ish so that way there aren't too many hours left in the work day. I've discovered that my most productive times are in the morning between 9:00 and 11:00. Anyways, I basically do the same thing in the afternoon-- more wasting time. But see, here's the deal, when telling my boss all I've done it really ends up sounding pretty good. Add a good dose of confidence and an explanation that what I'm doing can take quite a while (which it can), and you've got a boss content with his little intern from Truman State. (Plus, he's french, and there's definitely a little gender bias working in my favor)

So what are some of the things I do while working? Hm, well, on collegehumor.com I read for an hour on confessions of bad things roommates had done. Once I went to addictinggames.com and poked around for something to do. I facebook stalk quite a bit. Lolcats, Postsecret.com, and msn.com are also good hangouts. I try to stay away from financial sites because then I just get depressed what with all the money I'm losing. Other than that, I pull up the calendar on Outlook and count down different types of days like how many I have left until leaving or until I'm done with work. And then I'll get on timanddate.com and use the duration calculator to find exact hours.

There have been a few neat points though. One day I got to research the competitive environment for residential real estate in Brazil. Try figuring that one out when your only resource is Google. I know I can turn a mean Google search, but really? Tomorrow, a fund manager from the Ukraine is coming to the office, and Oliver has requested that I sit in on the meeting. That should be neat.

What gets me about this guy is that his business rides on non-paid interns. Sure, it saves overhead, but I really don't think one's business should be dependent on the work of transient students just looking for a little experience and something to put on their resumes. Plus, I feel used. Oh I despise that.

I think interns over the years have painted him a pretty rosy picture of the internship. He talks about how we 'learn so much' while doing our jobs. Junk, absolute junk. I have to be overwhelmed with information before I feel like I'm learning a lot of facts. And let me tell ya, it takes a lot to do that. Once I'm to the point where I literally can't take in information any faster, that's when I'm learning a lot. Last summer at the pharmacy, I was learning a lot. There were hundreds of drugs on the shelves, hundreds of people coming through every day, and hundreds (times a lot) of dollars passing through my hands into the cash register. Right, so that basically means I get bored quickly unless I'm constantly bombarded with new things. Maybe Louie (our dog) feels like that.

It used to be something of a game, the whole trying not to do much but still be reasonably productive. Now it's just ridiculous. There are some good points, but because I need to dry my hair and get to bed (it's only 9:20PM for goodness sakes!) I will write about them later and leave you now to ponder just what job Laura Beth might like/be good at. Any suggestions? I've got a few ideas.