Morning Coffee: JPMorgan's 29-year-old female MD is having a fine career. Real life big spending dilemmas

Angie Long seems like an illustrious sort of person. Equipped with an economics degree from Princeton and a history of female rugby-playing, Long made managing director (MD) and was promoted to run JPMorgan's high yield credit trading desk aged only 29. She has a CFA Charter. She developed the concept of the high yield debt index. Now she's about to sell a $37bn collateralised loan obligation (CLO) platform first funded by some Pizza Hut moguls.

How do you get to become like Angie? It's worth noting that she made MD aged 29 at JPMorgan in 2004; these days most of the new young trading MDs seem to be men. Angie had a great mentor in the form of Blythe Masters, female inventor of the credit default swap. She has a great husband, Chris, who also went to Princeton, who also worked for JPMorgan, and also founded the $37bn CLO platform, which Bloomberg reports the Longs - married for 25 years - are now about to sell.  

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It could have been very different. In 2007, the Financial Times reported that Angie had considered resigning from JPMorgan a year after her daughter was born. Working and motherhood were too hard, said the FT. But JPMorgan wanted to keep Angie Long and so let her take a leave of absence and then come back to work for 20 hours a week in a specially created role working out of Kansas City. 

“I dealt with some creative people in human resources who told me to think outside of the box. I didn’t have to choose a full-time or a standard role,” Angie Long declared at the time. It was a sign of how far women's rights had come, declared the FT in 2006. It was also a sign of how good Angie was and how hard it was to find people. “When you have someone as strong as Angie, you work hard to find the right seat for them,” declared her male JPM boss. “Competition for talent is at all-time highs...so you have to be creative about talent retention.”

20 years later, Angie has four grown-up children and is about to sell Palmer Square Capital Management, the $37bn CLO platform she founded with Chris in 2009 in the tiny place of Mission Woods, Kansas. Bloomberg notes that the two have been riding the quadrupling of the CLO market ever since and that Palmer Square is one of the largest CLO issuers, despite being based in Kansas. Investors like the recurrent fees that CLOs generate. Angie is having a fine career; it might not be so easy for women now.  

Separately, people working in AI Labs in Silicon Valley are holding Iliad-themed naked wrestling parties and trying to make generational money in the five years before AGI renders humanity extinct. 

When they do make this money, the WSJ says many of the AI guys and AI women don't know what to do with it. One moment they were earning $300k salaries. Now they've sold stock and have $30m+.

The most popular purchase in these situations seems to be an espresso machine. This might be supplemented by a sauna. Maybe a watch. Someone bought a $35k vase.

Meanwhile...

5,000 new people went to work in Abu Dhabi's financial hub in the first half of this year. There are now 49,000 people there in total. (Bloomberg) 

Hedge fund Millennium is opening in Athens. Hedge fund Verition wants to. The Greek finance minister is coming to London to talk to other hedge funds. The UK allows 100% tax relief on foreign earnings for four years; Greece allows it for 15 years. “For highly mobile wealthy individuals, the decision is increasingly about the overall package: tax certainty, lifestyle, connectivity and access to Europe.” (Bloomberg)   

Hamza Lemssouguer's Arini Capital Management lost 8% in July and nearly 1% in August. Blame its investments in Aston Martin and Altice International. Arini is doubling down on conviction trades and some are pointing out that it lost 8% over two months in early 2024, then gained about 29% over the following 12 months.  (Financial Times) 

US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent is saying things like "I have asymmetric information", and "I am the house now," and, "You can be against me if you want," as he buys Japanese yen. (Bloomberg)  

The Treasury department said on Wednesday that it would buy back $6bn in US government debt in the first buyback operation since Bessent in mid-August announced the expanded programme. (FT) 

Scott Bessent made his name 30 years ago, betting against sterling while working with George Soros. “The Treasury Secretary’s ‘put’ should be taken seriously,” says a strategist at Citi. (Bloomberg) 

Jefferies hired Joram Siegel to build an outsourced fixed income trading platform in 2024. Now it's changed its mind and is firing him and closing the platform. (Bloomberg) 

IG Group, the London-listed online trading platform, is cutting hundreds of jobs. (Sky) 

A 22-year-old posed as a representative of Gemini crypto exchange and Google and conned $245m of bitcoin from a man in Washington. Then he bought a fleet of sports cars, rented mansions in Miami and spent $569k in a single night at a club. (Yahoo) 

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