Point72, Balyasny offer high salaries, low acceptance rates to summer interns

Hedge fund firm co-founder and CIO Dmitry Balyasny visited three college campuses and gave a keynote address at the London School of Economics alternative investment conference in recent months. It’s all part of an effort to recruit the next generation of employees amid the fierce fight for talent — and this year's summer intern class is shaping up to be the most competitive ever.

Internships at top multistrategy hedge funds, including Balyasny Asset Management, Point72 Asset Management, Citadel and Millennium are among the hardest jobs to land on Wall Street with some acceptance rates below 1%, sources said. The roles can come with five-figure monthly pay and perks like trips and attending Mets baseball games.

“It’s incredibly competitive,” said Gary Goldstein, who started recruiting in 1979 and is the founder and CEO of Whitney Partners, an executive search firm. “There has been a shift away from going to the investment banks where that was a very hot segment of the market for a long time.”

There is a huge uptick in interest to snag these sought-after jobs on the buy side, Goldstein said. “There’s a real appetite for going into hedge funds.”

With summer only a few months away, Pensions & Investments spoke with Balyasny and Point72 about their programs. Millennium and Citadel provided information about their programs.

Balyasny will host approximately 100 interns this summer with many coming from quant-focused backgrounds. The firm received over 40,000 applications and accepted under 0.5%.

It was the highest application year on record and a 15% increase year-over-year, said Hannah Dinardo, head of campus recruiting at Balyasny. Balyasny himself visited Princeton University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and New York University. The majority of interns are rising seniors along with masters and PhD students.

“We are in search of top talent anywhere we can find it,” Dinardo said.

That means going through thousands of applications, without using AI, to find candidates with a passion for the industry who have more than good GPAs, she adds. They are seeing applicants building trading bots and algorithmic strategies and pursuing certificates and research.

“Times have changed, and it is very competitive for them,” she said. “We are really looking for the people who want to break into this industry.”

Most interns will start June 10 and work with the firm for 10 to 12 weeks. Pay ranges vary up to $25,000 a month and up to a $25,000 sign-on bonus for some groups of interns.

Interns focused on macro, commodities, technology and data management will go through customized week-long training groups with case studies and trading simulations and dive into areas ranging from options trading to swaps with the goal of bridging the gap between what is taught in school and market application, Dinardo said.

Every Thursday, interns will hear from people across the firm’s business. “It’s a way for them to better understand the hedge fund industry,” she said.

Balyasny expects around half of its interns to accept full-time roles. “Our goal is to convert as many of the top-performing interns to full-time as we can,” Dinardo said. “It’s very intentional and strategic.”

The $21 billion in assets firm will start accepting applications in August and September on a rolling basis for its 2025 internships.

Point72 Asset Management is already recruiting interns for 2025. For this upcoming summer, the hedge fund will host its largest group to date of 55 interns. Only 0.6% of applicants received an internship offer this year. The $32.3 billion firm declined to provide total application figures.

“It seems more firms now are hiring undergrads on the buy side directly,” said Jaimi Goodfriend, head of investment professional development and the director of the Point72 Academy, who added that Point72 has seen “this almost rocket ship of applications.”

The firm launched both its Academy summer internship program and its full-time Point72 Academy, an initiative that recruits new grads and give them accelerated training as long/short equities investors, in 2015. The goal is to “educate young aspiring investors to see if they want to join this business,” Goodfriend said.

The eight-week summer internship includes a boot camp, rotation with a portfolio management team and work on project for an investment team. Goodfriend says they are always adjusting the program and thinking through areas including data incorporation. “We have to think about the analyst of tomorrow and what that means,” she said.

Summer interns start after their junior year and if they receive an offer, come back the next summer as an Academy associate for the 10-month program with successful grads becoming analysts.

From last year’s summer intern class, 74% of interns received an offer to join the full-time academy and 97% accepted. The firm has seen higher retention rates for Academy graduates than external analyst hires. In 2023, Point72 saw its largest application pool to date with over 30,000 applications for the Point72 Academy.

Goodfriend advises applicants not to use ChatGPT when answering application questions because each one is reviewed by a human.

“We really want to hear about people and who they are authentically,” Goodfriend says. Recent academy participants have included a concert-level musician and an Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP)-ranked player, she added.

Firm founder, Steven Cohen, donated $100,000 to three separate long/short funds run by student investing groups at Brown University, the University of California, Berkeley, and MIT, to give students early exposure to running a long/short strategy.

And Cohen’s ownership of the New York Mets baseball team means interns will get a game excursion along with an offsite experience.

An online job posting for a 2025 Academy investment analyst summer intern role in the U.S. lists an annual base salary of $120,000 to $140,000, an amount that gets prorated to the length of the candidate’s internship.

“We are not alone in educating people earlier through internships and insight opportunities,” Goodfriend said, pointing to an upcoming insight program in London for students who are still two years away from internships as well as a virtual freshman insight program in the U.S.

“Assets, plus talent, equals hedge funds,” she said.

Ken Griffin’s Citadel is on track for “another record-setting year” in terms of applications and “the most distinguished class yet,” a spokesperson told P&I in an email.

In a letter sent to investors on April 1, Griffin noted that Citadel received over 100,000 applications from undergraduates and graduate students for positions in “full-time and internship programs within the Citadel family” and that only “a small fraction of one percent” of applicants would be selected “maintaining the exceptionally high standards we set for talent.”

Griffin said in his letter that Citadel takes pride in “in having built one of the most formidable teams" in hedge fund history. Griffin underscored the firm’s ability to recruit noting “we have enjoyed tremendous success attracting gifted graduates from the premier colleges and universities.”

That comes after Citadel had approximately 69,000 applications in 2023 with an acceptance rate of approximately 0.5%. The firm had more than 300 interns last year across divisions. The 11-week program which starts with offsite visits in Florida, paid interns a median wage of $120 an hour last year. In 2023, the firm also covered signing bonuses, in-office food, and the value of corporate housing.

A role currently posted on Citadel’s website for a quantitative research analyst intern pays up to $5,000 a week not including other compensation and benefits.

Izzy Englander’s Millennium will host approximately 150 interns across technology and core infrastructure roles during its 10-week global program this summer in New York, Miami, London, Dublin, Tel Aviv, Hong Kong and Singapore. The firm has plans to add Bangalore to the list this year. The program formally began in 2016 and has tripled in size since 2019. The goal is to offer successful interns offers for the firm’s full-time analyst program that starts after graduation. Millennium declined to comment on the number of applicants and acceptance rate.

A trader/analyst intern role posted on Millennium's website had an annual salary range of $125,000 to $200,000 specific to New York.

Since 2020, Millennium has run a partnership program with UBS for entry-level research analysts. The analysts spend two six-month rotations within UBS’ research division and then are matched with one of Millennium’s equities portfolio management teams in New York, London, Hong Kong or Singapore. Millennium has hired over 40 people onto its trading teams since the program began.

New this year, Millennium is launching a 12-week intern program for masters level quant and math students to join investment teams as quantitative researchers in New York, London and Hong Kong. The inaugural class of almost 30 is set to start in May and will get on the job training along with classroom training in markets and technical skills.