PrefBlog

The financial services prep-school boys are hurting:

This is Wall Street’s new tech meritocracy. Financial institutions traditionally coveted graduates from Stanford and other big-name schools and people already working in Silicon Valley. But that system tends to overlook good programmers from other schools or gifted dropouts, according to recruiters. And besides, banks need to fill so many programming jobs that elite schools can’t possibly pump out enough candidates.

So the industry is looking in places it never did, turning to outside firms to evaluate prospective programmers based on objective measurements, not their pedigree. The idea is that people lacking a computer science degree — art majors, graphic designers and chemistry graduates from the University of Delaware like Furlong — can still make the leap to well-paid careers in technology. By using algorithms to spot talented coders, HackerRank and competitors with names like Codility claim they’ve essentially increased the world’s supply of developers.

There are some who think that the fixed income tide has turned:

Bonds worldwide have lost 2.9 percent in October, according to the Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate Index, which tracks everything from sovereign obligations to mortgage-backed debt to corporate borrowings. The last time the bond world was dealt such a blow was May 2013, when then-Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke signaled the central bank might slow its unprecedented bond buying.

Europe led the losses that reverberated worldwide this week as signs of accelerating inflation and economic growth spurred speculation that the European Central Bank and its major counterparts are moving closer to curbing monetary stimulus, including asset purchases. The result is that investors are abandoning one of the year’s biggest trades — a bet on higher-yielding, long-term bonds — as they wake up to the limits of central-bank demand that drove bond yields to record lows as recently as July.
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Yields on 10-year gilts reached 1.31 percent, the highest since June 23, the day of the U.K. vote to leave the European Union. Similar-maturity German bonds were set for their worst month since 2013, pushing yields to 0.217 percent, a level last seen in May. U.S. 10-year Treasury yields touched about 1.88 percent, the highest since May.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 29th, 2016 at 12:08 am and is filed under Market Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.