Editorial standards
The numbers hedge funds do not publish
Almost everything a candidate wants to know about a hedge fund is undisclosed by design. Pay is private. Pod economics are contractual. Headcount and turnover are reported by nobody. That is the constraint this site works under, and this page is how it handles it.
Four kinds of source, kept apart
The four are not ranked from good to bad. Each is the best record of one kind of fact and a poor record of another, so what matters is never mixing them.
- What an industry body countsHFR and Preqin count industry capital and flows across thousands of funds, and for a question like how much money the industry runs, or which strategy bucket grew last quarter, there is no better record. Their quarterly figures carry the quarter they describe, every time they appear here, because an AUM number without its quarter is not a fact about the industry — it is a fact about when somebody last looked.
- What candidates and recruiters reportInterview formats, the order of rounds, which headhunters cover which platform, how long an off-cycle process runs: this is reported by people who went through it, and it is the only source there is, because funds publish none of it. It is treated as a pattern rather than a rule. Where a process is described here, it is what recruits consistently describe, not a guarantee of what any one seat will do this cycle.
- What pay surveys and compensation data showPay is the most-searched thing on this site and the least verifiable thing in the industry. Nobody publishes a pod's PnL split; those terms are contractual and private. So compensation is given as a band with the source and the year attached, never as a single figure, and the difference between a base salary — which is knowable — and a bonus outcome — which is not — is kept visible. A precise number for something nobody discloses is a made-up number with a decimal point.
- What a fund says about itselfA platform's own careers page is the best record of what a programme is called, when it opens and what it asks for, and a weak record of what working there is like. Guides lean on it for the first and say whose account it is for the second.
What goes stale fastest
Three things here decay on different clocks, and they are dated accordingly. Industry capital moves every quarter. Recruiting timelines move every cycle, and an off-cycle market has no calendar to anchor to. Pay moves with a year that has not finished yet, so a bonus figure describes a year that is already over by the time anyone can quote it.
Every article carries the date it was last changed, not just the date it first went up. Where a figure is a point-in-time reading, the reading’s own date is stated beside it rather than implied by the page.
When a source disappears
Sources go away, and a citation that quietly rots is worse than no citation. Every external reference on this site is checked automatically, and a link that returns a genuine 404 fails the build rather than sitting there looking authoritative.
When one does disappear, replacing the link is only half the job. In September 2026 two cited industry-capital releases were deleted by the body that published them, which keeps only its five most recent. The citations now point at dated archive copies — and every figure resting on them was re-checked in those copies before the swap, because a source that moved is often a source that changed. A live link is not evidence that the claim behind it survived.
How the guides are written
Research and drafting use AI tools. Every article is then checked against its sources in a separate pass, and a citation log sits beside each one recording what each claim rests on and how confident that source is. Nothing here is published because a model produced it; it is published because the claim was traced back to something.
The guides are written by Daniel Reeve, who edits the site.