Morning Coffee: JPMorgan’s best new trading jobs sound tortuous. A CFA executive is accused of failing the ethics test

The author John C Maxwell once said that “If you think you’re leading, but no one is following, then you are only taking a walk.”  Similarly, if you think you’re a trader, but nobody is buying or selling with you, then you’re just a chump sitting at a desk sending emails. No matter how well-paid the job or how prestigious the desk name, that’s got to be a frustrating situation.

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And it seems that this is the fate of JPMorgan’s private credit traders.  On the one hand, they’re a hand-picked team with the support of Jamie Dimon himself, working on one of Troy Rohrbaugh’s top strategic priorities. But on the other hand, the reality is that they’re finding it very difficult to get their calls returned. 

Apparently the daily “run” from the JPM private credit desk – the list of loans they want to buy and sell – has become something of a standing joke in the industry, for its stale pricing, unrealistic volume quotations and above all, the fact that it’s very obvious that most of the planned trades haven’t executed. Jennifer Lin, one of the key executives managing the business, left the bank earlier this month, after apparently spending most of 2025 trying to stall impatient clients who weren’t getting their orders filled.

Why are JPMorgan's traders getting the cold shoulder?  Seemingly, because the private credit community is quite small and cliquey, and nobody fancies giving up market share to a megabank.  JPMorgan has a strategic plan to open up and democratize the private credit market, bringing transparent pricing and higher trading volume.  But, of course, a “private” market which trades actively and has open information is private in name only.  The private credit industry regards it as a key advantage of their asset class that they aren’t marked to volatile public markets, and so they’re not particularly keen on helping anyone break in and change the rules of a game that has served them pretty well to date.

This might not last forever. History provides plenty of examples of tightly-knit groups using their market power and control of scarce assets to boycott outsiders, and it’s rare for this to end up as a sustainable equilibrium.  At present, industry observers are looking at JPM’s efforts and saying things like “Just because you want an ostrich to fly doesn’t mean it's going to happen … Certain properties have to be present for a secondary market to develop and be maintained”. But the arc of the markets always tends toward more transparency and more trading. 

Lots of smart traders suspect that if there’s another M&A boom which suddenly requires a lot more financing, or an economic downturn that puts borrowers under financial stress, then the private credit insiders may decide that it’s nice after all to be friends with a trading desk that’s got a big balance sheet and access to a wide investor base.  And that means listening to the calls to regularise and expand the market, letting the big banks take their slice in order to grow the overall pie.  Although the JPM traders are currently the least popular kids in the market, they may have their day in the sun after all.

Elsewhere, the “ethics” paper is notoriously one of the most painful parts of the CFA exams to study for. So those who have suffered it might permit themselves an ironic smile at the news that the Institute’s former Chief Marketing Officer has been arrested and charged on an eight count indictment relating to allegations of nearly $5m of phoney invoices to companies he allegedly controlled.  Is that bad? Would it make a good multiple choice question?

For his part, Michael J Collins is calling these “trumped-up allegations from a former employer”, and he says that he is “looking forward to returning to court” to fight the charges. The money, according to the indictment, was spent on fine dining and engagement rings, so at least somebody’s had some fun out of it.

Meanwhile …

Danny Yong had nearly twenty years of double-digit returns as a trader for Citadel, Goldman Sachs and his own hedge fund (Dymon Asia).  But in 2019, he realised that he was heading into his third consecutive year of losses and, unusually for a superstar, he was “brutally honest” with himself and gave up managing money to concentrate on building a multistrat business instead. (Bloomberg)

After seven “Most Impressive CEEMEA Bond Syndicate Banker” awards and a promotion to Managing Director at JPMorgan last year, Alexander Karolev is taking a sabbatical year, which he plans to spend with his family in his home country of Bulgaria.  Gavriel Shaya, recently hired from HSBC, will take over the bond syndicate desk, and Joseph Hayashi is being transferred to London from Hong Kong to help. (Global Capital)

Bill Winters of Standard Chartered had to practice “again and again and again” to get over a debilitating fear of public speaking.  “If I didn't prepare myself mentally, I'd have a full-on panic attack: blood to my head, spinning, dry mouth. And it would last for 15 or 20 seconds”. (Bloomberg)

“Some of the newer people were like, oh my god, this isn’t what I signed up for”.  Veteran expats in the Gulf region, however, are treating the latest round of geopolitical uncertainty a bit more phlegmatically. (FT)

The Andurand Commodities Discretionary Enhanced Fund has, not unsurprisingly, had something of a roller coaster ride from that very uncertainty.  It’s down 60% for the year to date, but this isn’t too far out of the general run of things for this very volatile fund.  (Bloomberg)

A recent graduate who had to make 647 applications before getting an accountancy job thinks that the problem may have been that her resume wasn’t written so as to be intelligible to automated AI filters. (BBC)

While building Saxo Bank into one of the most successful Nordic fintechs, Kim Fournais has also spent the last two decades turning the small Danish island of Vejrø into a quite unbelievably sweet-looking ecotourism paradise. (Fortune)

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