JPMorgan wants some juniors to help it value private equity investments

efinancialcareers.com:

Are private equity firms sitting on massive writedowns that could destabilize the global financial system? It's a question for regulators like the Bank of England. It's also a question for analysts and associates at JPMorgan. 

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The US bank is creating a new product to value private equity investments and is hiring juniors for a team, based in New York. Named «private equity valuation» specialists, they will sit in the bank's data team in the corporate and investment bank, reporting to Neil Hyman, the head of data products and CEO of PricingDirect, a JPMorgan subsidiary that provides pricing information. Historically, PricingDirect has focused on fixed income products; this therefore seems to be a new beginning. 

In its job descriptions, JPMorgan says the new juniors will provide «independent valuations and analytics on private equity» as well as PricingDirect's fixed income and derivative products. The valuations will be based on «real-time market intelligence from buy-side and sell-side market participants.» Successful applicants will know about valuation; they will also know about data science and be able to code in Python. 

By pushing into private equity valuations, JPMorgan is addressing the hot topic of the moment. There is good money to be made in calculating the true value of private equity funds' unrealised investments. Preqin, which provides data and valuations for privately held and traded assets, was sold to BlackRock for $3.2bn in July. 

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