Morning Coffee: Hedge funds are demanding awkward information in return for highest pay. Barclays' back to the office thrust is quite limp

efinancialcareers.com:

Traders and portfolio manages are just like the rest of us – they have pride and shame, and they like to present themselves as successful.  So if you ask one of them about their recent performance, you’ll get a sort of edited highlights, with all the dumb trades they made left out, and quite possible a few smart trades that they didn’t make inserted into the historical record. Even without any intention to deceive, memory can be a surprisingly unreliable record.

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That’s why, ideally, anyone hiring for a multistrategy fund would prefer to get some sort of hard evidence to back up the candidate’s claims of an outstanding P&L.  But unfortunately, Business Insider reports that it’s not as simple as that.  Hedge fund returns are confidential and proprietary data.  The returns of individual pods in a multistrat (which are not usually reported to investors) are even more confidential.  Hedge funds are also very sensitive. They know that recruitment is a channel by which information can leak out into the world, and prepared to get quite aggressive legally to prevent it. 

Given this delicate situation, traders and recruiters often tend to do what traders and recruiters often tend to do – to push right up to the limits of what’s legal and professional, and then perhaps push a little more.  On an anonymous basis, some people involved in multistrat hiring have confessed to taking mobile phone screenshots, or pointing their phone at their trading screen on a videocall, or even taking a laptop to a coffee shop meeting on one of their work-from-home days to record the P&L of a potential hire. Random envelopes drop into mailboxes with no identifying information or return address, just