Fixed Income Research Analyst I

Job Title

Job Description: Performs deep, independent credit research to add value to bond funds and performs minimal credit risk (MCR) assessments on credits for money market funds covering a subset of banks and finance companies, including Business Development Corporations (BDCs). Communicates credit opinions, relative value and MCR determinations to support security selection and portfolio positioning decisions through published written work and presentations. Researches economic, market, and policy developments to assess their impact on fixed income securities and portfolio exposures.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Provides fundamental analysis of assigned issuers through qualitative and quantitative methods.
• Generates investment ideas and responds to market opportunities, including assigning and updating ratings.
• Builds and maintains analytical tools to support the research and investment process.
• Engages in regular discussions on investment strategy and processes.
• Collaborates effectively in team-based investment processes.
• Maintains strong relationships with issuers, rating agencies, and external counterparts.
• Monitors existing holdings and ratings.
• Works closely with investment professionals across the organization, including equity, high income, alternatives, and asset allocation teams.
• Ensures accuracy, consistency, and integrity of analytical outputs, models, and research materials used in the investment process.
• Interacts regularly with other analysts, portfolio managers and traders across a variety of investment mandates as part of the team-based investment process.

Education and Experience:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Economics, Financial Markets, Finance, or a closely related field (or foreign education equivalent) and three (3) years of experience as a Fixed Income Research Analyst I (or closely related occupation) performing credit research on financial institutions using independently established qualitative and quantitative methods within an investment management environment.

Or, alternatively, Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Economics, Financial Markets, Finance, or a closely related field (or foreign education equivalent) and no experience.

Skills and Knowledge:

• Demonstrated Expertise performing independent fixed income security, issuer, and sector analysis on financial institutions by integrating financial statements, capital structure data, and credit metrics into assessments of credit quality for investment mandates; designing and implementing advanced data acquisition, extraction, and analytical methodologies to pull and synthesize complex financial data from diverse regulatory sources -- Call Reports, SEC filings (10-K and 10-Q schedules), OSFI reports, and Form ADV filings; and augmenting the investment research process by improving the efficiency of data synthesis and identifying non-obvious patterns within large datasets to inform fundamental financial modeling and analysis, using programming languages (Python and SQL) and machine learning (ML) techniques.
• Designing and engineering automated data workstreams to analyze the underlying portfolios of BDCs and specialty finance companies; performing advanced coding in Python and SQL, alongside sophisticated ML techniques, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), to programmatically extract, parse, and structure granular investment-level data from unstructured and disparate sources -- private loan database (Reorg) and bankruptcy filing system (PACER); and creating aggregated datasets for conducting in-depth fundamental analysis, risk assessment, and valuation of portfolio holdings.
• Performing comprehensive credit analysis of financial institutions by leveraging private credit strategies (tech/ARR lending, specialty asset-backed lending, real estate lending, life science lending, and secondaries); and conducting a granular, "bottom-up" review of the quality and risk within underlying investment portfolios, and a "top-down," strategic assessment of business models, competitive positioning, and growth drivers within the financial institution space.
• Analyzing complex securities and financing arrangements across the capital structure to inform superior investment selection in public investment-grade credit; conducting comprehensive investment-grade credit analysis and relative-value and risk assessment; and performing integrated capital-structure evaluation (including private and traded loans, junior credit layers, and preferred/common equity).

Category: Investment Professionals