Investment

Join us as a Research Analyst and you’ll be on a structured career path to becoming one of our Portfolio Managers. That’s because we prefer to develop our Research Analysts until they’re ready to manage their own portfolio, rather than recruit Portfolio Managers from outside our business. Importantly, it also means that all our Portfolio Managers have a good appreciation of the contribution our Research Analysts make, because that’s where their career started.

As an Equity Research Analyst, you’ll be given a group of companies to research in one of seven broad industry sectors. Your work will include reviewing companies’ assets and cash flow, evaluating their management and assessing their trading environment. We call this the “bottom-up” approach to stock picking.

Your research will give you the information you need to make a buy or sell recommendation to the Portfolio Manager. Ultimately, the Portfolio Manager makes the investment based on a combination of factors including the Analyst’s research, their own research, third party research and discussions with colleagues.

Our Fixed Income division also adopts the "bottom-up" approach, which, in this market, is known as "bond picking".

Like their Equity counterparts, our Fixed Income Portfolio Managers make sure that the funds’ investment objectives are fully reflected in their portfolios. They gather and absorb all the investment ideas, by picking the brains of Credit Analysts, Traders and Quantitative Analysts.

We have centralised trading desks on both the Equity and Fixed Income side of our business who are responsible for instructing trades in UK and European markets and exchanges for Fidelity managed accounts. The desks’ primary role is to execute trades and provide Fund Managers with value-added market commentary to assist them in positioning/managing their portfolios. Some Traders specialise in a particular product within their asset class (for example money markets or credit).

As well as Traders, we also have Quantitative Specialists in both Equities and Fixed Income. Although they tend to operate slightly differently, the primary role of both is to support the investment process through quantitative analysis and research.

Fidelity International made a major commitment to building a pan European real estate capability in 2006, and has since built a team of people based in London. The team covers research, fund management in the UK and continental Europe and specialist real estate operations. The next phase of expansion is now under way and a significant amount of seed capital has been allocated to the enterprise with preparations for the first pan European fund for institutional customers under way. In due course, Fidelity expects to become one of Europe’s largest property managers with real estate teams in major cities across the continent and aims to manage many billions of euros of real estate across different European markets.