As I write, I’m sorting through the hundreds of business cards collected during 9 consecutive weeks of hedge fund conferences in 6 cities on 3 continents.  Anyone who has spent time on the conference circuit (in any industry) knows what I’m going though.  Who was this guy?  What exactly does “director of strategic development” mean anyway?  Did this card go through the laundry in my shirt pocket?

So many cards, such a haze of memories.  But there is one thing that a lot of these business cards seem to have in common: the words “capital introduction team”.  It seems that pretty much everyone I met this fall from a prime brokerage (”PB”) wasn’t actually in sales, but was part of the “capital introduction team”.  It’s as if all PB salespeople changed jobs all of a sudden.  Or maybe the PBs have simply become third party marketers – compensated not by a percent of assets as a third party marketer would, but by traditional prime brokerage fees such as spreads on security lending and short rebates.

Financial News published an interesting story today about the new dominance of cap intro in the value propositions of many prime brokerages.  Says Financial News:

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