How to Know if HF L/S industry is for me? Wealth Management instead? Feel lost

PWM is looked down upon because it is not likely to yield earnings as large as other areas of high finance as quickly, and the long term upside usually is higher elsewhere. The truth though, like most things, is a bit different and more nuanced. First, to get very very generalized here: 

Wirehouses (edward jones, morgan stanley): set up your own office using the tools and support of the larger firm, with a payout model based on generated activity. The type of investing here is more often than not model portfolios + whatever structured product of the day is being pitched. Wealth planning is a big focus here. Usually relies on the parent firm pitching how things should look, but gives team's a lot of flexibility to run things however they want. Want to pick stocks? Go ahead. 

Independent RIAs: Individually owned by founders/employees. Can run it however they want, and get paid on however profitable it is. Wealth planning is a big focus at some, and less so at others. Really up to however the firm decides it wants to run things. 

Private Banks within large institutions (JPM PB, etc.): Kind of similar to wirehouse model, but the clients are the firm's clients, rather than your own. Central investing team mostly picks how clients should be invested, and you put together the mix for your clients. There is a "house view" and "house model portfolio" more often than not.  

Then you have a ton of variation off these models (Neuberger Berman, Bessemer, Rockefeller Capital, First Mahattan, etc. - you'd really be surprised at how many firms there are that run in house strategies, similar enough to small LOs. The economics can be pretty good to pretty shit.)

The people who get paid the most are 1) the leaders within very large organizations who worked their way up the hierarchy, 2) founders of independent organizations (RIA) or independent teams (wirehouse), 3) advisors with very large books of their own clients (usually coincides with 1+2). Upside also comes from selling your book/firm. 

People will debate the utility of advisors, but we are not going down that path for now. Because the universe is so large, you can have people who really focus on building financial plans on emoney, and the investing side is an afterthought since it gets lumped into sleepy ETF + mutual fund portfolios. You can also have advisors who are very focused on the investing side, and their whole value proposition is picking individual equities. Neuberger w/ Steve Eisman is a bit like this, as well as First Manhattan, + a long tail of RIAs. I knew a woman at an independent RIA who was very focused on stock picking, and it runs similar to a small LO AM firm. She had +$1bn in client assets for her own book, and charged a flat 1% fee. She makes like +$8mn/yr consistently, and that was before the larger firm sold the RIA to an aggregator, which probably resulted in a +$40mn pay day at the very least.


End of the day though, research and investing at these shops will always be a cost center, and not a revenue driver. You eventually have to move into bringing in client money if you want to make real money, which is a difficult endeavor. If you like helping people, and see yourself as a strong salesman, and still want to be able to participate in the financial markets, it can be an interesting path. Most people here who love investing, however, want to work somewhere where investing is the revenue driver, and they can get paid on that performance.