Landing an internship at a top financial institution is one thing. Leaving with a job offer is another — especially at an uber-selective, highly competitive hedge fund.
Balyasny Asset Management, which manages $25 billion in assets, accepted just 0.5% of applicants for its 2025 internship class. Only about half of them can expect to be offered a full-time job at the end of the summer, as BI previously reported.
Hinal Jajal and Francesco Catanzariti know what it takes to make the cut. They were interns — Jajal in 2024 and Catanzariti in 2023 — and have since joined the hedge fund full-time.
Now, they have front-row seats to some of the hedge fund’s most topical work, despite only being in their early 20s. Catanzariti just finished his first year as an analyst on the macro trading team, a strategy that’s gotten notably busier this year amid increased market volatility. Jajal is about six months into a full-time role as a researcher on the applied AI team and has been building an LLM — a type of AI model — to forecast market events.
Jajal and Catanzariti sat down with Business Insider to talk about their experience working for the hedge fund and their advice for interns looking to get a full-time job offer. Here are their top tips, including “failing quickly” and avoiding “falling in love” with a single task or project.
Don’t be shy
Both Catanzariti and Jajal said they were pleasantly surprised by the amount of access they had as interns to Balyasny’s senior leaders and portfolio managers.
Jajal said she got direct feedback on her intern project from the head of macro research, Chris Pulman, despite the fact that he was not on her team.
“I got to meet him weekly and get his input on, ‘Okay, this is helpful, this is not helpful.’ That’s amazing for someone who’s still in school,” said Jalal, whose intern project involved building a Large Language Model to mimic “super forecasters” in the markets.
Catanzariti advised interns to take full advantage of this unusual structure.
“Talk to people. I think that’s a really, really good No. 1 rule,” he said, adding, “Maybe you’ll make mistakes, maybe you’ll be embarrassed, but it doesn’t matter.”
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He cited his own experience approaching alumni of his school, who were analysts in different areas of the firm, to grab coffee so he could learn about them.
“I remember having interesting conversations with other analysts working on other teams who were really experts on machine learning,” he said. “Maybe it wasn’t 100% directly related to what I was working on, but it was something that I knew could be useful.”
Catanzariti said he continues to take advantage of BAM’s “flat” structure as a full-time staffer.
“I have a lot of my friends and classmates, they work for different institutions — investment banks or hedge funds,” he said, adding, “There’s much more hierarchy, much more structure. And for me it’s like, wow, I could literally reach out to this person who is well known in the industry, has a lot of expertise in an asset class, and this person could be available.”
Balyasny Asset Management
‘Failing quickly’
For Jajal, efficient iteration was essential to making an impression. Her advice: Learn to fail quickly.
“When you’re working in research and you’re working in finance, you fail a lot,” she said, adding, There are ideas you will try, and they will not work out.”
With only 10 weeks to deliver results, Jajal said she focused on “running experiments quickly and failing quickly so that it’s not like you’ve spent five weeks on one thing and suddenly you find out it doesn’t work.”
“Avoid rabbit holes and also get frequent feedback, check in with your manager, check in that you’re on track in terms of your project,” she added.
That wasn’t necessarily obvious to her in the first couple of weeks, she said.
“Ask yourself, what’s the bare minimum I need to do that is reliable, but also quick to determine if this would be a value add?”
As a full-time employee, she has continued to develop the model, but is also working on things like enhancing BAM’s internal document search system.
Balyasny Asset Management
Don’t fall in love with a specific task
Francesco advised interns to use their eyes and ears to understand the bigger picture and learn from full-time staff. It may sound simple, but this can be easy to forget when you’re focused on your work.
“I think in every industry, but specifically this one, people can fall in love with a specific task or a specific project,” he said.
Francesco said he used calls and meetings with portfolio managers and other analysts to try to ascertain how people think about the market.
“What does the PM care about? I think that’s something that really helped me in understanding more of the dynamics of the team,” he said.
“It was fascinating to see PMs and senior people analyze the situation and apply hypotheses and be always willing to change their minds and adapt and again, not falling in love with a specific idea or a specific pitch,” he added.
Things can change quickly, especially in a volatile market. Starting his first job at a hedge fund during this time has taught him as much, he said.
“They have seen similar events,” he said, adding, “They can bring this expertise they’ve been through in the past to the present moment. And I think that’s something that I particularly look up to.”
