That 25% bonus is only on base salary which makes up perhaps 40% of total compensation at those levels. Most of the money is as RSUs which makes up about half the total comp.
At hedge funds, the majority of your "cash bonus" can take the form of deferred comp that's locked up in a shitty fund that doesn't perform anything like the famous ones (both Citadel and RenTec do this). Some don't let you pull it out unless you never work again.
RSU comp can be quite competitive when you take those factors into account.
Usually because the strategies which have genuine alpha and consistently outperform are capacity constrained, and so cannot be scaled to handle both.
Of course, at RenTech in particular the employee-only fund is the good fund. But that's not always the case, so the parent commenter has a point. Deferred/locked up compensation can really suck.
>Of course, at RenTech in particular the employee-only fund is the good fund
Yeah, but only the long tenured/high performing employees get access to the good fund (there's a merely average fund that most employee deferred comp goes into, if I understand correctly).
Former colleague of mine was a M&A trader at Lehman during the crash. 95% of his net worth was in his fund, which was up 50%+ for the year when the bankruptcy trustee seized everything. IIRC, he was starting to get his money back in ~2014-15.
