Wall Street's new disaster playbook; top restructuring lawyers

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Welcome to Wall Street Insider, where we take you behind the scenes of the finance team’s biggest scoops and deep dives from the past week. 

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Wall Street had to quickly adapt to a new work-from-home reality, and firms are already thinking about how the coronavirus will transform the way they work in the long run — Tradeweb’s CEO called the shift to remote work a “fundamental game changer” when it comes to business and personnel impact.

Banks have been forced to rewrite continuity plans, including testing and deploying remote-working capabilities to their vast trading ranks. Dakin Campbell and Alex Morrell talked to more than a dozen insiders about the exact steps firms have taken to replicate trading floors at home.  

Read the full story here:

Wall Street’s disaster playbook never included work-from-home trading. Insiders explain how banks rapidly adjusted during one of the most chaotic markets in history.

And as Casey Sullivan reports, top law firms are seeing a “great reset” that could reshape office needs and how they use tech to interact with clients. That’s not to say everyone is looking to redefine business as usual — Dan DeFrancesco talked with NYSE’s COO about how the exchange is thinking about its iconic trading floor.

Wishing everyone a healthy and safe weekend. As always, my line is open at mmazzilli@businessinsider.com. 

-Meredith 

‘Hope for the best, but plan for the worst’

CB Insights research pegged fintech funding for the first quarter at around $6 billion — the lowest quarterly total since 2017. Dan DeFrancesco asked backers including Bain Capital Ventures, Index Ventures, and Goldman Sachs what advice they have for startups as the coronavirus throws global economies and markets into turmoil.

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As fintechs face their first funding drought in 3 years, we talked to 11 top investors about what young companies should do to survive the downturn

Project MBD ARGO

Dakin Campbell gave a play-by-play on how Mount Sinai Health Systems secured a shipment of 130,000 N95 masks, with collaborators including senior Mount Sinai and Chinese healthcare execs, a senior partner at Goldman Sachs who serves as the chairman of the hospital chain, and a call to Warren Buffett. On the Goldman side, the project was code-named MBD ARGO — a reference to Goldman’s merchant banking division as well as the 2012 film starring Ben Affleck. 

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How a massive New York hospital secured 130,000 N95 masks from China with help from a senior partner at Goldman Sachs, private jets, and a call to Warren Buffett

Top restructuring lawyers gear up

As the novel coronavirus sweeps the globe, it will fall on a cadre of elite attorneys at the nation’s top law firms to help guide companies through an unprecedented hit to revenue. Casey Sullivan talked with attorneys, consultants, and recruiters to identify 10 restructuring and bankruptcy lawyers to keep tabs on as the business landscape shifts dramatically in 2020.

Read the full story here: 

10 lawyers who navigated the biggest bankruptcies in history are set for a huge boom in business as the coronavirus fuels a restructuring surge

Hedge fund winners and losers

March was a month of pain for investors in market-tracking index funds and sophisticated quant hedge funds alike, as a stock selloff knocked several hedge fund categories. Bradley Saacks rounded up the winners, losers, and those in between in the $3.3 trillion hedge fund industry.

Read the full story here:

Macro hedge funds are soaring while quants and stock-pickers tank. Here are the biggest winners and losers.

On the move

Morgan Stanley hired a top trader away from Deutsche Bank in distressed credit— an area primed for a boom as corporate debt gets crushed. Deutsche Bank had tied with JPMorgan Chase for first place in credit-trading revenues in 2018, according to the most recent league table available from Coalition, and is home to one of the top distressed-debt houses on Wall Street. 

Hedge funds and investing

• Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian are in ‘a world of hurt’ right now, but the pain won’t last. Analysts reveal when demand could come back and which companies could come out on top.
• ‘We are in an unprecedented moment of global distress’: Read the full memo billionaire Ken Griffin sent to Citadel employees on the coronavirus crisis
• A liquidity crunch for the hedge-fund industry’s biggest backers could force redemptions on even top-performing funds
• BlackRock’s $1.7 billion Obsidian hedge fund plunged in March as the coronavirus threw fixed-income markets into turmoil
• ‘The best run I’ve ever had’: Inside Wall Street’s coronavirus-fueled trading frenzy, where historic shocks of volatility are creating massive paydays

Careers

• How the 2020 MBA class can make itself marketable in the middle of any crisis, from a Columbia dean who guided students through the Great Recession and turned anxiety into action
• Wharton — the prestigious business school that minted stock-pickers like Warren Buffett, Steve Cohen, and Joel Greenblatt — is rolling out the red carpet for quants
• $1.5 billion ZipRecruiter just laid off hundreds only days after the CEO said the economy was headed for a steep increase in hiring after the end of the coronavirus
• Private-equity giant Carlyle bought a stake in a startup that uses AI to judge how much you smile in interviews, and now it’s offering the tech for free to its portfolio companies
• Top law firms are delaying start dates for summer associates — here’s everything we know so far

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