Recruiting for 2026–2027 · any year, any subject
Join the fund
No finance background is assumed and none is required. What the fund needs is people who will read a set of accounts properly and then argue with the room about what they found.
01 Commitment
Hours, terms and pay
- Time
- Roughly six to eight hours a week during term: reading, modelling and writing, plus the meetings.
- Meetings
- Fortnightly research meetings in term, in person on campus where possible, with an online option. Quarterly review and annual review are formal and in person.
- Examinations
- Meetings are suspended during formal examination periods, and the portfolio is held on a monitoring-only basis over the summer. §3.6
- Term of office
- One academic year, reviewed at the end of the autumn term. Re-appointment is possible. Third-year students are eligible for every role, including CIO.
- Handover
- Officers overlap with their successors for at least four weeks and leave a written handover pack. Records belong to the University and are not kept in personal accounts. §3.5
- Pay
- None, and no share of any gain, ever. No student or staff member may take personal financial benefit from the fund’s performance. §1.2
02 Roles
The roles, and what each one is accountable for
Every officer role has a named deputy who may act with its full authority. Analysts are open to students in any year.
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Analyst
Research and financial modelling support. This is where most people start and where most of the learning happens: reading filings, building the model, drafting sections of a pitch, and sitting in on the argument.
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Portfolio Manager
Covers a sector or a geography. Originates ideas, logs them, writes the pitch, presents it and answers for it. Monitors the holdings assigned to them after results, and produces the annual re-underwrite for each one.
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Head of Research
Owns the quality of every thesis before it reaches the Committee. Maintains the Research Standard, approves ideas for research, keeps the idea log, scores every draft and may return one without a hearing. Allocates sector coverage and coordinates the annual re-underwrite. Deliberately excluded from risk-limit authority, so the risk function stays independent of pitch origination.
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Risk & Compliance Officer
Performs the pre-trade check on every approved trade and confirms compliance in writing before execution. Monitors every limit, keeps the risk register, the breach log and the conflicts register, independently verifies the monthly valuation against the broker statement, and reports breaches.
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Operations & Reporting Officer
Strikes the monthly valuation. Maintains the trade blotter, the holdings record, the look-through sector table and the performance record. Document control, minutes, and the whole reporting cycle: monthly, quarterly, annual.
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Stakeholder Relations Officer
External communications, the annual report, and partnerships with student funds at other UK universities: joint research, competitions, shared governance. No partnership may pool capital, manage another body’s assets, or share live holdings before publication.
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Managing Partner and CIO
Leads the investment process, accountable for portfolio construction and final position sizing, and the primary contact for the Academic Adviser, the broker and the Advisory Board.
Quorum for a decision is four voting members, and must include the CIO and the Risk & Compliance Officer, or their deputies. The Academic Adviser attends without a vote, holds a veto over any decision, and is the only person who instructs the broker. §7.2, §7.3, §2.3
03 Selection
How selection works
Two conversations. Neither of them is a test of whether you already know the vocabulary.
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Expression of interest
Get in touch and say which role interests you and why. A paragraph is plenty.
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First interview
A conversation. What you are studying, what you have been reading, what you want out of the year, and how much time you actually have.
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Second interview
Five practical questions. We are looking at how you reason towards an answer, not whether you already have one.
Before you apply
Read the Research Standard, particularly the three tests and the ten failure modes. If the idea of writing down, in advance, the three things that would prove you wrong sounds like the interesting part rather than the tedious part, this is the right society for you.
04 Contact
Get in touch
The fund is also open to student investment societies at other UK universities for joint research, case competitions and sharing governance documents, and to anyone at the Business School who wants to look at the mandate before it goes to the Academic Adviser.
There is deliberately no application form here. A form that validates your details and then discards them, which is what the previous version of this site did, is worse than no form at all.
Prune Hill Capital
- Based at
- Business School, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX
- Applications
- Rolling, through the autumn term.