Throgmorton is a selection programme for first-year university students targeting careers on the buyside. This page describes how the programme is structured, how applicants are assessed, what the four tracks contain, and what top performers in each cohort are eligible to receive.
The gap between an undergraduate degree in economics or finance and a competitive buyside role is structural, not informational. A capable first-year student can read every relevant text — Damodaran, Greenwald, Marks, Klarman — and arrive at interview without ever having made a portfolio decision under live conditions. Coursework rewards correctness on questions that have already been answered. The buyside rewards judgment on questions that have not.
Existing preparation platforms address this gap by providing more material: more videos, more practice tests, more behavioural prompts. The implicit theory is that the missing ingredient is information. Throgmorton's premise is the opposite — that the missing ingredient is reps. A candidate who has structured fifty credit deals under varying macro conditions reads first-round technical questions differently from one who has only read about credit deals.
Throgmorton therefore does not teach. It assesses. Admitted applicants complete one or more tracks under live conditions: prices move, mandates shift, redemptions arrive, defaults occur. Decisions are scored against the cohort. Performance is recorded on a verified profile. The output is a measurable signal of how a candidate performs against realistic constraints — something a CV alone cannot establish.
Throgmorton accepts applicants in numbered cohorts. Each cohort has a fixed application window, a fixed close date, a fixed start date, and a fixed length of approximately ten weeks. The current cohort is 2026/II, which closes to applications on 14 June 2026.
The cohort system exists for two reasons. The first is comparability: a candidate who placed in the top decile of Cohort 2026/II did so against the specific group of applicants admitted to that cohort, against specific scenario seeds, under specific macro inputs. This is more meaningful than an isolated score with no peer reference. The second reason is finite admissions cycles. Applications close, decisions are returned, the cohort begins. No applicant sits in a permanent queue.
Cohorts are numbered by year and Roman numeral — 2026/I, 2026/II, 2026/III, and so on. There are between four and six cohorts a year. An applicant deferred from one cohort may reapply to the next.
Scores from one cohort are not portable to another, and scores from later cohorts do not displace earlier ones. Each cohort produces its own ranked record.
The application requires three pieces of information — name, university and year of study, contact email — and a current CV in PDF format. The CV is the substantive input.
CVs are reviewed against four criteria. The composite score determines admission.
The first criterion is academic signal: institution, degree, and performance within that degree. The criterion does not require attendance at any specific university; what matters is academic strength relative to the applicant's cohort.
The second is quantitative competence: evidence of comfort with mathematics, statistics, finance, computer science, or adjacent quantitative disciplines. Applicants from non-quantitative degrees may demonstrate this through coursework, projects, competitions, or written work.
The third is demonstrated commercial interest: evidence that the applicant has engaged with finance outside the classroom — investment societies, internships, personal projects, written work, or self-directed reading reflected on the CV.
The fourth is structural quality: the clarity, accuracy, and presentation of the CV itself. This is a proxy for how the applicant would present themselves in a first-round interview.
Each accepted applicant receives, alongside their decision, three written points of feedback against these criteria. Deferred applicants receive a brief explanation of which criterion fell below threshold and an invitation to reapply in a subsequent cohort.
Decisions are returned within 24 to 72 hours of application submission. The acceptance rate is calibrated such that approximately one in three applicants is admitted — a level high enough to maintain meaningful cohort sizes, and low enough that admission carries weight.
Each cohort runs four parallel tracks. Admitted applicants may complete one, several, or all of them. Each track produces a separate score and percentile rank within the cohort.
Private Credit Track. The Private Credit Track simulates the work of a direct lending and stressed credit fund through a full economic cycle. Admitted applicants begin as analysts and progress through portfolio manager and head of restructuring roles as the track unfolds. In the analyst phase, the applicant originates and structures direct lending and mezzanine deals against a pipeline of borrower profiles, pricing each deal, setting covenants, and sizing within a portfolio mandate. In the portfolio manager phase, the applicant takes responsibility for the aggregate book — capital allocation across vintages, concentration limits, and the trade-off between yield and recovery under shifting macro conditions. In the head of restructuring phase, applicants who have admitted defaults must work them out: debt-for-equity conversions, amend-and-extend negotiations, outright recoveries. Performance in this phase is scored on recovery as a percentage of par, not on having avoided the default in the first place. The track is scored on three composite metrics: gross yield, default-adjusted return, and weighted recovery rate. Length: typically eight to twelve weeks of cohort time.
Hedge Fund Track. The Hedge Fund Track simulates a long/short equity book under live macro conditions. Applicants begin with a defined risk budget, factor exposure limits, and a redemption schedule. The track is structured around three core challenges: generating alpha (selecting longs and shorts that produce returns beyond what could be explained by market beta or factor exposure); managing factor and sector exposure within mandate, including value-versus-growth, large-versus-small, and sector tilts; and surviving redemptions during drawdowns, which compress decision-making and force selling at the worst possible moments. Scoring weights four metrics: alpha against benchmark, peak-to-trough drawdown, factor-neutrality at quarter ends, and AUM survival through redemption events. The track is deliberately punitive on undisciplined risk-taking; a high gross return achieved through concentrated positions is scored below a moderate return achieved with controlled exposure.
Asset Management Track. The Asset Management Track simulates the work of a long-only manager running client mandates against a defined benchmark. The focus is not absolute return but relative performance, fee economics, and tracking-error discipline. Applicants are issued mandates with specific benchmarks — broad equity, fixed income, multi-asset, or balanced — and a set of constraints: tracking-error budget, sector neutrality requirements, and liquidity floors. The track tests several disciplines that distinguish institutional asset management from generalist investing: maintaining benchmark awareness during drawdowns, managing fee drag as a structural headwind, handling client-driven mandate changes mid-cycle, and balancing the trade-off between alpha pursuit and tracking error. Scoring is based on information ratio, fee-adjusted return, mandate compliance, and consistency of performance across market regimes.
Private Equity Track. The Private Equity Track simulates the work of a buyout fund through full deal life cycles. Applicants source, structure, hold, and exit a portfolio of leveraged buyouts under macro conditions that affect entry pricing, leverage availability, and exit windows. In the sourcing phase, applicants screen targets against a defined investment thesis. In the structuring phase, the applicant builds the capital structure: senior debt, mezzanine, sponsor equity, and earnout terms, sized against base and downside cases. In the hold phase, the applicant manages portfolio companies through capex allocation, bolt-on acquisitions, management changes, and refinancing. The track simulates several macro shocks during typical hold periods to test whether the original thesis survives changing conditions. In the exit phase, applicants choose between strategic sale, secondary sale, recapitalisation, and IPO routes. Exit timing relative to the macro cycle drives a substantial portion of returns. Scoring is based on gross IRR, MOIC, value creation against the original operating thesis, and exit timing relative to the macro cycle.
Each track is independent. An applicant who completes only the Private Credit Track receives a Private Credit ranking; one who completes all four receives four rankings and a composite cohort score.
All four tracks operate against a common macro engine that varies across scenarios and within each scenario over time. The engine takes thirteen primary inputs: monetary tightness, inflation pressure, credit creation, leverage, asset valuation, growth momentum, labour-market conditions, fiscal impulse, trade frictions, policy credibility, shock type, shock persistence, and a stochastic element controlling regime-transition probability.
These inputs interact. A regime of high asset valuation, loose credit creation, and stable policy credibility produces one set of conditions. The same valuation level under tight credit and falling policy credibility produces a different set. The interaction matters because real buyside decisions are made under conditions where multiple variables are moving simultaneously, often in non-obvious combinations.
Cohorts can be run against historical scenarios — 1970s stagflation, the 2000 dot-com bust, the 2008 financial crisis, the 2020 COVID recession, the 2022 rate shock — or against custom configurations of the macro inputs. Within a single cohort, all applicants face the same scenario seed, which is what makes performance comparable.
The engine is not a forecast. It is a deliberately stylised environment whose purpose is to test decision-making under conditions that resemble historical regimes closely enough to be informative.
Each applicant who completes one or more tracks receives a Throgmorton profile at the close of the cohort. The profile contains a composite score for each track completed, expressed as a percentile rank within that cohort; a breakdown of performance against each scoring metric within the track; a skill profile across decision dimensions including valuation, risk management, macro reading, capital structure, exit timing, and operating judgment; and a consistency rating indicating whether the applicant performs only in benign conditions or maintains performance under stress.
Profiles are visible to the applicant and remain on the platform indefinitely. Cohort statistics — average scores, percentile distributions, top scores by track — are published in aggregate at the close of each cohort. Individual scores are not made public without the applicant's permission.
Applicants who finish in the highest percentile bands of their cohort are eligible for additional outcomes.
Throgmorton Fellows — the top 5% of each cohort, ranked across all completed tracks. Fellows are eligible for the following, subject to availability: a thirty-minute call with a practising buyside professional; a personalised CV review; and, where a relevant firm relationship is in place, introduction to firms whose hiring criteria match the Fellow's profile.
Throgmorton Scholars — the top 20% of each cohort, ranked across all completed tracks. Scholars receive a written performance report and may be considered for referrals on a case-by-case basis where firm relationships exist.
The relationships through which referrals are made are developed cohort by cohort. Throgmorton does not publish a list of partner firms; in this market, naming firms publicly without their permission would be both inaccurate and counterproductive. The programme targets first-round access to firms across private credit, hedge funds, asset management, and private equity, primarily in London.
Throgmorton is designed for first-year university students. Second-year students are eligible to apply but should be aware that the programme is calibrated for an audience that has not yet held a finance internship. Penultimate-year and final-year students are typically beyond the programme's intended use case.
The programme does not require attendance at any specific university, residency in any specific country, or pursuit of any specific degree. Applicants from outside the United Kingdom are welcome to apply; the macro engine and most scenarios are global. The application and platform are in English.
There is currently no fee to apply or to participate in a cohort.
Cohort 2026/II is currently open. Applications close on 14 June 2026. Decisions are returned within 24 to 72 hours of submission. Admitted applicants begin the cohort in the week following the application close.