How to Ruin Your Weekend in 3 Easy Steps
With all the recent negative news, I feel like we haven’t heard enough positive stories about the finance industry lately.
So I sat down and thought… and thought some more… and thought for awhile longer after that.
But I still couldn’t come up with anything good without outright lying.
So instead, I’ll just tell you a story from my first month of investment banking. You may not learn how to Live The Dream with this one, but hey, knowing how to ruin your weekend is an equally valuable skill.
1. Find Out About Pitch Late Friday Afternoon
Most banking horror stories, after all, do begin with “Friday at 4 PM” or “Saturday at 8 PM…”
It’s a pitch for a company we don’t care about – normally it would be too small a deal for us, but my MD think it’s “low hanging fruit.”
And you know what happens next: the gorilla summons all his monkeys to go chase after it.
4 PM: Everyone gets on a conference call to hear more about the company in question. The pitch is set for Tuesday, which means that the weekend has already evaporated.
6 PM: The Associate sends me and the other full-time Analyst (I had just started so I was paired up with someone more “experienced”) an email suggesting that “It might be a good idea to get started tonight.”
The other Analyst takes off in search of models and tells me to “handle” the Valuation part of the pitch. This is where you try to “convince” the company that you can sell them for $5 billion even if they’re only worth $3 billion.
6 PM – 12 AM: I foolishly spend the whole night getting precise numbers for our entire Valuation: comparable companies, transactions, and DCF. Yeah, all that stuff you read about in the Vault Guide. It’s foolish because you never get precise numbers until it’s finalized.
2. Argue With Associate Over Valuation Until 3 AM on Saturday
8 AM: Wake up early to check Blackberry for messages. Nothing. Hallucination?
2 PM: Wake up. Associate thinks we should pick different comps (short for “public company comparables”).
He wants to look at 5 financial metrics and also screen companies by geography and # office buildings owned… or something equally useless.
3 PM: Return to office and start looking at different sets of comps.
4 PM: He also thinks everything else in the Valuation is wrong and makes some suggestions on how to change the other parts.
10 PM: I finish up with another round of changes and send him the revised Valuation. Other Analyst is still MIA. I think he might have been filming this YouTube video you’ve seen before…
2 AM: Associate emails me with more changes. He also wants a different screen for comps: companies based in Ukraine with headquarter buildings painted blue.
2:05 AM: I explain that Capital IQ doesn’t give us information on building color.
2:10 AM: He asks for a different screen. Since this guy is married I’m also starting to wonder why he keeps emailing me at 2 AM on Saturday… please, wife, come to the rescue!
2:15 AM – 3 AM: After a stream of 10-15 emails, I stop getting responses from him and assume it’s safe to sleep now.
3. Get Locked Out of Apartment While Trying to Sleep for 2 Hours on Sunday (Into Monday…)
10 AM: MIA Analyst shows up at office to “help out” after most of the annoying work is already done.
10 AM – 9 PM: Most of day is occupied with continued banter between us and the Associate asking us to re-arrange league tables to make us #1 in every Industry and every Product. Add in a few more revisions of our Valuation as well.
9 PM: Other Analyst has a “previous engagement” and has to leave – so I get the remaining work.
5 AM: Go home to sleep for a few hours. Except I’ve lost the key to my apartment and my roommates are not awake to let me in. Head back to office and pass out in the “sleeping room” for a few hours.
9 AM: MD decides to scrap everything we did over the weekend and go back to the original version I had on Friday night. He is on a red-eye flight and needs to have everything by 9 PM.
8:55 PM: We’re finishing up and notice an error on page 31. Have to re-print everything.
10 PM: Deliver presentations to MD at the airport as he’s about to get on his flight. Jokingly offer to shine his shoes too.
(I don’t recommend that one.)
11 PM: Go home early.
Damn, it feels good to be a banker.
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Random question, but what’s usually the minimum gpa for an SA position?
Anything 3.5 or above is fine… 3.0 – 3.5 will make it tougher and put you at a disadvantage, below 3.0 will be really tough without networking.
On a related note, would it be okay if I round a 3.46 to a 3.5?
I’ve been hearing many differing accounts about whether I should round to the nearest tenth or hundredths, so I don’t know what to do.
3.5 is fine, that’s what I’d list in this case.
:D I read that with tears in my eyes – tears of joy. God that sounds like the greatest job ever (and I’m not being sarcastic, seriously that is what I want)
“11 PM: Go home early.”
-classic.
“10 PM: I finish up with another round of changes and send him the revised Valuation. Other Analyst is still MIA. I think he might have been filming this YouTube video you’ve seen before…”
Hmmm, dosk, is that a subtle hint at where you worked during your analyst stint? Hmmmm??? Great post. Keep up the good work, and it’s fantastic that you keep a sense of humor about things when you could just as easily call Unbelievable out for being an unbelievable loser.
For the careful observer, I drop many hints about where I worked. :)
And yeah, whenever you start something new you always have people telling you it’s stupid/won’t work/is useless etc. and it’s something you just have to deal with and learn not to take so seriously.
Great post, really appreciate the site as well, lots of good info and very spot on (from what I observed during my minimal 2 months as a summer analyst). However, switching to another topic, I’ve found it very difficult to get any bites from mid-market/boutique banks even with bulge-bracket IB experience as a former SA. I currently have an exploding offer (which expires shortly) to work within internal corporate finance for a well-known financial services firm. Could I simply work within this 2yr. program, pick up some additional experience, and launch back into IB once the mkt. hopefully picks up in 2010? From the people I’ve talked to at mid-mkt firms, there is simply nothing (very, very few spots) available in IB right now, and I’ve talked to a lot of junior people at a lot of mid-mkt. firms. I’m also considering going back to business school in a couple of years and getting a CFA to make myself more marketable. Any suggestions? Thanks.
Yeah, taking that offer is probably your best option if no leads have turned up from MM/boutiques. I don’t think the CFA will help you all that much with that background – business school might be a good idea, but I would suggest getting some kind of “interesting” experience to set you apart from everyone else with a similar background as well.
so you were a west coast banker…
I thought we already established that I was at UBS LA. :)
Hahaha!!! That is gold!! Don’t you love it that as you move up the food chain, your original work always comes back to you?!
Yeah, general rule is Number of steps up ladder = Number of revisions backward you usually go… sometimes exponentially.
Sydney Banker how are you? Im also in sydney (although not working in finance) and im curious to know how the deal flow is right now? Are times tough here yet? Im considering trying to switch across to finance a few years down the track when the market has well and truly recovered and there are (hopefully) jobs again.
Hilarious man, and hits home so hard. I read your site before I got into banking, and now that I’m in, couldn’t be more true! I remember being personally offended that my first preso came back with revisions…
Yeah, I remember thinking I was doing something wrong the first time we went through 47 revisions of a pitch…
I just want to know what happens when you’re late to work. Do you get told off by a VP or does it go on a “record”?
Just curious :)
Depends on the day – if you are late for a meeting or call or something you could get in trouble. But a lot of the time nothing is going on and senior bankers are traveling, in which case you can get away with a lot. I often strolled in “late” if I knew people were gone and there wasn’t much going on that day.
M&I,
I’m an analyst at a top-tier BB. I owe a lot to this website, from getting interested in IB to actually making it in.
This story of yours reminds me of a crazy weekend a had a few weekends ago when I got into a little trouble managing deadlines between two associates. I’m starting to realize that perhaps to be a good analyst, you don’t need to do a lot of work, but you need to be able to be good at this ambiguous-time-and-deadline management game.
In the beginning, I asked for “interesting” staffings because I just wanted to help out more, but then I often got smashed in the face with multiple staffing requests again and again, to a point where it often became hard to deliver.
Do you think its a better idea to stay silent, get staffed on fewer deals and over-deliver when staffed? Or is it better to be on a lot of projects, do well for all of them with the ocassional mess-up? What do you think makes a better impression in terms of gaining trust and compensation?
Thanks and keep running this amazing website!
I don’t think it matters too much but fewer projects and over-delivering is probably better because people remember your mistakes more than what you did right
Thanks for the advice,
However when I have downtime, I feel like a waste of space or feel like I’m missing out on projects that other analysts are working on. I have this constant urge that numerous events should be occupying my calendar.
How do I get my staffer to staff me at the right pace?
Any suggestions?
Thanks!
If you feel that way just speak up and say something… say you’re looking for more client work as you have some downtime right now.