The Complete Guide to Cold Calling Your Way Into Investment Banking

Internship recruiting is over.

And you made a valiant effort, securing 10 interviews with everyone from boutiques to bulge bracket banks – but you didn’t land the offer.

And now you only have a few months before your non-existent summer internship begins.

With recruiting finished, your last, best chance of breaking in is to cold call your way into Wall Street.

But will that even work?

Should you bother going all-out and calling hundreds of firms?

And if you do take the leap, how do you cold call your way in successfully without getting slapped with a restraining order for being too aggressive?

Blackstone vs. Goldman vs. Evercore vs. JP Morgan: How to Decide on Summer Internship Offers

After a long and hard-fought interview season, you made it through recruiting alive and came out with 4 summer offers: Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Evercore, and JP Morgan.

Getting them was hard enough, but now you have an even more difficult task in front of you: deciding which one to accept.

This is a complex analysis that will require years of data, math skills, and top-notch spreadsheet wizardry, so fire up Excel right now and learn how to create the model that you’ll need to make your decision.

Investment Banking Fairness Opinions: Profitable and Prestigious, or Glamorless Gruntwork?

“Morgan Stanley is acting as financial advisor to the buyer and Credit Suisse is acting as financial advisor to the seller, with the fairness opinion provided by Houlihan Lokey.”

So we’ve been over this “financial advisor to the buyer and seller” stuff before, but what about that fairness opinion bit?

You always see sentences like the one above at the bottom of deal announcement press releases – so what is this mysterious “fairness opinion,” why does it matter, and what should you do when your VP calls you at 2 AM and asks you to help out with one?