All About Leveraged Finance – from a Director in the UBS Leveraged Finance Team

It’s finally here – that Leveraged Finance interview you’ve been asking for since we started this interview series.

Unlike every other interview on the site, this one is not anonymous – it’s a discussion with Josh Pearl, a Director in Leveraged Finance at UBS Investment Bank and co-author of the best technical reference guide around, Investment Banking: Valuation, Leveraged Buyouts, and Mergers and Acquisitions.

Most of the other interviewees have been at the analyst or associate level, so I wanted to publish this one and get a crash course in all things Leveraged Finance straight from a senior banker.

The Myth of the Career Path

I’ve gotten a lot of questions about how you can start your own hedge fund, make $1 billion per year in cash, and then retire at age 30 with enough capital to buy several countries.

So today I’m going to give you the exact set of steps you need to do all this: all you have to do is copy and paste and fill in a few blanks and you’ll be well on your way toward being the next hedge fund billionaire.

Positioning Yourself for Business School, Part 1: The Financier

It’s a question on everyone’s minds these days:

“How can I get into the Harvard, Stanford, or Wharton MBA programs?”

“If I don’t get into finance or consulting right now, should I go back to business school instead?”

“How can I stand out from everyone else who’s applying?”

With the markets still in turmoil, more and more people are thinking of heading to business school. Even those who actually have jobs are thinking of going back to school to insulate themselves from layoffs and get a 2-year vacation while they’re at it.

Regardless of your background, though, you’ll face a unique challenge getting into business school and then using it to get into finance:

The criteria to get into business school is different than the criteria to get into finance coming from business school, and the two often contradict each other.

So here’s how you solve that problem…