Industry Groups vs. Product Groups: Got Exit Opps?

“Yo, M&A is the best, right?”

“Why would you ever take an industry group over M&A or Leveraged Finance? Don’t you want to buy entire countries when you move into PE?”

“If you’re not modeling you’ll get bottom-tier bonus!”

Ah, yes: the industry group vs. product group debate.

Just like the debate over cardio vs. strength training, models vs. bottles, and boutiques vs. bulge brackets, there’s so much fervor on both sides that you’d almost think war was about to break out.

Actually, I lied: it’s not quite that heated, but let’s dive right into the debate and see what the arguments for both sides are.

Copy This Investment Banker Resume Template to Get Into KKR (Or At Least, Something Almost as Good)

We’re going to continue our series on investment banking resume templates and go through how you should write about investment banking experience in this article.

You can actually use a similar template for anything in finance, whether you worked on the sell-side or buy-side.

But you can’t use it for everything.

Who Should Use This (or a Similar) Template:

Mergers & Acquisitions: What You Do Every Day

One question I’ve been getting lately is, “What do you actually do in XYZ group at a bank?”

And since everyone still wants to be in Mergers & Acquisitions, “M&A” is the most commonly requested group.

I had assumed that if you found a site like this, you would just naturally know what you do in each group.

But I was wrong – because I keep getting this question over and over.

So today, we’ll delve into this and answer definitively the following question:

What do you actually do in Mergers & Acquisitions?