A Week In The Life Of An Investment Banking Analyst: Tuesday
Today my week continues with an account of Tuesday in the same week.
9 AM – No fire drills today, so I get to the office at a normal time once again. The morning is fairly slow and I spend most of my time making further changes to the presentation/Offering Memorandum for Client A from yesterday.
I defined fire drill back in my post on investment banking lingo, but it’s an emergency where the Analyst has to produce something under a very tight time constraint (usually less than an hour). Often it turns out to be unnecessary after the fact.
12 PM – Multiple requests from different MDs; one of them wants to see an analysis of deal-related documents that Client B (the public company being sold to a larger public company) and the buyer are exchanging. Another one is asking for some old presentation we put together.
Managing Directors don’t interact much with Analysts, but there are always exceptions. Everyone has a different style and some of the MDs are more “hands-on” than others. Sometimes if it’s a simple request the MD will just ask the Analyst directly rather than going through 2-3 other layers of people.
3 PM - Have to run a Premiums Analysis for a potential client. Dealing with them is often more painful than working with real clients.
A Premiums Analysis is one of those valuation methodologies you may not know about if you’ve only read the Vault Guide or some of the other packages out there before.
When a public company is acquired, the buyer has to pay a premium to the seller’s share price so that… there’s an actual reason to sell the company. Why would you sell for $25.00 if your share price is at $24.75 currently?
A Premiums Analysis lists all public companies that have been acquired in a certain market (for example, Internet companies) in a certain deal size range (over $5 billion) in a given time period (since 2006) and establishes the median 1-day, 20-day, 30-day, 60-day (and sometimes even more) premiums paid to the seller’s share price. The medians are usually in the 15-35% range, and sellers will rarely agree to be purchased for anything under 10% unless there are unusual circumstances (recent run-up in stock price).
If you apply the median of the set to the company you’re looking at, you get an idea of the price to expect.
6 PM – Analysis takes longer than expected since most of our data is wrong (this happens a lot). Client C (the private equity deal) has sent a flood of information throughout the day and I make further changes to our models.
8 PM – Some of the other Analysts go out to eat. I want to leave before 2 AM so I pass on this one.
10 PM – Finish up work for Client C and speak with Associate on changes for Client A’s presentation.
This is how the workflow in investment banking works: constant revisions of presentations and documents until they’re in passable form. 90% of your time is spent on everything after the initial version.
1 AM – Accomplish my goal of heading home before 2. Changes took longer than expected.
2 AM – Decide to go work out despite being tired. I don’t recommend this.
Note to incoming Analysts: If you’re at all into fitness, I recommend finding a 24-hour gym near wherever you work. Often you’ll only be able to hit the gym at unusual hours.
3 AM – Arrive back home, even more tired. Pass out.
This was a standard Tuesday. There was probably less downtime than normal, with 16 hours of actual work.
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Tags: investment banker lifestyle, investment banking, investment banking analyst, M&A deals, understanding investment banking
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nice, tortuous stuff you were getting huh
what’s interesting is also what you didnt write.. how do you keep yourself awake through the hours from morning till late? how many cans/cups of redbulls/coffee do you drink? do you consume them at intervals? perhaps meditate a little bit? do you procrastinate at all even while knowing you have tons to do?
I drink (or used to drink) a ton of coffee every day. Probably in the range of 10-15 cups.
I also had some red bull occasionally and if things got really tough I would switch to yerba mate (really strong tea/stimulant from South America).
I would try to space things out but sometimes I gave in and drank around 5 cups in the span of 15 minutes…
Great post.
I’m relatively new to the website but I’ve been instantly hooked. All your articles are extremely helpful in one way or another. However, when you mention things like the Premiums Analysis among several others, it really makes a difference as readers like me get a true sense of what sort of work an analyst actually does.
Keep up the good work!
Thanks Shane, glad you enjoyed it!
This isn’t directly related to your post, but do people break into I-banking after they get their MBAs? Let’s consider they didn’t work in consulting or i-banking prior to their MBA.
Kevin: Yes, that’s actually extremely common. A lot of career changers get an MBA and then get into finance/management type fields.
excellent post.
as someone who just finished MBA, and who is trying to get into equity research but has found the blow up of the sell side research model to be despiriting (and riskier i.e — will the research job still be there in 5 years? Research does not generate revenue per se, banking does…also, a lot of research is outsourced these days), I have recently started interviewing for i banking roles……
This site has really helped me get a better idea of what happens out there, so thanks.
Thanks, glad you like the site.
I think research will still be around in 5 years, but it may become more of a buy-side job… it’s hard to make money with it in a post-Spitzer world.
Superb read…
I always wanted to know what “EXACTLY” an I-banker does. The entire set of articles has a very insightful information describing alomst each hour of the week in an I-banker’s life.
Thanks, glad you enjoyed
So working from 8 a.m. and maybe even earlier, to 2 a.m. and maybe even later, how do you have time to do anything else. These times still doesn’t seem realistic to me. It’s like work all day then get 3-5 hours of sleep work some more and little rest. You even get called in on the weekends. So how do you have time for family, church(if applied), etc.(car maintenance, all other things in life that takes up time). How do you manage to find time?
You don’t!
It’s not ALWAYS this bad (look at the rest of the series) but in general you have almost no time for a personal life. Often you have to hire housekeepers and just pay other people to do everything for you.
Thanks for the quick reply. If I not that great on grammar and English, can I still succeed in the IB field? I am great at working hard, math, multitasking, and still working on the people skills. So can I still make it?
Language/communication skills are actually MORE important than technical/quantitative ones because you’re constantly emailing and calling people in finance. Some people get in without those, but I would strongly suggest working on your “soft” skills as well.
This has to be the best website/blog in the history of www’s!
Thanks for the share!