I'm a new associate. What do I do with downtime?
I'm very new so haven't been assigned much coverage yet. Besides for reading about the market and my analyst's companies, what should I be doing when I don't have deliverables? It seems that I have multiple hours of downtime a day. Is that normal?
You should be building out a working knowledge of your analyst's companies. Listen/read previous calls/filings and get a sense of where every company stands in the competitive landscape relative to eachother. Start to develop your own opinions about each company.
Look into companies that are tangential to your analyst's coverage universe. Figure out competitive positioning and develop working theses on each.
Basically spend as much time as possible reading about different companies and develop working knowledge of different industries to train your brain on how to think like and investor. All of your spare time should be devoted to this along with keeping current on market conditions, especially those specific to your coverage universe.
Something I've found moving to the buyside from the sellside is that the work is very unstructured. Whereas in my previous job I was expected to churn out reports, keep strict deadlines etc, I now have few actual deliverables beyond adding value. I can do that by basically doing anything that makes the PM's life easier: building new tools, coming up with buy ideas, stress testing issuers etc. Anyway my point is: I don't think you really have 'downtime', it's more that the job isn't strictly defined and you don't have someone breathing down your neck.
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