What is classified as MM in the US Markets?
Hi fellow monkeys,
Fellow Canadian, I was recently reading a WSO post about “best MM” banks, and I kept on seeing names such as Jeffries pop up. Their website had the lowest M&A transaction in 2023 at 1.3B USD. Now I understand that this could be a weird year, but I had always assumed that MM is 100M-999M. I’m a little confused because from my understanding Canadian MM is a wild range of 50-500 others place at the same level as the US. Now if Jeff is classified as a MM firm, what classifies MM based on deal size.
Theres no clear answer. I work in the MM (albeit at a top group) and have done $300M and $4B deals. Honestly there really is no perfect way to explain this on teh banking side as banking groups will go for fees where they think they can earn them. The best way to think about this is form the PE side becuase funds have mandates based on check size / revenue / EV. So a MM fund is looking for $50-150M rev or TEV of $250-750M or whatever it is. Generally you are correct and MM is thought of as ~$200M to $1B. $50-200M is still MM, just also LMM.
Jesus, the disparity between Canadian MM and US MM is ridiculous, i worked at a Corp fin group in the summer at one of the accounting firms, doing practically sell side M&A and they branded themselves as MM, which by us standards we would’ve been in the mid range of LMM. Thank you for the Info though, I didn’t think about it from the PE side!
Just a labeling thing from them. Would think almost everyone in canada considers Big4 sell side to be LMM
Would say generally <$2bn TEV but can range up to $4bn depending on the context. Mostly <$1bn though backing into $200-500mn Equity checks on the sponsor side
It is genuinely interesting to see those disparities in classifications of sizes between Canada and the US
Jefferies only lists their bigger deals on the website, plenty of smaller deals they've released on e.g. LinkedIn
Perfect thank you, I truly appreciate it
If u have bbg and open m&a league tables pretty Jeff is sub 1 billion average size which is lower than RBC BMO and TD. Moelis is also actually below 1 billion but guess their founder boosts the cache of the firm. Need to go back beyond just one year for accurate data.
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