What do equity research interns do?
Did any of you guys intern (as an undergrad) in equity research at a bulge-bracket firm (or any firm with an equity research internship program, actually)? What did you get to do during your internship?
I ask because I’m an equity research intern right now, but at a small firm with no structured internship program as such. I just want to see if I am gaining a similar set of experiences to that which an intern going through an actual program would accrue.
A sample of the kind of stuff I’ve done so far:
• Collected the specifications of all new and rumored laptops (information from company sites, press releases, tech blogs) for a Tech Sector analyst.
• Searched for and summarized academic papers on financial liberalization; a Banking Sector analyst used it in order to help him get material to put in a sector report.
• Used CEIC Data Manager and Bloomberg Terminal to grab a bunch of micro and macro data in order to make tables and charts e.g. charts like Current Account Balance vs. GDP growth, and tables where I calculated ratios like P/B, ROA for banks – some of these were actually sent to clients/used in reports
• Added 2Q2012 figures from a bank’s annual report into a 3-statement model.
• Wrote short summaries of the events and consequences of some non-systemic banking crises in the Asia-Pacific. The analyst added a couple more crises to the table and then put it in a report.
P.S. I guess some of you must be research analysts at firms which have structured ER internships - what do you guys give to your interns to do?
Yes, that is not too far of
Yes, that is not too far of what we have our interns do.
Interns can't write reports as you need a license, and they also don't have the capacity to write in a presentable way to clients either. So most just end up helping out with data gathering, market research, and data entry.
However, my advice would be not let it weigh you down because the real value you will get is learning how the industry operates and learning through osmosis being immersed in the environment. You should use that time to pick peoples brains on how everything works during downtime, lunch, etc -
How do they speak to clients?
How do you analyze data points in the market?
What do clients look for in the work we do?
How do we add value to clients?
What are some challenges in our industry?
Where do you see our industry going?
That is the real knowledge you can apply after your internship in your job hunt. It will have a much bigger impact that saying you learned how to collect tech shipments from Asia. It also shows you care and are knowledgeable to your current team which helps out a lot.
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I'm also working on a project to give people insight into the sell-side, would love to have your input in a short 20-s survey:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/F8SBV9K
i guess interning at a hedge
i guess interning at a hedge fund is a bit different, but besides updating financials and doing fundamental analysis, i also often create forecasting models and do some valuation comparisons
Update our industry primer we
Update our industry primer we put on the back burner for the past 4 years.
im interning at a HF. I'm
im interning at a HF. I'm being trained to actually write reports and don't do anything else. By that I don't mean that someone else does the data fetching for me. I do everything from start to finish. If I have to gather data and do a long laundry list to get the report done, I do it myself.
Get your hands on the models
Get your hands on the models and master them. Some firms place more of an emphasis on them than others but its always a great skill to have and its something you can always keep updating, building, and playing with after your internship. IMO I'd much rather play around with future earnings than try to write a "fake" research report when you get back to school and want to keep your skills sharp.