Morning WSmonkeys,
I'm in a process for an IR Analyst position at a 50B listed company in Europe and was wondering whether you could help me assess the opportunity. Facts:
- 4.5 years of B4 experience (3 of them doing transfer pricing - debt/interest rate analysis and intangible valuations and 1.5 in the Equity valuations team), got my CFA Charter 6 months ago.
- At the moment I'm happy with my job in the sense that I'm well considered, environment is nice, hours are not extremely crazy, and there is still room for progression. However, there are some cons: our annual revenue mostly come from business valuations for audit impairments and PPA valuations (they don't really sell a lot of fairness opinions, transaction related valuations). It's good to see these cause you get to learn DCF in and out and excellent analytical/business skills (specially with the PPAs), but at the end of the day it mostly comes to calculating a WACC and copy pasting management's projections, plus it has an accounting bias which I really don't care much about. Everyone at the team agrees that after 2 years this is quite a repetitive job and the learning curve flattens quite a lot. Of course salary is pretty shitty as well.
- I've gone to some interviews approached by recruiters to see how the market is and what my real exit opps are, and here are my conclusions: PE is impossible (no M&A experience); M&A is doable although I would need to go to a tiny boutique or get a downgrade, which is sthg I'm not willing to do cause I'm not a i-need-M&A-then PE guy. Equity research is also nearly impossible due to lack of market experience plus shrinking fees reducing the industry further. Hence, I see my most likely exit opps getting reduced to in-house Corp Development gigs (which I'm fine with)
Having said this, my main concerns are the following:
1) What does an IR analyst really does? i've read everyone has a different opinion: glorified secretaries, ex ER people that wanted better life, etc. Do they really do some DCF models, follow the markets, etc.?
2) Once you go to IR, is there any back-up plan in case you wanna move from it? Like lateral move to Corp Dev, or going to ER, ECM, etc.
Thanks all!
Cheers
anybody?
Really depends on the group. You can make moves if you're proactive in the position. You will have access to a ton of opportunity to learn (research, talking with investors & your mgmt. team, access to corporate strategy and corp. dev. groups). That being said, there are such varied opinions b/c there are such varied experiences within each IR group. Generally speaking, I'd say the larger the company the less desirable the position would be, in my opinion. If it's a smaller company, you'll actually get to sit in on executive strategy meetings, travel to meet investors, etc.
If you're at a mega company, you might be doing work that is rather monotonous. I'd also say the chance of you climbing ranks within IR are slim to none. Get the experience and then move to a more 'front-office' group like strategy or M&A. When you're at the top of the IR pole,life is good. When you're at the bottom, you might as well be an IB analyst with 1/4th of the pay and 1/10th the modeling experience.
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