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heard Mercury is a scam - any other HH that is willing to talk to SS ER?

 
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A few things to your question - I know SS ER gets a lot of hate sometimes, but I'm relatively junior into my career covering a hot sector. Outside of money being great (benchmarking against some of the posts here, I think I'm getting more than usual with ~1YOE and TC ~200K) and my analyst being a good person, I don't think I know my sector well enough to generate that much value for the buy-side. I also like my work and the client interactions I've had as an associate so far. 

For the buy-side, I know it's all about performance in the end, but I think I'll be in a much stronger position if I give myself a few more years - still lots to learn/room for comp growth. Of course, I might be biased in this area because I've always worked for very good analysts; I'm currently on a ranked team, and started off at an independent that mimicked the buy-side. Sometimes I think people from SS jump to the buy-side too quickly without discerning fund quality/platform stability, which is fine, but it's easy to get blown out. Personally, I've seen a few associates lasting just a year before going back to SS + a slight downgrade. For now, I like the stability of my job and the brand name on my resume. Ideally, after a few years, I'd leave for LO or VC, but would be open if these opportunities present themselves earlier (I've gotten some traction with VCs early on). I'm also not opposed to staying in SS ER either and becoming an analyst, simply because of how much growth my sector has (in case someone asks, it's HC but not biotech). Hope this helps!

 

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