Sell Side Exit Opportunities: Top Ranked vs. Unranked?

I'm considering opportunities on the sell side and am wondering about exit opportunities for working under a top ranked analyst versus an unranked one.

I am assuming the former has stronger exit opportunities, but any commentary around the degree to which they do or discussion around past experiences would be appreciated.

Note: Edited due to comments below.

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Best Response

With equity research, you can't generalize over the entire firm like that. I would say that bulge brackets (on average) are better as they have large sales forces that can broadcast an analyst's ideas, so there is greater job security in that. However, you also have idiots at some bulge brackets that can't say anything worth saying on a note or over the phone because of conflicts with other business lines, such as investment banking.

What you should really care about is the specific team and how good the team is. Good teams have good exit opportunities. The good team could be at Stifel or it could be at Sanford Berstein. It depends. Evaluate the team, not the firm as a whole as a first step. Second is to evaluate the firm.

I think you can generalize over a firm in investment banking more often than you can in equity research.

 

I was definitely being overly general by mentioning firms instead of mentioning specific teams and apologize for that. I am familiar with analyst rankings and understand that individual teams matter more.

However, the main point behind the question still stands. Would working for an analyst who has been unranked for multiple years severely hurt exit opportunities versus a top ranked analyst or are the exit opportunities relatively similar?

 

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