Y'all are too intimidating. I'm a first year student...

So, I'm in my second semester of my freshman year. I love equity research but I'm just learning basic stuff.
I'm applying to summer internships but I recently flunked a timed (45min.) case test and write-up. I realize this is probably entry-level 1+1 stuff that would take like sub 10min. for most equity researchers to do but I really find this case is somewhat tricky. 

Can someone help me with this case? Thank you. 

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You should practice this exercise on real companies. And do that for all the sectors you can think of: do one for energy, for consumer, for healthcare, for media, etc. The number of sectors you do depends on how hard you want the job because you won't know what sector you are given during the case. 

So practice "spreading" the historicals, and when the new earnings results come out, populate it, re-forecasting the future. And write about what you think, look at what the company's press release focuses on and if you can, look at what sell-side ER writes about for the quarter. Over time, you can get to that "sub 10-min" you talked about easily. 

A lot of people "love" equity research, most don't get in because they didn't try hard enough to convince the firm you can do the basic tasks of the job before getting the job. 

 

wow thanks, that makes a lot of sense. so many CPAs seem to go into the field; I'm just a Business major so I wonder if my technicals will ever be good enough to compete. But only 3 weeks into my first accounting course so we'll see. 

by "spreading" the historicals, what do you mean? 

 

"spreading" the historicals means putting the historical income statement, balance sheet, cash flow statement, and business KPIs into the spreadsheet. 

You can learn everything you learn to be a good research analyst on your own, so it's not about comparing yourself to whoever has "better" majors, better schools, more credentials (CFA, CPA, what not). Some of the greatest investors are liberal arts majors (many of whom studied philosophy). 

 

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