Feeling tired and bored of doing hedge fund work

I started to dive deep into investing during sophomore year of college and ended up joining the investment club. Really liked the work of reading up on SEC filings, understanding the drivers, etc. Made it my goal to exit it into an HF (naive attitude).

However, after a few months as an analyst  I'm starting to get bored of doing this and even feel like I don't want to exit into HF.  Is this just burnout or is it showing that I'm not really interested in this type of stuff.

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 Is this just burnout or is it showing that I'm not really interested in this type of stuff.

How the fuck are we supposed to know? You can't even fucking tell yourself

 
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This is one of the primary reasons I didn't want to go into IB. How can you be interested in some of the more fun parts of finance if you're doing modeling for 80-100 hours a week? The work in IB is very mundane and excel heavy, especially during the first two years (even more so if you're at a BB or a sweatshop). The deep dive investing stuff is where the fun is at imo, as you get to back up your thesis based on your intellectual understanding. Even when you're wrong you learn a lot about the market and why you were wrong, whereas if you're wrong in IB you get chewed out by your MD/VP/Associate for not formatting a model correctly or having a minor typo. 

Of course there is value in learning the ins and outs of how a company works through the sell-side, IB has a high burn out rate due to the nature of the work requiring long hour and detail perfection to climb up to the next steps. Similarly many larger banks have very rigid hierarchy structures so the analyst usually has to do most the heavy lifting in regards to data crunching/modeling. 

Everyone talks about the paths that IB gives you but it also takes something. Unless you love what you do to a heavy degree, it's a heavy and stressful burden. See if you can make a decent return on your personal account with your newfound knowledge of M&A deals and maybe you'll recover the passion you had for finance. 

 

See the thing is I'm losing interest in the deep dive stuff and like another poster pointed out, I'm not even sure why.  The passion I had for learning about businesses and making a thesis back in college has waned.

 

What about trying different strategies or looking at different sectors? There are many garbage companies to short, some with no revenue and management that were previously banned from public markets by the SEC. Similarly you can be an activist like Hindenburg and find some fraud perhaps. Not everything is a long or a fundamental short, there are multiple worlds in finance that might be more interest than a long based on a dcf...

 

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