Hi,
College junior here, Im currently trying to learn about different industries and was wondering how IP learn about an industry if you get assigned one? Where do you start and do you have something like a framework you follow or do you just start reading book after book?
Im especially interested about „normal“ ways since I don’t have access to industry primers from ER or other industry research.
Thanks for all types of insights.
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Google the top news sources for the sector, subscribe, and read everything. Look up consulting reports, read books, watch YouTube videos, conferences, etc.
Just use Google
Sell side industry primers help massively for summarizing the basics pretty quickly - but obviously the best way is just going through the companies themselves. Investor days will tend to give breakdowns of their end markets, growth rates, TAM, products, sales cycles, competitiveness, etc. As well as with 10ks. Just gotta grind through a lot of companies, their investor days and 10ks, and earnings calls. Compare and contrast the models, margins, blah, blah...
You can definitely learn from books about the industry and stuff, but if the end goal is going to be covering these companies... well, might as well cover the companies...
For high-level introductory info, often VC firms will have useful industry reports that do a good job outlining trends that they are looking at, who the major players are, etc. a16z, Bessemer and Lightspeed have good ones, at least for the tech industry off the top of my head.
I'm not in HF, but I believe the best way to understand industry basics is to read books.
For example, I cover semiconductor as a banker, and I need to/want to understand my clients deeply. Therefore, I read the following book:
Silicon Earth : Introduction to the Microelectronics and Nanotechnology Revolution
It is a great book to know beyond primer basics. With this book, I am now capable of holding a meaningful conversation with hardware engineer friends. You just get a much, much deeper understanding of products and services companies offer. In comparison, VC/Consulting reports can get really shallow/have a hard time explaining things clearly. I think this is also a reason why pure finance folks are out of favor now.
How about Chip Wars!?
I think it's a typical journalist book: you spend time to savor a good/great story, know more about industry history, major players, etc., but I don't think it really helps when it comes to understanding products and services.
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