Thoughts on spec sales

I've been on the buyside for 3-4 years now and the only sellside emails I open up nowadays are from spec sales. Depending on the person, I think they're pretty valuable resource counterparts. 

What do you think makes a spec sales person good? Imo it's knowing bogeys, sentiment, and most importantly I value original thoughts. I don't care if they're right/wrong, but I would rather have them think for themselves (to the extent they are allowed to) than regurgitate analyst notes. 

Heck...sometimes I wonder if I should make a move to spec sales after a few more years of doing this. Seems like quite the job. 

8 Comments
 

Agree the spec sales product can be good.

The challenge is the constant need for product and to have something to say about everything. You gotta wake up early and have a blast everyday and your blast needs to be out early.

Need to cover a lot of names. Earnings season can be longer.

Give away comp upside transitioning to that role, but may have less comp volatility.

Path back to a hedge fund might be hard, if you go that route. Might be a one way ticket if you go that route

 

All good points. I personally don't care when the morning blast comes. If all you're doing is regurgitating analyst notes, then yes it shouldn't be sent out at 8am, but if you're actually putting original takes in it, I'm ok with it coming out at 8:30. 

Need to cover a lot of names. Earnings season can be longer.

This is very true. I wonder if sales will/should transition into a sub-sector specialist model for certain sectors. You already have some firms dividing tech/software and TMT, but why not for consumer (i.e. splitting out discretionary vs. staples). I think the real value in sales is with spec, not gen sales, and they can be better quasi-analysts not being spread out too thin. 

It's an interesting potential career though there's obviously not too many seats especially scaled ones.  

 

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