Are the Vault Guide Rankings Accurate?

Kind of curious to see what people think about the Vault Guide Prestige rankings (mostly on prestige). Seems a little subjective and biased to me... For example, how is Qatalyst #15 in prestige? They kill it in tech and are widely known as the best tech bank (alongside Goldman and MS). Blows my mind. Especially when you get past the top 15 it starts getting a little questionable in my opinion. Thoughts?

Thanks in advance.

I think they make sense and do about as good a job as possible. If you just specialize in tech, it's hard to compare it to a bank that does everything. But I would argue that groups are very important, for example, BAML sponsors or Barclays P&U is more prestigious than ECM or DCM at GS/MS/JPM. Also, PJT RX would be ranked the top shop in RX, but the prestige rankings have no way of breaking that out.

Best Response

If you ever decide to make a legitimate decision based off of those rankings (which is obviously a bad idea in the first place), then I think it really only makes sense to compare if you have generalist offers from smaller firms (i.e. EB/MM M&A offers).

For example, comparing something like EVR M&A to Centerview M&A would justify use of these rankings. Vault collects commentary directly from employees that is actually really helpful in helping you uncover what the lifestyle at a specific firm is like.

It's impossible to use these rankings to compare something like CS vs. Citi because your experience will be almost entirely group-specific.

Yea but even then, most of the comments from these small firms are almost identical and don't really go in-depth about firm culture. It's nearly always a pattern of "great senior level exposure, lots of responsiblity due to lean deal teams, opportunities to work on high-profile transactions" and the con always being "rough hours".

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