Can You Sketch Out What A Hard Day in IB Looks Like?

Ignore AN1 info. Saw the two forums on quitting. Can someone sketch out a day of what you were working on that makes the day so bad?

9am - x

10 am - 1pm xxxx

that type of style if anyone would be willing. 

12 Comments
 

Working on 2 live deals + several pitches all with meetings during the week and each with different deal teams asking for deliverables at the same time and basically being unable to leave desk at any given point because emails keep coming in. 

Pretty much this. And I won’t lie, there have been times when all this pressure leads to inconsistent numbers across the deck etc (ie forgot to update some model output somewhere) which leads to nervous MDs which amplifies the stress. Don’t even want to talk about the time(s) when actually errors occurred - those things got ugly.

 

OP here - Would this not be for the intense periods? haven't heard of too many people on average working weekends on those hours. I know analysts work weekends but didnt think it was this bad on average

 

This is a somewhat heavy but not absolutely terrible weekend if you are in a sweaty group without protected weekends. On the worst of days your weekend can be woeking straight through, with a few hours in the middle of the night to sleep... happens often enough

Protected Saturday you are working a few Saturdays a quarter but Sunday is rough (10am-2am every weekend)

 
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when i was an analyst i generally worked 6-7 days and on M-T normally logged off around midnight. my worst stretch i was on: 

  • 1 accelerated sell side CIP to close in like 5 weeks (directors make or break deal)
  • 1 sell side on a slightly accelerated timeline that our always adversarial client asked for to “keep us working fast”
  • 1 sell side for a company that needed to sell a division to survive BK
  • 1 growth equity raise for a company run by founders who learned what M&A stood for from my VP  (directors first deal)
  • 1 buy side with a VP trying to get tombs in a new vertical to make director

my worst stretch i was logging off M-TH around 3 or 4 am. that friday we opened the VDR at 1am. saturday i worked almost all day (got b*tched out for being away from laptop for an hour), and i had to make a deal w the other analyst to go to plans at 9pm. that sunday i worked from 9am until 3.30am when i started crying from stress :)

 

Hours sound interesting - was perfectly normal for my (country coverage) BB An1 class last year to stay on average at least 4am most weekdays for at least 9 months (until Ukraine started and things slowed down). Fridays usually out at 9-11pm, weekends on average normal though (8-10 hours)

Feeling even more exploited now reading that what appeared to us as normal is peak intensity for most others lol

 

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