Capital Markets Group - Detailed summary

I'll speak for DCM as that's where my experience (6 mos.) lies.

DCM, like ECM, is a product group. So essentially, the IBD industry groups cover the companies and when they need to do a debt issue (our group does both HY and IG), they hand them over to us. We advise clients on market timing and issuing structure and then we line up investors to try and guarantee the offering will be a success (most of our transactions are sold on a best-efforts basis rather than underwritten). So we work with IBD in order to know the client from a micro perspective and we work very closely with traders to gauge investor appetite (size and tenor of issue) and appropriate pricing levels. We also work closely with the swaps desk, either for asset swaps or currency swaps. That said, we do a lot of our own client coverage at the CFO/Treasurer level.

Given that we do so much of our own client coverage, we do a lot of pitching, either to win mandates that we know are coming up (i.e. prefunding maturities) or to pitch new ideas to clients (say, calling their subordinated debt in the UK and issuing senior debt in the US). So at the junior level, it's a lot of data dumping/pulling to create charts for presentations, but as you move up the ladder, the work becomes extremely client-focused -- you're advising clients and strategizing. Our group is much closer to an IBD group than an S&T group, both in terms of hrs per week (7am - 9pm on average, though no weekends) and the type of work we do.