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Bill Anderson
EVR is prob #1? Maybe along with GS. Bill Anderson from EVR is the top name in this field
Thanks! Any good resources you might recommend to read to stay up to date on the industry?
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Think as analyst you’ll be pulling shark repellent all day. It’s not analyst / associate level role - as cool as it might sound
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someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong - but I've spent a bit of time in the activism defence space when I was recruiting (I talked to a few juniors in the space and an activist as well). From my understanding, it's very hard to rank the teams with the public information that is available to you. There is a Bloomberg league table specifically for the activism vertical which ranks teams by # of mandates/most influential mandates.
A lot of companies that keep an activism defense team on retainer tend not to publicly disclose it so you don't really know which teams work with which companies and ultimately how they stack up against the other.
Worth noting that a lot of activism defence goes unpaid and often tied into broader defence mandates. There's potential to get paid an ongoing activism fee once a situation goes live (e.g., an activist campaign goes public, a general meeting is requisitioned, etc.). However, the usual focus is on locking up any resulting M&A, such as a corporate sale, break-up, among others. I find most of this work is handled by the coverage / industry teams, and the actual activism team ends up being rather small. These are my observations, so I'm equally curious to hear others' perspectives to see if they are consistent.
this is super helpful thanks. Sry if this is a a stupid question but what's the incentive then for activist teams to do so much work on anticipating an preventing campaigns? Wouldn't they want more proxy wars to generate more fees?
Del
Same logic as restructuring teams, i.e., wouldn't it be better if companies didn't find themselves insolvent or in that mess? Management / Boards have a tendency to find them in theseselves situations without having their own advisers trying to underhanded them.
To address your question, I would say (i) defence advisers are generally engaged by the Chair / CEO (usually with support from the Board / CFO) and they wouldn't choose an adviser who wasn't providing good advice on activism, (ii) activism fees pale in comparison to M&A fees and so the priority is the latter, and (iii) if your client loses the activism battle, chances are that you're fired as the adviser when the new management / Board comes in (no bueno for you the banker).
Activism SUCKS and is the single worst black hole you could be in as a "banker", actually worse than being an ECM slide monkey because they aren't in pressure cooker situations with Trian trying to (justifiably) fire an incompetent management team you are trying to kick save. Sounds cool, isn't.
Source: Worked at a generalist EB that did these mandates too and it was the worst possible staffing bar none.
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Keep throwing your MS activism nerds, hopefully Trian drops a letter to your client with negative 5 year TSR this weekend
Di most people try to exit? If so where can an EB activist defense banker usually exit to?
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