Do not fall for boiler rooms

Boiler rooms have been going around a lot lately and for good reason. They’re a ton of “regional boutiques” that are being sold to potential employees as “investment banks”. You see these potential roles and think “okay, if I start here I can learn a bit, shouldn’t be too competitive to get and I can eventually sell this experience to a bigger bank”. Wrong. You’ll be stuck there, working with an Md who’s actually a business broker, and the analysis you’ll do is normalizing “entertainment expenses” all day when adjusting EBITDA. It’s shit experience and you’ll never land a bigger bank. You’ll learn the wrong things, and it’ll be the same thing as a non target applying to a BB.

If you’re wondering why I’m shitting on them it’s because they’re scams. They’re not investment banks and they mislead their employees that what they’re doing constitutes investment banking. It doesn’t, and the longer you stay there the further you get to your goal.

So if you’re a student looking for IB experience, and you want to say you worked in IB as a freshman, sure go for it. Leverage the ability to write “investment banking summer analyst” on your resume. But if you’re out of school/recruiting for full time, do not apply to these places. They typically have shit cultures, with zero connection to the industry, and won’t help you transition.

Ways to tell if the shop is a boiler room/business broker.

1. You go on their website and there are options to “sell your business”. No professional investment bank says that.

2. You go to their team and they’re full of non targets/people with no IB experience besides the shop they’re working for. The CEO also came from a sales background in an unrelated industry.

3. You go on LinkedIn and no one who has left the shop ever lateraled to a bigger shop - and if they did, it wasn’t because they endorsed the brand of the shop.

4. They do not have anything like Bloomberg terminal or cap iq.

Please stay away from these places. I’ve seen so many guys think they’re going to leave eventually and then get stuck in these boiler rooms for years.