I have a question for everyone here who is an analyst / associate in M&A (or an industry coverage group that does lots of M&A). Forgetting completely about the exit options, pay and prestige, does anyone here in M&A actually enjoy their jobs on a day to day basis?Would you still do it if it paid less or if the exit options were not there? Say for example, if you were not able to move to PE/HF/VC/corp dev and had to stay in banking for the long haul.
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Of course
M&A is the most generalist (i.e. you see a little bit of everything - valuation, industry stuff, negotiations between shrewd dealmakers, financial and fiscal engineering, law and contracts, market stuff, balance sheet stuff) entry level finance job you can do
M&A are arguably the most complex corporate transactions so it's quite intellectually fascinating to follow from pitch to closing
You know private information that only a select few know so you feel like a badass
Huge adrenaline when big news break (e.g. you see the share price of a $10bn company increase by 10%) and as you work on longer term projects vs. markets, you have a bigger sense of achievement when the deal closes
You feel useful because your clueless MD couldn't show anything without you
Working in a team is great if you get along well w the people
you have a lot of BO support so you don't have to do the most basic tasks (in theory)
Good MDs are just cool to see at work
As an analyst you do meetings with people 20y+ older than you and very successful professionnally
i could go on and on but i have to spread some comps now
edit: IMO, people who don't enjoy M&A (I don't mean people who just hate the hours, etc but would enjoy it otherwise) are just people who are not interested in finance / corporate strategy and went there for the wrong reasons (and they are plenty) I'm at a HF now and for certain things, it's much less fun than IBD (still better overall though)
cant believe someone at a hf would call M&A intellectually challenging lol
no1 with half a brain could think M&A is intellectually challenging
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