Factset League Tables YTD-September

Global M&A league tables with only # of deals with disclosed transaction amounts.

yeah dude you gotta HC that into the excel backup so it ties. or just add "illustrative" to the title. duh.

Yeah suprised by Lazard too. But Qualayst is doing some good shit. 

Moelis does a lot more sponsor advisory than strategic advisory compared to other EBs, and sponsor transactions tend to have undisclosed values a lot more, hence why Moelis's total disclosed value is a lot lower. Looking at the data, only 55% of Moelis's transactions have disclosed values, compared to 62% for Lazard, 69% for Evercore, 72% for PJT, and 83% for CVP and PWP.

Both. What really matters is your deal reps and exposure as an analyst (essentially deal count/IB analyst class size could serve as a decent proxy). I can tell you that deal size really doesn't matter that much and doesn't mean a better analyst experience. I'm at an EB that does everything from the $100M sell side to the mega-cap deal, and I've generally found that deals around the $700-$1.5B range have been the most enjoyable deals to work on.

For real, LionTree is killing it too.

Moelis usually isn't that high in league tables. Their bread and butter has always been MM to mid-cap sponsor sell-sides, and have always been a volume shop like Jefferies or Lazard doing way more deals than the PJT/CVP-type firms. 

Yeah WF is a lower than I thought they'd be. I always thought of them as below RBC by a bit, but not by that much.

I think Rich handler just became a Billionaire.

driven by their balance sheet. they’ll provide financing for a deal, do no actual M&A advisory, but ask for M&A credit (and usually give better financing terms for it). so transaction value isn’t as good a proxy as revenues if you are looking for a metric that implies deal flow or potential bonus comp.

I think it is slowly happening. The BAML name is a lot more sticky as BofA's kept it around a lot longer than WF kept Wachovia (I believe WF kept the Wachovia name for only 3 years), but I think there's been a very gradual transition (anecdotally at my BB fewer and fewer of the senior people are calling BofA by Merrill). Give it maybe 5 or more years and I think the BAML name may be gone.

This would be awesome!

Interesting, thanks for posting! Surprising to see how little has changed, with Barc today roughly where Lehman was, and BofA roughly where Merrill was. Did not know that Wachovia was as strong as it was (for some reason I always had the impression Wachovia was where WF roughly is today back then). Interesting that Greenhill completely fell off, and Jeff and Guggenheim really were nowhere pre-GFC.

This was an interesting post. Know a few people who were at Bear Stearns/CIBC back then (had no clue CIBC did fairly well back then honestly, Bear Stearns was a scrappy banker. A former IB analyst (left finance after working at Bear Stearns) said it was a very scrappy bank vs bigger banks. Often let hard workers get to better departments internally vs. hiring external candidates. Heard that although Blackstone M&A often wasn't in the top echelon of banks in M&A fees, it was one of the hardest interviews/positions to land. Their exits were absurd vs. most of the street.

Do they have a bad reputation?  BofA is almost universally considered #4 BB on this site.

I've never heard too much negative feedback on BAML.  Citi gets a bad rep because they 'self own' somewhat consistently.  Lots of stories about pitches destined to fail, dropped balls, missing out on deals for silly reasons (an MD repeatedly mispronouncing the client's name from one story I've heard).  They also have below-average internal management - it can take months to get approval from finance / HR to replace an analyst who leaves for PE - even when most of a team leaves at the same time (which they've had to deal with).

Also, at least amongst (some of) the junior class, they jokingly call themselves 'Shitty Bank', which comes from the above + the fact that they routinely try to compete with GS/MS/JPM and lose out on mandates.

Bankers aren't usually the happiest bunch, but the Citi guys I've met seem to be some of the least happy - all of the pain of banking, with worse institutional support, and a handicap on exits and comp vs. the banks they consider their peers.

The problem is it only goes 10 deep

Lol. Goldman is never not going to be #1.

Goldman had an avg. value of ~$3bln/deal YTD, compared to JPM's ~2.6bln/deal and MS' ~$3.3bln/deal. I think it's honestly fine to divide out the deal value by # of deals; all the top 3 banks hunt for 'whales,' and will be on 90-100% of mega caps. But also, they're all on the ~$100-1b deals -- at least for JPM & GS since those two have the Regional IB & Cross Markets groups to break into the mid-market. To the extent that deal size is influencing anything, it's the placement of the EBs imo. The gap between JP and Citi, for example, is really a lot of deal flow since Citi's average value per deal is about the same ($413,320 / 142 ~= 2.9b) as JPM's.

Sustained, they consistently do more and more deals despite such a small head count. With expected growth it’ll be interesting to see what they evolve into.