Finanical Modeling/Analysis vs. Formatting/edits

How much of your time is spent per day doing financial modeling and analysis versus formatting word docs and moving around charts?

State whether you are at BB, Large boutique, small boutique, and your position.

16 Comments
 

0% formatting. 95% analysis. 5% modelling.

SVP in credit analysis, IB focused on the middle market.

All my juniors do analysis and modelling only. No formatting. But we don't do advisory or pitching.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, post threads about how to do it on WSO.
 
SSits

But we don't do advisory or pitching.

Key words...any M&A / A&D analysts will be doing at least 50% formatting/copy pasting excel to pp...and I'm being generous with that 50%

 

What does A&D stand for? Aerospace and Defense? And yeah I agree with you 100%

"I did it for me...I liked it...I was good at it. And I was really... I was alive."
 
Best Response

there aren't enough certified guys on this forum to give you a big enough sample. I think your experience depends on several things (and I'm not in banking, just sharing what I've learned here and from friends in the industry):

  1. your superiors: if your MD is a stickler for detail, clearly there's more time formatting. also, you will basically be doing the work the associates don't do, so it depends on what they want to do, and that varies from person to person
  2. your group: different groups probably have different work
  3. size of firm: as you allude to, smaller firms have smaller headcounts, but the same amount of hats need to be worn, thus you wear more hats

PS: wouldn't that be irrelevant if you think banking sucks? if it sucks don't do it, simple as that.

 
Roma

Trying to get a feel for how the work might vary from bank to bank and role to role.

First year analyst work is usually the same from bank to bank and group to group unless you got to a very very VERY small boutique group where you would be actually doing "real" work

 

I'm currently a summer intern at a boutique IB in NYC. I would say that as an analyst, about 80% of his work will be PPT based work (including using excel to make charts/graphs) and 20% excel modeling work. I know there is a lot of hype behind financial modeling, but it's only when I actually started working at a boutique IB when I realized how little financial modeling work consists of in an analysts' overall workload. Not saying modeling is not important, but if you enter boutique IB thinking you're just going to be building merger/lbo models all day, you'll be in for a surprise.

Now as an intern, I would say almost 100% of the work will start at powerpoint (basically formatting and researching whatever the analysts need), but as you gain more credibility, they may begin giving you more excel modeling work.

DISCLAIMER: This is based off my experience in boutique IB. Cannot guarantee it will be the same at a BB or other boutiques.

 

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