Good at Banking Bad at Finance

Been on the desk for a year in a top coverage group. Our deal flow has been slow, so been doing an inordinate amount of pitch work compared to previous classes. During my review, I was told I'm near top of class, but they said I could improve on technical work. To me, banking has 3 tiers of work:

100 level: moving logos around on the page and text comments

200 level: simple analysis (comps / multiples) and sourcing 

300: models / actual analysis 

The 100 level and 200 level stuff are pretty locked in, and my associates can always count on me to deliver on these two items. As this is a majority of the work, this makes me a strong asset. But when it comes to the 300 level work, I often feel like I've forgotten I'm not in graphic design class and I'm supposed to be valuing companies and providing advice to companies looking to do finance-related transactions. I'm sure this is part of having no deal flow, but it feels like I'm missing a good chunk of how to be a better analyst. Anyone else feel this way / have ideas on improving this other than picking up the finance textbooks we read in college and just refresh?

3 Comments
 
Most Helpful

You're not going to be totally comfortable leading the production of a model from scratch until you're ~3 years in. As you point out, it's one of the few things that can get pretty wonky / actually difficult. 

It's just a function of collecting years of experience trying to do things in spreadsheets and having to figure out a new formula or method to do so. You collect all these tricks in your arsenal over time and get to a point where nothing is new to you and no matter how poorly formatted the data you're working with is and how wonky of an analysis your superior asks for, it'll be a simple execution job. When you're young and doing everything for the first time it's normal to have to re-do things a few times until you get it right and actually having to think before cranking something in excel. 

 

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