How are Jefferies killing it all of a sudden?
In the last 5 years jefferies has really upped their game, and I’d argue that they’ve had one of the biggest M&A glow ups the street has seen for a while.
How have they done this? - I’ve seen expansion of teams, and new teams like international energy springing up out of nowhere.
How are they managing to maintain the deal flow, and grow transaction levels at rates other banks would dream of? - of course an elephant can only run for so long.
Hiring a bunch of new MDs + taking advantage of their comparative advantage in LevFin (they can give higher max LevFin reads to banks because of a lack of regulation compared to other banks). They run very lean deal teams and can afford to pay MDs larger guaranteed bonuses, having the general corproate policy of paying everyone below MD like shit and paying MD's well. Rich Handler might be a dick, but he and his leadership team do know how to very efficiently increase market share.
How can they be less regulated than any other bank?
there are constraints on the banks in the traditional sense(depositors) that are regulated by fed, fdic, occ. depositors in the event of bank failure will be insured by the fed, and so the gov has stricter regulations for banks with depositors, and the boutiques you are seeing are not as regulated. jeff has partnerships with massmutual, smbc, to provide institutional capital and can more aggressively arrange it because it's not a BB or balance sheet bank
Good morning Rich
Relax lol they aren't killing it. Yes, they are doing better but not killing it by any means. Still an absolute sweatshop in most groups
Killing it relative to where they were 5+ years ago. It's not that they're Evercore, it's that in the league tables they're above names people wouldn't have expected. Obviously being a sweatshop means it sucks to work there but it doens't mean they're not doing really well in terms of market share.
Previous commenter didn’t make the case it was any less sweaty. If anything more by the “leaner deal teams” comment
Was told that a few of the juniors at my prestigious finance club, think Kelley IBW/UIUC IBA/Wharton WTIG, chose Jefferies over lower tier EBs like MOE/PWP/LAZ. I guess this means Jefferies is the up and coming EB?
No
It's by definition not an EB because it's not purely advisory. When I talked to an MD there last year he said Jefferies is going for something similar to pre-2008 banks like Merill and Bear. Smaller than bulges but using its balance sheet aggressively.
What a useless comment 😭 never once did the post claim jefferies was an EB as it’s clearly not the way it’s structured—the post is about how quickly it has improved relative to other banks.
Wtf bro, I was just saying what the juniors at my school told me. They brought up the league table and specifically explained how their deal flow is growing really fast and the experience that analysts get will be insane compared to at more stagnant firms like Moelis.
Congrats on Jefferies and IU!
If your friends are getting you to take Jefferies over either of those I promise you they aren’t your friends.
Laz lower tier is diabolical
"think Kelley IBW/UIUC IBA/Wharton WITG" don't even group WITG with those others lmao.
Congrats on IU Kelley btw. Might be the dumbest comment I've ever read
Youon even know what ur talking about. UIUC IBA wipes Witg
Unique platform + aggressive growth over the past decade. Jefferies isn't a regulated bank, which means that their platform can be very aggressive on high-yield lending in attracting business, and to this day, the core of their franchise is still built on LevFin and sponsors relationships. They've also built a very attractive platform for seniors - they offer the upside of EBs (relative autonomy, higher upside from an eat-what-you-kill compensation model, all cash bonuses) with the benefits of a larger platform (ECM, LevFin / DCM, ER services across geographies and industries), and as a result have been able to hire a lot of very good seniors from across the street.
For all of the firm's faults (junior culture, junior comp, wlb), you really can't deny that Jefferies management has done a remarkable job in elevating the firm's status on Wall Street. A decade ago, Jefferies was a much smaller platform that was only really relevant for healthcare, energy, and underwriting the hairiest LBOs. Nowadays, they're a bona fide global IB franchise that can go head-to-head against other BBs across most industries.
Goat comment, and so poetically told.
I think you’d make a great finance doc, if you ever do, let me know.
Not sure what happened to my previous comment, but in short...this is accurate. Also no DEI stuff here relative to the BBs I read about on WSO (tho godspeed if you are a woman working here...) If they don't think you can cut it you will get shown the door real quick LOL
Agree they’re very good in Healthcare and can match the GS/MS’s of the world. In other industries I’m not entirely sure that’s fair to say. It’s clear they’re in a much better position than they were only a few years ago though. From a sponsor perspective, I don’t think they compete on the largest stuff out there but are definitely competitive on the large yet volume deals on which frankly most global M&A departments are built ($1-5bn EV deals).
That said, as others have said, it’s clear their real competitive advantage is the willingness to do a high volume of sponsor work combined by extraordinarily aggressive financing solutions. I’d say their financing is their true moat rather than their advisory skills. Which is from a ‘regular employee’ perspective not ideal if you’re looking to leave eventually. But if you own JEF stock that’s totally fine (as long as they can keep the financings coming).
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Their University of Kansas pipeline ;)
/s
Bump
They’re certainly killing, alright
By working their junior team to the bone. lol
Terrible place to be a junior/mid-level, but good place to be a MD they’ve done a good job elevating their status. We’ll see if the upswing continues or if they’ll eventually get burned for treating people poorly. This comp model inherently attracts sociopaths.
Rich Handler's raw cocaine energy
This is the reason.
He shags his client’s wives.
That’s how you close a deal.
https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/11/03/sex-and-dru…
Most of the time he was pimping out his wife to clients. Not exactly baller being a cuckold buddy.
Del
Throwing money to get the best bankers. Pay bit guaranteed bonuses.
That then crashes the wider bonus pool and each one added means millions less in the bonus pool for AN-VPs. Buying business. Very simple.
I’d assume they have a separate bonus pool for the MD laterals
Del
They are probably the only bank I have seen that has successfully pursued an aggressive organic IB growth strategy. I want to say it was Jamie Dimon who made a comment on this to the effect of "you basically can't organically create an IB franchise, you need to go buy one", which is generally true if you look at the 90s and 2000s. BofA tried and had basically given up by 2007 - Ken Lewis publicly admitted defeat. Then the crisis hit and they bought ML.
I think part of what has made Jefferies massive hiring splurge successful is that the bank also has a full suite of non-M&A IB products. Good LevFin team, solid equities team, top of street secondaries team, ABS, assorted random other products, equity research. They do basically everything a pre-financial crisis IB would do except for DCM. So when they bring people over they can still generally leverage their relationships for a wide range of things like they could at a bulge.
Part of it also is just hiring effectively and bringing on people who had portable relationships and whose "relationships" weren't actually their prior bank's relationships.
Literally every EB has been organically growing market share tf are you talking about
I once talked to a former banker at Jefferies and was told quote "if I had to choose between joining the Taliban or rejoining Jefferies, I'll pick the Taliban".
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