How to start studying finance with 0 knowledge to start?
I have been a lurker for couple months, as I was unsure where my career path was heading. With Covid shutting down my alternate career path, I decided that I should at least study finance seriously to see if I want to do IB or not.
I am currently a sophmore at a west coast school, and I will be taking an upper div intro finance course over this summer. But the course doesn’t start for another 3 weeks, and with my internship cancelled, I wanted to get ahead on learning more about IBing and finance in general.
As I basically have 0 knowledge in finance at the moment (not including the little knowledge I have about basic finance definitions), I am lost on how to get started. My end goal is to be sufficiently knowledgeable to break into high finance/IB at the end of the day.
I have searched around on WSO for a couple hours, but the only forums I could find was on online courses (BIWS, WSP, WSO). Is it okay to jump straight into these technical interview prep courses without any prior knowledge in finance? I would also greatly appreciate any responses with your experience with the courses I have listed.
Have a nice day, and stay safe guys.
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Ah sorry for the misclarification. I meant that I am a rising sophmore. Hopefully that means I still have more time? Still looking to start ASAP for rising junior internship though.
Watch YouTube videos on what life is like in an investment bank. No point studying finance if the 100+ hour weeks are something you're not prepared to do.
Watch YouTube videos on what investment banking entails. Find out what M&A, DCM, ECM are. Find out what you do in each area. No point studying finance if spending your day aligning logos on PowerPoint is something you're not prepared to do.
Read books on the culture within investment banks. I suggest Discussion Materials by Bill Keenan. No point studying finance if getting yelled at by an MD because you can't decipher their chicken scratch notes is something you're not prepared to do.
Acquire 'Investment Banking: Valuation, Leveraged Buyouts, and Mergers and Acquisitions' by Joshua Pearl and Joshua Rosenbaum. If you can understand the content, retain it to memory and are able to explain it, you're in a very solid spot for interviews.
Like I said, please spend all your time initially finding out about the job itself, rather than the theory behind it. It could save you a lifetime of regret for a decision you may make, or it will put your mind at ease that it's absolutely something you want to do and the drive you'll get from that will be invaluable in any preparation you do for interviews.
Thank you for your response. I actually have been reading about investment banking life for a while, and talked a little to someone who interned at a BB about their experience. Reading about the lifestyle definitely deterred me, but it also sounds a bit exciting. So I have been oscilating between IB and other career paths, but with Covid and economic instability, I wanted to study the actual substance of IB in further detail. If you have done/been doing IBing, would be great to hear your experience and how you got into it.
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I can get your knowledge up in the leveraged finance space / life cycle of a deal / and those responsibilities at each step - w examples. hit me up if u want.
Okay so I think you should first understand investing. Investing has 3 main methods which are accounting, valuation and financial statement analysis and are directly applicable to IB. Begin with accounting, then move on to financial statement analysis and finally valuation. It becomes a snow ball effect that will make the guides much easier to understand instead of trying to go in naked without some background knowledge.
I hate to sound like a hardo but you want to eat, shit and breath finance as much as you can. Ingest CNBC, Bloomberg, everything on this site and read as much as you can about IB from the casual reads such as monkey business to Pearl's IB : Valuation, lBO and M&A book. Eventually you will have made enough progress to pull the strings together and truly understand the answers to the guides instead of remembering the answers.
You have time. There's no need to rush. In fact, I would focus** on the fundamentals, because those are most necessary to understanding more intermediate/advanced finance. Start with financial accounting- Edspira is an amazing Youtube channel for accounting. There's also a book by rosenbaum and pearl that's really educational. Best of luck!
What was your alternate career path that got shut down because of COVID and why are you not pursuing that anymore? No career path has gotten eliminated entirely because of this pandemic forever.
Based on your post, it seems like you don't know what finance but have heard about IB a tiny bit and think that IB = finance. Please know that finance is a very broad field and IB is definitely not equal to finance. Others on this forum can inform you about the other fields that there are: S&T, Corp Finance, Corp Dev, etc.
I'm curious: what drove you into wanting to do IB all of a sudden? I know you said you find the 100+ hours exciting and everything but like others said, you really want to make sure you are not just going into this field because of the money or just because your peers are going into it.
You actually have to be interested in the field to succeed so please make sure you are actually interested. I'm not deterring you from it, I just want you to know what you are getting yourself into.
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