Investment Banking Holidays?
How do holidays work at most investment banks?
I'd assume analysts are working almost every holiday not named Christmas, Thanksgiving, or the 4th of July.
At what level if any would you be able to take off for President's Day?
Speaking form EB M&A experience, it's very group and deal dependent. At some point or another as an analyst I worked all of the holidays you just mentioned, but I also had other holidays off when things weren't too busy (e.g. Memorial Day).
What’s a holiday ?
(+SB) I had a Holiday once, I was told that instead of spreading month to month financials for our client, I only had to do YTD. This saved me 30min, which I then used to work on a pitch book.
Jesus Christ... working on Christmas? What the fuck could be that important that you NEED to work that day? Client can’t wait 1 extra day? That’s just outright sad. No other way to put it. There are some sad people in IB (seniors that force a junior to work when it can wait)
I do loads of valuation work over christmas. Family keeps removing the f**king price tags on my presents so I don't know what to sell them for.
I'm sorry, but you guys give the impression like it's completely normal to work during Christmas or it's completely normal to not to be able take some time off.
This exact thinking makes IB industry so broken and horrible. MDs are just bad managers, do not value juniors, do not value people's personal time and create tons of unnecessary pressure. What could possibly happen if the model is sent out 2 days later? Would the deal fall apart? Would the client finish relationship? He probably wouldn't even fucking care, because it's Christmas and no one who is reasonable person works at this special time.
Get a grip. Life is not only about (and in case of IB usually meaningless) work. If I was told I cannot spend Christmas with my parents, because a piece of shit MD wants me to run another useless model update - I'd quit on the spot. This kind of bullshit is absolutely not worth it.
Most people in the industry are extremely insecure and just take it in the ass, props to you if you would be able to tell your MD to politely fuck off.
Yeah agreed. There’s no way in hell I wouldn’t tell my senior to get fucked if they tried making me work on Christmas. Frankly even anything more than a half day on Christmas Eve id probably go off.
It's called sucking it up for 2 years, paying your dues and then moving to the buy-side. Time is more flexible once you make the leap at least typically.
No, this is an absolute bullshit, stop pushing this. This is what makes this industry so shitty work/life balance wise.
I understand this is not 9-5, you need to work a lot, you have client-focused role, etc, but I'm pretty sure LOTS of work is absolutely unecessary, avoidable, or can be done on a different day than a Christmas Eve. The whole industry is just the pure bad people management, that's it.
There are much more demanding sectors, with more demanding work than putting together excel spereadsheets - and they don't have those utterly stupid schedules.
beta af
They value juniors and their free time enough to pay them quite well on top of the value of the experience. Just my two cents, it's worth it for me.
Everyone has a different slope on that trade-off. I think I am being fairly compensated for my time.