Is Nomura really that bad?
I see tons of people here calling it a glorified sushi restaurant. Is that just WSO being WSO or would it really be that bad to start a career there?
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Not a bad place to start your career. Outside of WSO, Nomura is not the "meme" its made it out to be, but its deal flow and rep is not as good as BB/EB. Focus on placing into Sponsors or M&A. If you work hard you can place into a good PE shop, but you need to be a top bucket analyst with solid deal reps. You will have to overcome several hurdles that BB/EB people don't necessarily have. At worst, grind it out at Nomura for a year and then lateral to a better bank.
None of the well known MM banks are bad. WSO is filled with prestige whores who only want the best of the best which are BB/EB. They’ll shit on any bank that’s not top 10 league tables. The Japanese banks (Nomura, Mizuho, MUFG, SMBC) are all well known in finance industry. It may be hard to break into UMM/MF PE but those are still reputable firms. Like the other comment said, it’s pretty easy to lateral to a BB if you care about prestige or want to break into MF PE. Outside of MF PE, it’s not going to matter if you want to move to corp dev or something more chill.
Unless you're talking about debt deals Mizuho, MUFG, SMBC are pretty garbage.
Not many outside of the world of IB or PE will know that. I would take IB at those firms over things you see typical non target school kids go to like accounting, FLDP, financial analyst, back office roles, or even regional boutique IB. Also just saying I'm not biased. I'm not going to IB at any of the Japanese banks.
We BB bankers pick up sushi there alright, ain't nobody said glorified
Do they actually have sushi?
It is not that bad. You still get solid experience, especially in some of their stronger teams.
This is group-dependent but the reason there are so many Nomura memes is because culture isn't the best. It's still IB and after a year if you are a decent interviewer I don't see why you wouldn't be able to lateral elsewhere.
It's honestly not that bad, just avoid the salmon tataki and don't go in with Zuma expectations
Had beef tataki there once and went directly to bathroom. They apologized and said their main chef had to do a right lead on a $10M revolver deal so some banker helped in the kitchen.
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