Low M&A flow

Hello,

I am prepping for an IB analyst interview at a lower MM firm (FT), and as I was going through their website I realized that their M&A activity is extremely low. They are a reputable bank, nothing special, but I expected a lot more. They do have a lot of transactions (30-40 per year in my sector), especially in the IPO and secondary offering fields, but M&A itself is in the 2-3/year range. So far I have been concentrated on M&A and thought this was the cream of the crop, so it's a bit disheartening. Does this look bad as far as having deal experience and using it to exit in the future, or do other "deals" in IPOs/secondary offerings give you good deal exposure as well?

Thanks for the help.

4 Comments
 

I don't think they rank that high. I just looked at their 2019 deals in the field and out of 20+ transactions 15 are secondary offerings. They probably work on some deals that get killed and don't advertise but I'm worried about not getting enough M&A exposure. Is working on ECM much different from M&A?

 

At my bank, it is night and day in terms of hours, but the exit opps reflect that. In my experience, M&A analysts have a better shot at the top PE shops, broadly speaking.

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