Prologue: Most college grads today are obsessed with M&A but as we all know, a junior banker in M&A does a lot of basic grunt work (at least that's what monkeys in this forum suggest). If that's true, why do people praise M&A a lot? I'm guessing the pay and exit opportunities are 2 main reasons.
Seeing some posts about people not being satisfied by the intellectual rigor of their work, I wanted to ask WSO what the most intellectually interesting IB division is (not counting S&T, Strats/Quants). We don't hear a lot of monkeys talking about structured credit origination and other divisions that made Investment Banks notorious for brewing the 2008 crisis and making bankers seem as the "masters of the universe"... instead we hear all about M&A, M&A, and M&A. Why's that so?
BUMP
I lol'd at the title. thefinancekid you're clearly very confused.
Why is he confused? I think this is a valid question to ask when choosing a career
That's because M&A is one of the few groups where you're constantly thinking through the financial impacts in various scenarios, essentially running a model in your head on the fly. Whereas in industry coverage, you're just thinking of rationale for your pitches, and the financial impact is just one supporting factor.
Ok but what about the other IB divisions?
it's just also a function of what makes headlines. Large size M&A transactions deal with public entities with a wide spectrum of constituents. Naturally stuff like that gets a lot of air time. The average WSJ subscriber is probably not going to care about the hundreds of intellectually interesting and creative trading structures that occur (just guessing idk anything about those parts of the bank). Plus trading information like that probably isn't even supposed to be for the public eye.
There is nothing intellectual challenging or interesting about investment banking.
You're a glorified salesman and most of your time will be spent doing administrative BS.
IB is process oriented and for the risk-averse.
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