Prospect - IB is Paradise

You wake up at 10am for your ECON201 at 12pm. Usual lecture today, no problem. You surf WSJ, CNBC, and, most importantly, a small, niche community full of finance overachievers named Wall Street Oasis. The first thread: by an Analyst 2-S&T asking how he could use his work experience to leverage into IB. Pathetic, you think, as he could not make it into IB directly out of school.

You get ready for class. On the walk, you listen to a podcast by an MD at Lone Pine about how hedge fund managers utilize risk arbitrage to boost alpha. Additionally, you type up a thread on WSO asking your fellow elite, holier-than-thou financiers a simple question: “Is a Rolex Submariner a good choice for an everyday office watch?”. It was gifted to you by your father, who happens to be a Director for Sales, EMEA at Morgan Stanley.

You arrive at class. Boring. Usual responses on your thread. Nothing really stimulating. You decide on a new question: “Average salary of Partner in PE, comparison to CEO of F100?”. It’s truly a simple ask. But you ask it because you know that you will be reaching that echelon one day. You are already destroying the competition in your ECON201 course. You take a sip of your $7 latte from Starbucks.

Class ends. Onto the next, an Astronomy 101 course needed for GenEd. A waste of resources, you think. None of this crap generates revenues for any firms, and is in fact a massive cost despite bringing nothing back to shareholders. You check WSO. A response regarding average salaries. Prospect - ER says: “my buddy at Goldman heard that the average CEO salary reaches $10mm annually”. A response to that post, Prospect - RE: “dude that’s bs, I know for a fact that they easily tap $30m per year”. Not bad, you think. But nothing on PE partners.

You head to your third and final course of the day: Accounting 201. Finally! A useful course. In fact, you sit front and center in class. Today, a simple concept: the flow between the financial statements. You quickly check in on your HireVue for a SA at JP Morgan, 2024 in their NYC office. Your father knows a few MDs there. You know they easily pull in 7-figures. But, no update on the status. No problem. You could probably get something with Morgan Stanley if needed. Anyway, class ends. You head back to your apartment.

Back home you log into your computer and continue working on your 3-statement DCF model that you downloaded the template for. You know that this is the exact template that the JP Morgan analysts use. You check WSO. A thread pops up on hours for analysts. A response from Prospect - PE: “my bud at Thoma Bravo says he’s cranking 85-90 hour weeks on the regular”. That’s not too bad. You then see an article on WSJ about Google laying off 15,000 SWEs. Good, you think. They cost way too much for the firm and don’t even bring in nearly the value that IB analysts create. Besides, SWEs are a dying breed, this is surely the moment that the tech domination ends. One final check on your HireVue status for the day. Still nothing new. Prospect - IB is paradise.