Tier 1 PCA/Secondary Advisory

Question

There recently was an interesting post on the PCA market and I went into detail about the various shops out there. I got some heat for my view that Goldman is establishing a great shop since they're presently untested and my view that Lazard is more of a Tier 2 since they're going to need to do a total rebuild. It would be great to discuss the following groups in more detail. Culture, hours, pay, deal dynamics, assets, anything:

1. Evercore: Highest volume and highest paying. Turnover is high, super high stress environment.

2.

radioactiveseed · Accepted Answer

So secondariesinvestor released some datapoints

all things considered here is my takeaway on rankings:

EVR, JEF, PJT, LAZ

CL (legacy brand soon to be gone), Moelis, maybe Baird?

Eaton (stifel), Houlihan (making good noise), Blair (dont know how much longer custar can use his wife for deal flow), RJ

Placement agents soon to be replaced with independent advisory boutiques

all the new mm guys, bofa lol they have a popular md but no proof of concept

JunkyardDawg · Answer

Unlike IBD, a lot of Principal/VP level folks at PCA groups are expected to get their hands dirty.

Dirty Mike · Answer

Pay is roughly the same for the PCA groups inside BBs / EBs. Teams are smaller though, and you will be more subject to the revenue generation abilities of your MDs / seniors. So the upside is there, but generally, the senior talent in APAC is pretty lacking, so revenue / bonuses are likely to suffer. That being said, all coverage groups are suffering with the China apocalypse right now.

Lazard - was the market leader. Cornered the market on China growth / VC GP-leds for the last 5 years. Largely disappeared now since the China market imploded.

JunkyardDawg · Answer

By Principal/VP I mean mid level - two levels above Analyst. Different firms have different titles. At CS, it's Vice President; at UBS, it's Director; and so on. Similarly, at CS, they call Director (4 levels above Analyst) and the UBS equivalent is Executive Director. At EVR, this person is called a Managing Director.

On comp, not sure about this year given all the base salary raises across banking, but before PCA across firms is likely anywhere from 15-30% discount to IBD.

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Tier 1 PCA/Secondary Advisory

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