What are your IB cheat codes?
To survive as a junior banker, you learn that being efficient is more important than almost anything else. To this point, as someone who is closing out my 2nd full year, I've come across a few "cheat codes" which help to quickly knock out specific tasks. While I know a lot of associates' cheat code is "jam the analyst", I try to stay away from that.
One of the best ones I've come across for new page generation (as a senior associate at a boutique, I tend to get emails that say "have a few pages on x, y, and z - and let's show some interested commentary on A/B/C companies"). My solution? Equity Research. Use keyword search in your research portal until you find a few recent reports with good commentary (charts, diagrams, whatever), then ship to drafting team to quickly replicate and finally team with analyst to round out any actual analysis/market updating. There is a 99% chance no one involved has ever seen the research before and if they have, who gives a fuck.
The other good one is for any kind of financial benchmarking, my first call is to CapIQ (heard Factset is even better for this). I ask them if this is possible and to send me an excel template (as opposed to creating spread from scratch or sending out an all-banker email asking if anyone has done something similar).
Anyone else have any cheat codes, or things that work well for them?
Would love to hear any other similar
Offshore everything to India team
The definition of efficiency here
Facts. I feel bad for the India team tbh because they literally get all the bitch work tasks that nobody wants to do. Especially the ridiculous research requests
What if there is no India offshore team? (cough cough MS cough cough fucking cheap)
Lmao this is only valid for boutiques
Never make a slide from scratch. In two years of banking, I think I only made a handful of actually new pages (like starting from a blank slide). Have a repository somewhere with a bunch of pitches / CIMs / MPs etc and anytime someone says “let’s add a page on __”, go find the closest thing and go from there. Making new slides from scratch is a huge waste of time.
If you don’t have anything in your repository, go look at recent pitches or CIMs from the MD/VP. Bankers are incredibly uncreative, so chances are your MD just wants the same page they used recently on another deal.
Agreed with all the above - mine: Be nice to everyone, even if you don’t like them. Particularly, there will always be people in the group that others don’t like - not saying you need to dive on the grenade and be that person’s bestie, but never be the one being mean to them. Risk/reward is terrible, and you never know where people will end up.
If it's a pitch for a prospective client to buy a public company (i.e. bullshit), you can quickly pull pages out of your ass by taking a look at the company's investor presentation and having your presentations team recreate shit. You can straight up steal pages entirely from the company's investor presentation, or failing that you can steal charts etc. for quads. And this doesn't work for every business, but tossing in a map is an easy quad filler. Similar advice to OPs really.
Basically, the more shit you can outsource to presentations or the India team, the easier your life becomes.
What do you mean by getting benchmarking from CapIQ/FactSet? What kind of request would this be, and what kind of output would you get from CapIQ? Do you usually have to make a lot of corrections afterward?
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