What Exactly is a Career Like in Bond Syndication

What is a career like in bond syndication, not loan syndication as I see a lot of threads about the loan syndication but not too much on bond syndication. What are roles of analysts and how do they change as you work your way up? How is pay like? WLB? Exit ops? Thanks

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This is a capital markets role, not IB. HY debt syndication, either HY bonds or leveraged loans, is a largely administrative job at the junior level. If you are looking for any kind of exit within buyside high finance you should absolutely avoid. You set up meetings with investors (for bonds you would put together the roadshow schedule), pull trading levels, pull together current holders lists so the salesforce can get top accounts to call, post marketing materials to the SyndTrak. Your hours will be better than levfin origination, but you will be in the office much earlier (7am or earlier). Seniors in levfin capital markets do very well and hold all of the power in levfin deals.

It's a really cool job as an MD - you become an expert on legal terms in the docs, know everything going on in the market you cover, know every single deal and where they priced, what terms the sponsor got, how comps are trading in the secondary market, what investors are thinking etc. Downsides are there are very few seats for these roles and the road to the top is long and grueling as junior work on cap markets side is helpless, soulless, mind numbing, and almost entirely administrative in nature until you hit SVP / director level and are given actual responsibility to quote pricing to clients. 

If this is IG (investment grade) syndications, take everything I said and make it even more menial. those deals price intra-day, and there isn't much into placing investment grade credit. 

 

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