WTF IS THIS COMPETITON
I was scrolling LinkedIn and I came across what might be the most ridiculous student Rx pitch presentation. These folks pitched a long bond/short equity of a natural gas provider in Brazil and included some wild analysis including a hedge ratio, Chapter 11/repayment recovery, and a case study favoring a UK scheme of arrangement. I'm an incoming 2027SA at a top MM IB and I would like to think I have decent technical knowledge; but I genuinely had no idea what the hell most of the presentation was talking about.
Is this really representative of your average BB/EB SA? Am I actually just irrecoverably behind?
Absolutely not. From my experience vast majority of BB and even some EB SA are nepo kids or DEI, that presentation is the best of the best and you will learn on the desk
Whatever
Sounds like you haven’t been involved in recruiting lol at my BB it is a shitshow and the majority of people hired even among non DEI are MDs friends kids, clients, and the like lol
You must not work in banking if you think the job needs “fire and grit” lmao
So which one are you then?
EB Rx ain’t nepo nor dei lol , holy
cope
Vast majority of BB or EB analysts are not rx, which aligns with everything I said. Weird response
brother relax this is the internet
It’s a wale up call. It shows you the freq. the best are operating at
this should be the standard since ChatGPT became available
SC on top FTFO
What you’ll find is students have all the smart sounding ideas rehearsed thanks to AI but don’t actually understand any of them. Stick around for the QnA and you’ll see what I mean.
This isn't all that if you've been to other comps
Do u have any examples? If I am behind the best, I might as well learn from the best.
The other GIS Investment Research reports. All available on their website.
.
Lol it was Claude brother stfu
Plain text is obviously gonna be AI these days who wouldn’t take advantage of that. But the ideas and knowledge needed to make the pitch itself are still there
Claude writes some good stuff these days
This presentation looks impressive, and maybe I’m just not well-versed enough in Special Sits, but what is the actual recommendation here?
P12 says “specific restructuring outcome not required to realize return”. A lot of pages of nice analysis (better than I certainly made in undergrad) but kinda gets lost in the sauce imo.
i do see a lot of chat stuff, but ngl i dont know how to create half the visuals in this prez. is this what is expected for incoming summers?
Don't worry, I've been at an EB in NYC for over a decade, worked on one of the largest bankruptcy cases of all time (industry coverage angle though) and can say for a fact a lot of this presentation is beyond anything you ever need to know in banking or PE (unless you want a spec sits HF seat or something).
The technical skills and presentation skills here are far beyond basically all of the summer analysts and first year analysts I've ever worked with (at least starting out). Definitely not the expectation.
That said if anyone on pg 2 is reading this and needs a job, let me know lol
Dude yea I’ll take one fs
Not on pg 2 but I’ll still take the job
This offer still standing?
congrats on USC GIS!
NGL - this is pretty damn good work but it’s completely off base in the recommendations because it doesn’t understand a) the specific weaknesses in NFE’s various contractual arrangements and b) how Wes Edens actually thinks (he’s brilliant but complicated).
It’s impossible for these kids to know that but it’s also why all of these competitions etc are totally useless, I would anyday prefer to hire a blank slate and train them.
No one gets hired to do business or is able to close deals based on comprehensive analysis and fancy ppt. Thats just for show. You win on relationships and how to get things done and you only learn that on the job,
Missing the Wes Edens point is the biggest whiff of this deck/pitch. It's all situational analysis (guesswork) in the slides but in December 2025 the coop/steerco debt holders were long under discussion about how to creatively restructure this thing - assuming a pro-rata recovery around 14pts is probably the last thing coop members and market participants were expecting. This ended up being some kind of RSA and the 12% notes are getting claim to newco Brazil business equity and these 6.5 26s getting oldco/coreco equity/prefs. So I guess one could say, this is a thorough analysis of the business and competitive market, but nobody could expect to properly recommend an investment pitch (it's hard for anyone to pitch distressed on the outside looking in)
Ignoring my title - chipping in from the O&G side, seems about the right level for college juniors/seniors with maybe a summer of experience. To add to above, would expect more work around the LNG takeaway agreements and the gaps that exist - my seniors would be asking for all operational cases using VG/GLNG recent marketing agreements as case studies to be the backbone of potential relevant work streams walking through relevant potential economics with a Traf or Vitol. Without a operating case, and potential resolution to the marketing hair that exists that you would need to work through all the waterfall liquidity analysis does not mean anything so it really is just a nice ppt.
Seen someting similar in our SA and A recruiting. Impressive presentations prepared, formatted clean, lots of analysis but Q&A was showing that 80% did not understand what they have done there.
That being said this presentation from the example seems to be impressive, I am sure some of them worked in the field already or got some help from someone who does.
Not representative of the AVERAGE BB/EB analyst class. Every class will have 20-30% of kids like this who live and breathe finance, but the majority will either be DEI, nepo kids or just normal people who worked hard for an offer and have chilled since then. That being said, it’s generally the kids like this who over prepare and immerse themselves in these kind of competitions and prep that snag the MF PE, distressed credit and SM HF seats. You will have to compete with them if that is your goal. If you’re not gunning for one of those seats then you are fine and will perform well on the desk if you learn quickly and work hard. The actual IB analyst job is not that intellectually difficult and the kind of prep this competition requires honestly doesn’t prepare you in any way to hand spread the components needed to calculate average ROIC over 15 years for 30 peers at 1am lol
Is distressed credit actually that competitive? What firms are we talking about?
Smth like a TPG Angelo Gordon, but ngl even for those a good number of people (>60%, from my experience) fit the above categories of DEI, nepo, or just normal guy who works hard and gets an easy break. Prevalence of genuine hardos is greatly overstated outside of Wharton and stern
Packing a slide deck with so much information that you just take their word for it is neither effective nor impressive, and again signals they are unable to distill this into what matters for the pitch. AI slop
Look at Kabir in his durag!!!! Hahaha
y'all this was the team that placed last at the pitch comp lmfao
mfs hating on each other in a college club holy hardo
0 chance that is the case lol
market isn't liquid enough to execute the trade so judges scored it last
lmao actually? hilarious if so
ran this through an Ai detector and it's hella clauded lol
lmao ironic
How do you even catch up to here? My school's investment banking / fund club's presentations/resources aren't even remotely to this level.
On that same note, it seems like I got a lot more to learn to lateral if the bar keeps getting raised.
They will have external help, for sure.
Hiring Claude
Just skimmed it, seems like an honest attempt at a student pitch. OP, you're comparing your singular personal preparation to an entire group. Consider that you're even willing to look for things like this; that places you ahead of some of your own peers, and likely ahead of yourself when you first started too. You're not necessarily behind. You could get up to speed on this in a few weeks just by reading the Financial Times headlines and Matt Levine's newsletter once a day.
This is insanity. Wow
Where can I find the pitch
https://www.gisusc.com/investment-research and their LinkedIn page
And then there’s the realization that you’ve wasted your college years doing this nonsense when it has zero value in your finance career
AI is a thing. You should try it.
Its good, but tbh there is so much information on there, I think anyone would have a hard time combing through it all
What I was going to say. Does not look anywhere close to client-ready material. Too wordy. Too many graphs jammed into certain slides. Too much emphasis on scenario analysis/cap structure break down - Not a clear-cut recommendation. Kind of just looks like Claude put this together too.
Congrats on HL!
If I gave a deck this dense to my MD, he’d use it to beat my ass
USC kids r another breed it seems, this is actually really impressive
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