IB vs. PE vs Investments

What's the difference between IB vs PE vs making investments?

Essentially, it seems like everybody's long term goal is to go into PE, which is just buying out companies, making them grow, and selling them after... so technically speaking, wouldn't going into Asset Management or equity research be more useful than going to IB since you would be analyzing the investments you're planning to make and such?

And one more thing is that, given that there's IB vs PE opportunity right after undergrad, it seems like most of us would say take the IB route first for 2-3 years before jumping ship. Why not just take PE route right after if that's what you want to be working in in the future?

TIA.

2 Comments
 
Best Response

I am a junior research analyst at a reputable AM firm, and I will give you my perspective.

IBD is much more relevant to PE than buyside/sellside research because in investment research, sure you try to find out what investments are good/bad (if even that), but you don't give a crap about financing the investment as long as it fits your portfolio risk profile and it enhances the portfolio. We don't care about financing because our investments are "financed" by our AUM. We have all the cash in hand. The biggest difficulty most of the time is figuring out how to allocate the cash efficiently! A very big part of PE is financing the buyout, and an IBD analyst would have much more relevant experience in that regards.

 

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