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In my opinion, the quality of the firm matters FAR more than the industry. I'd say 80% is the firm, 20% is the industry.
To try to answer your question, assuming "equal" prestige, I'd rank them as follows:
Hedge Fund
Private Equity
Venture Capital
Valuation Firm
Corp Dev
PWM
Search Fund (beware, most of these are scams where you just do the gruntiest of grunt work, in my experience)
how would you rank boutique ib and ER into that list
I'd stick boutique IB right at the level of PE and ER right below it.
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