ER Interview assignment

In my experience, it's mostly you're ability to write. As has been noted on this board, the technical element of finance is not particularly difficult to learn.

Some people, however, will never learn to communicate effectively through writing. Especially if you're at a boutique firm, its really helpful to the analyst to be able to pass some/ all of the writing off to you to free up his/her schedule for marketing.

TheGoodGatsby:

Got it, I had heard or read that answer mostly. I feel very comfortable writing but for some reason the page limit hamstrung me slightly. Thanks for the response

You'll need to adjust your writing so that you're only writing concise, snapshots of the data you're trying to communicate. As in, can you look at a paragraphs worth of data/explanation and get to the point in 2 sentences? At least that's the way it was explained to me by my analyst.

TheGoodGatsby:

Makes sense. I felt I could look at the data and sum it up but I was always thinking I'd lose points for not mentioning other minor points.

Key word there is minor. For example, the other day I wrote an analysis on the June ISM report, and the overall theme was that the PMI decreased from its April value, indicating a contraction for the first time since Nov 2012, and only the second time since July 2009. When I wrote about it, I only focused on the leading contributors to the decrease, which really was only a handful of what was reported, anything else was irrelevant and could be mentioned in a more in depth analysis if needed. Each ISM report is a couple paragraphs, but I had to sum it up in 3-4 sentences, or less, so you need to pick out what the most relevant important things are while maintaining the integrity of the report.