How long should it take an ER associate to make a report?

Hard to give an average because some reports are huge, others can be one-pagers. Apologize ahead of time for a long post.

This is based on my experience and it depends on a few things:

1. What type of a report is it?

- Initiations usually take the longest time. Page length can vary between 15 and 45 pages (from what I've seen). Initiations, depending on time constraints and free to publish dates, can take me anywhere from a day to a week (also depends on the company, if it's very similar to something we already cover, I'll use that company's report as a template). For me it also matters whether it's an IPO initiation or you're just picking up coverage of an existing company.

• Reports on earnings take me the second longest but we almost always publish right after the earnings call. Most of my conference calls happen the next day (which is very nice and lucky I think), so we can afford to do a quick first blush the night before the morning call and blast it out to clients/sales, these aren't really reports and take me about 20 minutes depending on how in-line the results were. Regular earnings reports can take me anywhere from an hour to 2-3 hours, also based on how straightforward the quarter was.

• Dividends/news/industry events/etc: usually one pagers, and take me about an hour or so if you don't have to update any forward estimates.

• Thematic reports/sector primers: Once in a while you will do these and they tend to be huge (I've seen 120+ page industry primers). These usually take a couple of weeks to put together.

2. What sector do you cover?

• I noticed I got lucky here again and my sub-sector's reports tend to be fairly short. My initiations for example, are never longer than 15 pages. Our reports for earnings results are never longer than 5 pages. Can't say the same for some of the other people I know around the floor.

3. What kind of analyst do you work for?

• Some analysts will do most, if not all of the writing, leaving you with updating models and working on other ad-hoc shit. My analyst does not like to write but we split it up pretty evenly. During earnings season we either split up the companies and do everything for that company(if more than one announces on the same day), or we split up the duties and one of us works on the reports while the other updates the models and pushes the estimates forward.

Given that I am not that experienced and I am not a publishing analyst, all of my writing is reviewed/edited/corrected and sometimes scrapped entirely by the senior analyst. He's always the one that finalizes everything. This obviously adds more time to all of the things above. For initiations he will usually spend a day reviewing all the information. For earnings results, he can spend about an hour editing my stuff and adding his own. It's always a great feeling to see that he didn't change much or anything at all.