Moelis & Co. 2021 Standing/Outlook
Clearly a rapidly growing elite boutique, what are your thoughts on Moelis in 2021? Are they in line with Evercore? What about stacking up against GS/MS/JPM.
Curious to see general sentiment and outlook on the bank as a whole.
Good firm, but a step below Evercore and Centerview. Bread and butter is still sponsor backed sell-sides but they have increased presence in larger cap deals over past couple of years. Outlook is positive and you get good reps as a junior, but culture is tough and selectivity/consistency in mandates leaves a little to be desired.
How does sponsor sell side differ from working in a Financial Sponsors Group?
Mostly sponsor sell sides. Good and growing team. Lean teams. Seniors are accessible. Globally interconnected team with good cross border deal flow and good product integration. Long hours even though some internal initiatives. Vision at the senior level to grow the firm. Middle market focus with some larger deals which allows to have a lot of reps with some large cap exposure. Generalist programme is great although you have less of a team bonding environment virtually.
I wouldn’t necessarily compare to Evercore though (In terms of focus and who I’ve seen in pitches) and more to PJT/Lazard/Roth
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Moelis is a premium version of Jefferies or even HL. It does significantly higher volume/banker than other EBs it is often associated with and does harrier and smaller deals than you see most EBs typically take on. This means you will get a lot of M&A reps on live deals and learn a tremendous amount very quickly, but not necessarily sexy deals and it can be one of the rougher sweatshops. Culture varies highly between offices and several highly toxic mid and senior folks enabled with a completely impotent and incompetent HR. If you are able to avoid those people, you are in luck. Unfortunately, several of the top MDs and the EDs/VPs who have attached themselves to them are some truly awful people that will never be forced to change regardless of whatever policy they put in place. I don’t mean just horrible to work with, but genuinely bad people. One proudly tells how he fired a jr banker on the spot because of being misleading about his PE recruiting and how him firing him hurt the kid’s career. I wish I was making this up, but a senior member told this story with pride during my orientation.
Any group's culture stands out for better or worse?
No groups as an analyst so have fun
Would you say also for HL rx?
Sad to hear about the comments above about toxic EDs/MDs; I guess it really depends on the office location.
The firm is growing fast and has a good trajectory in terms deal size as well, in which they are trying to be more selective and take on bigger deals.
The hours are brutal but for me the people were professional or at least try to help out if they can.
Don't know about other EBs as never worked there, but I assume they have more established presence in the market especially Evercore or Centerview.
Are the hours really any worse than other EBs / BBs? Banking is banking.
Hard to generalise but I work more than some of my other friends in banking. It’s always case and people specific though
To an extent this is true, but the marginal hours on pointless tasks are what make the job tough and usually the marginal hours at the places with rougher reputations come because someone is creating that environment vs it being a necessity of dealflow. That is why it is hard to nail down “culture” at a firm level because you could work with exceptionally well organized and thoughtful deal teams that don’t have MDs who rely on “pages” as a solution to problems or you could work with the seniors that think another page is all you need. Or you could work with an MD that pushes back on unreasonable requests from a client or one that wholly embraces any moronic request.
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