Straight to the Buy-Side
Have you jumped straight into the buy-side out of undergrad? Is it as impossible as people say it is? I am currently a senior doing a fall internship at a small family office in NYC that does a bunch of different stuff: incubation, short funds, quantitative finance, etc.
At first I wanted to do Investment Banking, because I thought that is the only real way into the buy side. It's what everybody does. However, talking to some people and to my boss, I realize this is not true. My boss even said that people from the sell side have a flight stigma attached to them and that he does not like their mentality. I also stumbled upon a throwback from WSO, talking about the benefits of going straight to the buy-side.
Do you think my boss is right? What do you guys think about the typical career path from sell-side analyst, to buy-side? Is this what you are pursuing? Do you IB analysts enjoy your work, or do you wish you had just started off at a HF, AM, or PE firm?
Hi Yossif, whoops, looks like nobody chimed in here.... maybe one of these discussions below is relevant:
More suggestions...
Fingers crossed that one of those helps you.
I agree with your boss in that I don’t agree with the mentality. Personally, I didn’t think slaving away for 2 years was worth it all, given, there was another option. I was fortunate enough to find full time opportunity at a pretigious GE/VC fund that had an analyst program, but the reality is that the options are extremely limited. Not many bayside firms recruit. So IB is the next best thjngs. It’s hard to avoid it, and most people hate it. But they go in knowing there’s an expiration date to the struggling, with buyside exit opps almost guaranteed, if you want, at the end.
AMA: Straight to Buy-side (Originally Posted: 11/08/2017)
This site has been incredibly helpful to me over the years so I thought I'd do this to give back.
I'm a current analyst at a growth equity/VC shop. I chose this path instead of slaving away at IB for many reasons.
I know you monkeys have strong opinions about working on sell-side first, so definitely feel free to share your opinions or questions, I would love to dialogue.
Ask away..
So tell the what whole story. How did you reach the buy side directly?
what's the break-down of responsibilities: i.e. modeling, market sizing, sourcing, competitor analysis, etc
How big is the fund? What size investments do you make? Which sectors? What are the main differences in growth equity versus classic PE models? Do you use leverage in growth equity investing?
buyside options out of ugrad (Originally Posted: 04/04/2010)
Curious to see what people think (this is hypothetical)
two top buy-side shops that recruit ugrad "classes" are Blackstone and Bridgewater (yes, i know there is the PE vs HF argument here, but outside of that)
if you had to pick between Bridgewater associates investment associate vs Blackstone PE analyst which would you pick? (I understand that they are very different)
do you think after 2 years at one you could move to the other (or similar place)?
from what i know: comp is higher at Bridgewater (blackstone slightly higher than BB IB, bwater 100k base + 20k signing + 8k reloc + bonus) i imagine bwater would have better hours i think that bstone would have more transferable skills to non-PE jobs, whereas bwater might stick you to HFs
i don't know any undergrad who turned down blackstone PE when offered the job.
Based on the recruiting trends of my classmates, there's not a lot of overlap in the students applying to BW and BlackStone. One set of people are set on the quant/trader track at Citadel/BW/Jane Street, and the other on the ibd/pe track at GS/MS/BX. As a result, it's very unlikely that the said undergraduates turned down BW like firms.
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I do. Someone at H/W turned BX PE down for RX back in the day.
i would add Qatalyst and Silverlake to that list.
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