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Career Resources
Biggest mistake? That I got into it in the first place.
what made you want to do investment banking in the first place?
Money. Still the reason I do it.
ah that explains it.
I was helping to put together a roadshow schedule during my first year, and put the wrong address of a meeting on the schedule. Got extremely lucky in the fact that ONLY my MD was late for the meeting (after abusing me for 5 minutes over the phone)...whereas the client, who was traveling with a calm, cool, and resourceful VP, made it with 5 minutes to spare.
Moral of the story (and possibly the wisest words I've heard on the job so far): Whatever you are doing (whether a model, memorandum, or a stupid roadshow schedule), CHECK, DOUBLE CHECK, TRIPLE CHECK.
Also, whenever you're faxing something to a hotel, CALL THE HOTEL and make sure they got the fax (and are running it promptly up to the recipient's room). Usually not a problem with better hotels, which cater to business people, but if somebody's on a due diligence trip in East Bumblefu*k, there might not be a Ritz Carlton nearby.
i thought i could be real slacker and get by with capiq/factset comps...
trust me, don't do it.
Using the CapitalIQ plug-in feature in excel to download comp data and didn't check whether data set needed to be adjusted to match year-ends.
Also, no question is a dumb question, however... there ARE some questions which are best to bounce off peers first vs. the associate or VP etc.
Anonymity - Anything to avoid before starting a career in IB? (Originally Posted: 07/06/2013)
I have read about some of the standards you have to adhere to once working in IB, such as; not talking to the press about your job, or discussing salaries and or bonus numbers (internally and externally) etc.
I was wondering, if your getting interested in a career in IB, whether there are any activities you should avoid while your studying or in your social life before applying?
For instance if you talk to the press about IB salaries, lifestyle or culture of a particular firm (be it correctly or incorrectly), or are / were involved as an activist in things like Occupy Wall Street etc prior to getting a job.
If you are upfront about what you have done in the past or your employer finds out at a later date, are there any situations that would be detrimental to your chances of starting a career or any repercussions to your career (if your employer found out at a later date) in IB?
What could you possibly have to say to the media about IB compensation as a college kid? And yeah, I'm pretty sure coming out as an OWS member is an auto-ding.
The world needs plenty of baristas.
Lets say you know someone working in IB and they show you their contract, and then you go and talk about it on WSO or Facebook, or you have a strong view about a bank and again you write about it somewhere on the internet, doesn't have to be for the NYT just somewhere, - and if a recruiter or HR somehow becomes aware that you made these comments, and or spoke about comp numbers; are you going to get dinged, or would you get a chance to explain / make a case for yourself?
Theres bound to be a case eventually where someone involved in OWS has a mid life crisis and randomly decides they now want to use their finance degree for IB instead of improving their new aforementioned mad barista skills....
Must have some pretty contentious principles if you're going from OWS to IB
It sounds like you already know the answer and you're just hoping we'll tell you you're wrong.
You're not.
The Internet is forever, kid. Probably felt pretty cool while you were doing it though, right?
I'm pretty fortunate in the fact that my name is very common. Think John Smith status and dozens of famous people have my name. I cannot find myself on google and if someone were to post any negative information about me, it'd probably end up on page 100 in the search results.
Not really sure what accusation you were trying to make... but i was trying to create a thread that discussed the opportunity cost of participating in online finance communities, versus not being involved and therefore potentially learning less for fear of the comments you post being detrimental to your career aspirations.
Then people with industry knowledge could bounce ideas around that would help explain to prospective bankers where they believe those lines are / would be that can detrimentally affect your career and i just threw some examples in as a jumping off point.
First rule of working on Wall Street: Don't talk about working on Wall Street.
During training compliance will come in and tell you very specifically what you can and cannot do. Just pay attention and follow what they say. Prior to actually starting theres not much you can do to break compliance since you don't work for them...
Do you know if there are any differences in compliance between working at a BB vs a F500?
Of course there is. In IB you have a public (S&T + research) and a private (IB) side. For example just emailing a research analyst as an IB person is a fireable offense. However with permission from compliance you can talk to them about public info or have them meet with your clients. Also you are allowed to "Wall-cross" the public side if it is absolutely necessary. Your brokerage account has to be with the bank and you need permission before every trade. You also can't tell other IB people any private info about deals you're working on unless they "need to know" even if they sit right next to you in your industry group for example. That's a bunch of IB-specific compliance basics I can think of off the top of my head.
Of course standard rules like never sharing private info about your company or posting about your company online or sending emails from your work email to your personal email apply probably at F500s too.
Thanks for that info.
Hey, I've been trying to wrap my head around this for awhile. Its a dumb question but,
Why is equity research (sell-side) secured from buy-side equity research and regular employees within the same firm? What does equity research on sell-side have that makes it illegal or insider trading? feel like im missing something so simple, but fail to grasp
OWS? Is this a troll post? Of course if you were the WSO monkey handing out bananas to the OWS people that would be different.
I may be wrong, but from what I'm aware the main reason sell-side research is separated from the rest of the IB is to prevent positive research coverage being effectively cross-sold with other products. This came under a lot of focus post-Enron, because the guys at Enron who dealt with the IBs demanded positive research coverage from banks if they wanted to do other business with Enron, and that's been blamed for some of the stupidly positive coverage of Enron before the collapse.
Unless you keep business lines whose clients are the covered companies separate from research, you have a pretty major conflict of interest.
Just a short rant about compliance. I started a few weeks ago and hate the fact that I have to switch my brokerage account to the bank's where they'll charge me a nice annual fee and almost $10 per (pre-approved) trade.
Oh come on, how much worth of free access to Capital IQ, bloomberg, broker reports, credit ratings and other information do you get in exchange.... compliance is just part of the deal
There's no such thing as "buy-side research" at an investment bank. Buy-side research simply refers to someone who is an internal research analyst at a hedge fund, mutual fund, etc.
In terms of the public side of the bank let's go ahead and distinguish between S&T and Research:
Research: 1) It is illegal for a sell-side research analyst to purposely alter their ratings in order to help the IB side win business. I.E. regulation prevents IB from freely interacting with research because they don't want IB to pressure research into publishing favorable reports on a company so that IB can win their next bond deal or M&A mandate or something 2) They also don't want IB purposely or accidentally telling research any material non-public information about a company (I.E. I'm working on a Yahoo deal and I purposely or accidentally tell a tech research analyst that their next earnings are going to beat expectations) because then it's impossible for them to do unbiased research about the company. In this example research would be "wall-crossed" and would not be allowed to write research or communicate with clients about Yahoo until the next earnings report crosses the tape. I.E. if research accidentally or purposely gets wall crossed they cannot cover the company until all material non-public information becomes public. This can get really bad if you accidentally tell research for example that company X is going to do a huge follow-on offering a year from now, as that would bar research from covering that company until the follow on is announced up to a year for now.
S&T: -Same as point 2) for research. If you wall cross a trader about a company (either purposely or accidentally) they can't trade that company's security until all material non-public info they were told becomes public. This is bad as they can't do their job.
Sometimes it becomes worth it to wall cross someone on the public side of the bank but it has to be done after getting approval from compliance and under strict supervision from compliance. A perfect example of this is if you're working on an IPO and need an equity trader's input on how to price/size the offering. It doesn't matter in this case that he has insider info because the company isn't public yet and he couldn't trade on it anyway. You just need to be careful that you only wall-cross him on info that WILL BECOME public by the time the prospectus is finalized and released. I.E. if you wall cross him on all the financials that are going to be on the prospectus and tell him about management's internal projections for the rest of the year (which won't be disclosed to the public) then he still can't trade the company even after the IPO until the period in which you told him guidance is over and the relevant earnings report is released.
Hope this helps. The main lesson is when in doubt call compliance. And never talk to S&T or research without compliance permission + supervision.
That was a bit of an extreme example..
Why?
Because i imagine if you were part of OWS; then it's a pretty solid way to preclude yourself from working on Wall Street!
Oh, I think we misunderstood each other. I did not mean that the WSO mascot is part of OWS. I meant that the WSO monkey should not be too worried about someone deducing his identity because he is spreading the word about what WS is really like to the ignorant OWS people.
Oh haha, what you said makes sense now!
Yeah, dont put anything dumb on social media, make your accounts private..make sure when your name is googled nothing strange or incriminating shows up
dont put facepics when trying to bang other dudes wives on the craigslist wm4m section
dont get arrested
whatever you're doing..DONT GET CAUGHT
OWS candidates are out of question. Who would put it on their resume anyway?
Your 100% right, if your going for a banking job i don't think you would put 'i enjoy participating in social causes such as OWS' but theres always a chance however slim that someone you use as a reference knows you participated in it or some random chain of events that cause HR to find out...
Did you start full time? Also, is this standard practice when working in BB banks? What about prop. trading firms? I would not want to switch brokerage accounts, unless my job offered a better deal of course ;)
Seriously, no one cares what you write under an alias on an online forum. If you are retarded enough to reveal who you are then that's really your own fault.
Thanks guys!! Definitely helps - makes complete sense now. Just fyi, the buy-side research I was talking about is like an internal HF/AM within the investment bank itself that has research analysts. Or I guess that really doesn't even count as investment banking, and is just a part of the bank as a whole...
i think that if you want to write, especially, you might want to do so under a pseudonym if your pieces are politically charged, they might rub people the wrong way
What if it was along the lines of financial journalism?
Do you think it would be an effective tool on your resume to show to your interviewers that you're interested and understand finance?
Based on your posts I would suggest that you improve your usage of basic English if you want to pursue a career in financial journalism,
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