Worst week in banking
What was your worst week/few days in banking? I just got done reading Discussion Materials and had a fairly easy time during my first year (no all nighters but a few 4am days) so I’m curious.
What was your worst week/few days in banking? I just got done reading Discussion Materials and had a fairly easy time during my first year (no all nighters but a few 4am days) so I’m curious.
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Career Resources
During my internship this past summer I had a stretch of the following days:
Sunday night: bed at 5am, wake up at 7am Monday night: bed at 4am, wake up at 8am Tuesday night: bed at 5am, wake up at 8am Wednesday night: no sleep till Thursday at 2:15pm (took a nap since it was remote)
Did you work on live deals? I thought most internships didn’t do anything live
Believe CS was one of the only BBs that staffed interns on live deals. Heard some very rough stories from interns. They were essentially thrown into the same constantly-working WFH situation that junior bankers have been dealing with since March. Did not seem like fun
Was this actually all hours spent working or just getting comments ridiculously late? Seems egregious for a summer intern.
Mostly workload, some component can be attributed to late comments.
If this was a european BB in NYC I may know which group this is...
It's TMT. Learn to read username
I was talking about the specific bank/location. My bonus was higher than your base you consultant.
where tf did you work
had a very similar week in my internship. Was working on a pitch and two live deals virtually. Was fucking brutal
been on the desk 3 months, worst week was so far was a backtobacktoback 4am+ stretch followed by an all nighter a few days later, probably touched right at a hundo that week. Week after only worked like 40 hours tho which was sick. Doesn't suck all that bad until its a 14 hour work day on a saturday and all the fellas are slamming beers on the course, that shits deflating.
Understandable haha just gotta get through the 2 years
That used to get to me too. Sunday nights my friends would go out for some fine dining where I lived and there were tons of great restaurants. Meanwhile I'm at the frickin' Minneapolis airport waiting for my connecting flight so I can see a client on Monday morning, staring down at my airport TGI Fridays (or whatever) crappy meal :(
Worked on a multi-billion dollar bankruptcy in my first year. Essentially just thrown into the deep end with the expectation that I had to pick everything up extremely quickly; it was a pretty industry-specific bankruptcy so the amount of terminologies + jargon that I had to pick up in the first two weeks were insane. Then had to proceed to understand their entire business model + build the operating model, before feeding that into cash flows / post-exit capital structure possibilities. MDs wanted dozens of turns as we iterated through term sheets. Ended up pulling multiple 100+ hour weeks for about four months before things started to come down -- it came to the point where my associate and I were literally sleeping in the office during the weekend as it was just quicker than taking the uber back home. Never again
That sounds horrible. Restructuring sounds interesting but the super long processes don’t sound fun haha
yeah, this sounds scary familiar. i was in restructuring for 2yrs at Rothschild from 02-04... my worst week I was in the office like 41hrs straight.
Most of this came from running endless scenarios through the model and updating the book endlessly...
Restructuring is probably the most interesting product (to me at least) and the most modeling heavy but the downside is you scenario model until you are blue in the face. Then you have to update the deck - but fortunately most of the updating the deck is just pasting over exhibits vs endless text like in normal banking decks. Nowadays there are short cuts where once you make the change in excel the table is auto refreshed in PPT, which saves a lot of time.
On one deal had to put together like 100 different data table one night so senior guys can evaluate every which scenario and come with the the right proposal for our client. Was ridiculous. Does the 100 iterations of analysis matter at the end of the day? No . . .
More color on the scenarios available? I am trying to move to RX
7 days of 8am to between 4am-7am. Worked on a sell-side from 8am to around 10pm then an international buy-side from 10am to between 4am-7am. The buyer's corp dev team called the shots on the model and the materials so had to be up when they were available to provide comments and my associate was interviewing so he was completely checked out. It was also my birthday that week, which was on a Saturday on a long-holiday weekend, worked till 7am that morning and most of the day. The silver-lining is the acquisition was agreed to on the following Monday, so there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Ended up at about 130 hours that week on top of the 115-120 hours the 3 previous weeks. It almost broke me. I lateraled 4 months later and haven't looked back.
Dam that sucks. When I started, the 2nd years gave me advice. There is always sleep at the end of the tunnel.
That sounds terrible - BB or EB?
It was a MM. Moved to a BB after, much better, especially with a graphics team and offshore team to handle mundane and repetitive tasks.
When I was a 1st year analyst I was in a very niche coverage group where the M&A team didn't really know how to model any of the assets properly. Was working on 2 live deals at the time and the VP was on her bank mandated vacation because it was near the end of the year and she was forced to take it for regulatory purposes.
On one deal, the client made alot of adjustments to the sell-side model and f'ed alot of things up so alot of time was spent trying to figure out their logic to ensure it wasn't a total f-up or if it was something unique to their tax structure as the client was based in Asia while we were working in NA and we hadn't engaged a tax advisor yet. We would have 8pm calls with the client then have to turn around the presentation by midnight hopefully and if that wasn't done then would have to try to get the model outputs/analysis done by 5-6am so my MD could review/send to the client.
Then I would sleep a bit/spend my morning's/afternoons working on the other live deal with final bids due at the end of the week. It was so bad that when I had my end of the year review in the same week I was honestly so dazed out and just wanted to gtfo of that room so quickly that I didn't even respond to my stub bonus being handed out (just accepted it and said I appreciate the support of the group and the MDs just said we'll let you get back to work now and avoided all of the typical performance related discussions).
That week I probably worked over 130 hrs between rebuilding the sell-side model, figuring out the consequences of various loans and tax structures, working through the contract to figure out how to get around sharing any potential refinancing profits from the offtaker and trying to present this in a format where it wasn't just copying and pasting parts of the contract for the client meanwhile working on submitting the final bid for another client by running last minute scenarios.
Generally was an awful experience and tainted my impression of the M&A team from that point forward.
Couple months ago had two back to back 100+ hr weeks. Absolutely brutal... generally my hours are 60-80ish
First month in RX i didn't sleep on my 2nd and 3rd day of work. Literally was thrown into 3 live deals each in a very niche and specific sub-industry (Aviation MRO, EPCC, and Military-focused Shipyard). I think i almost collapsed on my 45th hour of work, was told to "go nap in the meeting room, but be back after 30 mins). I can't remember much of what i done during that time but i can tell you its lots of modelling, deck prep, reading up bankruptcy and tax laws. MD was ruthless and has a zero ounce of humanity in him regarding hours. He saw one of the associate literally fell asleep on his desk, pulled his chair almost making him fell to the floor and telling him to "wake the fuck up, or you can sleep in your house forever.". I actually have to go to the doctor because after sleeping on the 4th day, i was having shortness of breath and my chest hurts.
I knew right then and there that the job is like a well-paid gulag where you constantly challenging yourself physically and mentally while getting absolutely worked like a horse.
But my VP is highly supportive and she could tell that i would not last a year in the firm after such a insane first week of RX. She referred me to one of the firm's longstanding client and i took the role in PC after only 1,5 months or so in RX.
gotta be moelis
Also in RX. Worst week was 8am-4-6am Monday-Friday then 10am-12-1am on Saturday and Sunday. Combination of a an absurd ask w/ even more absurd timing expectations from the CFO of a company we were engaged w/ (guy was truly a douchebag, too) and a highly involved fire drill deck over the weekend. The deck was the worst part because it was managed so poorly by the MDs. Sent them a first turn mid-afternoon on Thursday and didn't hear a word back until late morning on Saturday. Then, after what we all thought was the final turn on Sunday around 9pm, one of the MDs asked for credit doc summaries and DIP comps (pitch was Monday morning). I had to take 30-45 minutes Friday afternoon because I literally could not see straight when I was reading.
The things we do for money. That sucks tho. I wonder if Rx and M&A analysts have to go through that? Maybe even worse since they probably didn’t get a ton of Rx exposure before rona
I don't think that a lot of M&A analysts are getting thrown onto RX deals, since every bank I know of w/ an RX practice has it's own RX team (i.e., doesn't farm out work to the M&A side). We wouldn't ask an M&A analyst to do anything RX specific at my bank, would be super inefficient since they wouldn't know wtf they were doing. Same reason M&A guys don't ask us to build merger models for them.
Every week in banking is the worst, but I'm into that kinda thing.
lol bro reading discussion materials made me straight up shiver in fear especially when he wrote about his all nighter
Ya lmao I read it after I started working and I still was shook
the only easy day was yesterday
S.S.D.D.
Who's gonna carry the boats?
Had a week with two all-nighters in it, and every other day including the weekend and start of the next week I was in until at least 2am, most days later. Def sucked.
I'm sorry, but... why do you guys do it? Some stories here are absolutely badshit crazy.
I did my fair time in M&A, granted fortunately never had these crazy 100h+ stories, because my group was great and I was just lucky, but if I ever had to pull through shit like this... I'd just quit.
There is so much great stuff out there, interesting, motivating work with really caring people - why spending time in a hostile, borderline insane environment?
It's beyond me how broken this industry is (was?).
Money & Prestige
But it's delusional, isn't it? Only prestige you get is fake, you can do much more stimulating and prestigious things in other industries.
Money aspect is good, fair enough. But really worth the sacrifice? If someone told me I gotta pull an all-nighter during Christmas or sth, I'd fxkcing laugh at his face and quit. It's just pathetic what this industry became.
Was on a pitch as a summer analyst and easily pulled +200 hours over two weeks. Each week was about 8am-3:30am. Weekends were almost nonexistent.
Deals.
Worked on a buyside for a large Australian sovereign - would've been fine except half their team was spread across multiple offices in Australia, other half in New York, so you'd finish all the stuff for the New York guys, but then Aussie guys would wake up and you'd field all their requests, then they'd go to bed and the New York guys would wake up (I was in the Midwest, so slightly behind being in Central timezone). That made it so it felt like you never had a break, but at least everyone on the other side was pretty nice / chill, especially the junior guys + it was an interesting deal.
When all my buddies are staffed on interesting deals while I'm left out and asked to work on admin tasks and coffee ordering. Feels a lot worse than getting swamped with meaningful work.
Stfu lol
8:30-1/2am on Monday and Tuesday, which is pretty standard. Got comments on a pitch deck late on Wednesday which kept me at the office until around 4:30. Next day I’m told at lunch I need to get stuff to fly to client site, work from plane / hotel until around 2am, do client meeting, come back to office around 7pm on Friday and work until midnight, then in the office for 12ish hours a piece on Saturday and Sunday, not the worst but probably my only true 100+ hour week.
Seems like the current week is always the worst week, until the next week starts.
Worst was easily the 3rd week of my summer internship (London):
Monday 9am to Tuesday 5am - Cab home, shower, back to office
Tuesday 7am to Wednesday 5am - Cab home, shower, back to office
Wednesday 7am to 9pm - Cab home, sleep till 8am Thursday
So 60ish hours straight.
My group had 1 week to get fully-committed sole financing for +$1bn to support transformational acquisition deal. Between Monday and Sunday morning, I worked 118 hours on model, credit docs, industry work, and putting together a package for my bank's board (needed board approval due to size/speed/risk of transaction).
We ended losing deal to a sponsor. My biggest regret was not having more to do on Sunday, as it was my only chance to hit over 130 hours.
How do you even get through the hours? I’m operating on 6 hours of sleep a night and feel like my brain is sluggish.
Just a different energy. Not your normal slog, there's "excitement in the air"
Sounds like most of you guys could be taking several hour naps whilst waiting for comments from MD but instead you're probably dicking around on ESPN or BuzzFeed. Live next to office and go take naps. Seems like the solution?
You sound envious of fat banker bonuses.
right now.
Consistent 6am - 2am week days since covid in rx with an occasional Sunday off
7 straight weeks of 110+ hour weeks as an mba intern. Mind was mush. No days off.
Had two 130-135s
Definitely worked at Moelis
Does Moelis have the worst hours?
Every day is the worst day in banking and every week is the worst week in banking. Fuck this job
lmao
MY NAME IS JEFF DEEZ NUTS 21
Thanks for your comment JEFF DEEZ NUTS 21, it really helps!
Best,
Mario
Thought I’d bring this up since everyone is saying it’s rough rn
Internship at a botique summer 2020 (Friday off so I had to get a deliverable in by Thurs night): Monday 8am-10pm (big mistake tapping out this early on Monday) Tuesday 8am-2am Wednesday 7am -> Thursday 3pm Thursday Napped from 3-6pm, worked 6-8pm finished deliverable Friday woke up at 3pm and drank heavily all weekend
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