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A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AN INVESTMENT BANKING ANALYST - A Good Day vs. A Bad Day - YouTube
Channel: rareliquid
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What is up YouTube, welcome to the
channel my name is Ben and I'm a former
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JP Morgan investment banking analyst
First off happy Valentine's Day to all
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of you unless you're
single like me then in that case happy
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single awareness day
Today I'm going to be talking about a
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topic that I'm frequently asked about
and that is the day in the life of an
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investment banker
Now if you've asked anyone who's worked
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anywhere what their normal days are like,
of course they're going to say that it
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wildly can vary from day to day,
so i'm going to give you the best
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possible examples that I can give you
and I'm gonna give you two-
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one which is a kind of normal slash good
day
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and then one that's in a very intense
and busy
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and quote-unquote bad day. Alright so
let's start off with a good day
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and I'll assume that I'm working on a
marketing book, which means that we're
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trying to win business with a client
rather than
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working on a live deal which I'll get to
later on in the video
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Okay so let's say it's 8:30 am I wake
up and I quickly check my email
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my phone is literally right next to me
and I see about 20 emails or so,
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quickly scroll through them and see that
nothing is really
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needing immediate attention so I just
decide to snooze for another 15 minutes
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So luckily I used to live pretty close
to the office so I could get into the
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office within about a 10 minute walk
and so let's say I get into the office
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around 9:30 am
answer a few emails figure that there's
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not really much going on so
at around 10 am I ask my analyst friends
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to see if anyone wants to
grab a breakfast burrito so we go out
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and do that. At around 10:30 am, I have a
call with a client that's potentially
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looking to IPO
and luckily as an analyst there isn't
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that much that you need to really do on
a call besides take notes
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so as I listen in on everything I'm just
eating my burrito
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pretty much in silence. For the next few
hours until around 12:30 pm
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I'm working on the marketing book and
for this day let's say I'm spreading
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trading comps, which is
a valuation methodology in which you're
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comparing companies metrics against each
other, basically what it entails is
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looking into financial
statements, finding the relevant numbers
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and plugging them into excel
At first, in the first few months it was
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a little bit fun for me and then
once you get to your end of your first
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year or in your second year you've just
done this so many times it gets a little
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bit boring
Once it gets to around 12:30 pm, since
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I'm not really in any kind of rush
I grab lunch with a few of my co-workers
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and
bring it back to the desk. Pretty much
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there hasn't been a time I think in
around 2.5 years where I actually had a
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sit-down lunch at a restaurant
Every single day pretty much you just
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take your lunch back to your office
So I'm working on the trading comps
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until around 3:00 pm and
at that point I send it out to my
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associate, who
is the one who checks over everything to
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make sure that everything's 100%
accurate and at this point now I have a
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few hours where I don't have
really that much work to do on anything
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else and so
until around let's say 5:00 pm I'm just
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checking my NBA fantasy team
trying to see if I should make any
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trades or something like that I'm
texting my friends to see if they have
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any weekend plans
and that's pretty much what I'm doing
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for the next few hours. Alright now at
around 5:00 pm
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my associate says he just wants a few
formatting changes the numbers and all
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look good
so I make those changes really quickly
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and then send it out to my managing
director and the rest of the full team
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so they can take a full look at the
presentation materials
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Now at this point we're playing a little
bit of the waiting game where we're just
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waiting for our managing director who's
probably around 40 to 50 years old
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and here she has a family and that's the
main priority, right? Or
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maybe he's eating dinner with a client
or doing some kind of hobby like golfing
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or something like that
and we just have to wait until we get
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those changes
and so I'm just waiting in my cubicle to
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see
and wait for that email to come so that
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I can finally make those changes and
then eventually go home
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So let's say it's now 7:00 pm, I've already
had dinner,
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and I finally get an email from my
managing director who says he wants a
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list
of 10 different changes but they're all
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relatively quick fixes so it's not too
bad
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I make those changes for the next few
hours and by around 9 pm
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I send it off to my associate and vp, who
are already at home. So then my associate
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and vice president they just gave me a
few more comments
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which I make those changes to and around
10 pm I'm finally done
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and I just go through the presentation
materials one last time
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to make sure that I'm not making any
silly mistakes,
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and let's say it's around now 10:30 pm
I send those presentation materials to
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the full team
who will review it tomorrow and make any
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final changes before
sending that presentation eventually to
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the client. Okay so now it's around 10:30
pm I spend the next 30 minutes or so
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responding to all the emails that I've
kind of been neglecting throughout the
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entire day,
and let's say those are related to
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recruiting because I'm helping out with
the recruiting process
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and by 11 pm I call my uber home get to
home at around let's say 11:15, um
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wash up maybe watch a show or something
and crash and sleep at around midnight
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Alright so next up let's talk about a
bad day and I'll be assuming that I'm
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working on a live
M&A deal. So a live deal is one in which
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we've engaged with the client and the
client wants to either sell itself or
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buy another company-
it's really intense and all hands are on
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deck
and everyone needs to be on their A-game
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So the worst start to a bad day in
banking
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is that you've actually had a bad day
the previous day and so
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you haven't gotten much sleep so let's
say in this particular situation
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I've slept at 4 am the day before and
now I'm waking up
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at 7 00 a.m because I'm on the west
coast and our client or maybe
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our managing director and the rest of
our team are on the east coast
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So I wake up to about 50 emails and I
slightly panic because my managing
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director has asked for something 10
minutes ago
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for in advance of our 9 am call with our
client
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My associate has already responded to my
managing director and told him that
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we're working on it
and has already emailed me saying "Hey
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are you up?" and I respond immediately to
him and say yes I'm working on it
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okay so then for the next hour or so I'm
just working like a madman on the
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computer
I booted up my workstation that's just a
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few feet away from my bed
and as soon as I'm done with the changes,
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I send it over to my associate,
brush my teeth, put on my suit, and pretty
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much just fast walk
to my office. I'm in the office at around
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8:30 am
and by that point my associate has sent
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me a few comments to change
and so I make those changes really
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quickly and then send it out to the
broader team
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I have a short breather, let's say for
about five minutes before our call with
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the client at 9 am
and at this point the managing director
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and all of us jump
on the call with the client in order to
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discuss the presentation materials that
I've been working on
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and let's say that we're working on the
beginning stages of an M&A
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deal. For the next 30 minutes or so I'm
just taking notes and listening in on
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the call which
is about valuation and I learned that
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our client has
finished its management model, which is
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just the financials that we're going to
be
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using to base our valuation materials on
Right after the call at around 9:30 a.m
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the client sends us their management
model and for the next few hours let's
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say
two hours or so- my associate and I just
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go through every single tab in the excel
sheet
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trying to understand how the model is
built. To give you a little bit of
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insight any reputable public company is
going to have some
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sort of internal financial model that it
uses to strategize
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and project where they see the company
going over the next
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let's say three to five years, sometimes
maybe even 10 years,
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and these models can be very hairy,
unorganized for a lot of clients they
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typically are there's a lot of like data
missing here and there
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and so it takes some time to really
understand
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how the model works. For our purposes
today let's say that we just go through
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it for the next few hours
so at around 11:30 am or so, my
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associate and I group up in his cubicle
and we just discuss any kind of
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questions we have about the model
and we have a call set up to discuss it
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with the client at 12 pm
but in between that time where I think
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that I'll have 30 minutes off my
managing director
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emails me saying, hey can you pull the
latest equity research reports on the
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client,
and so I put those together in a nice
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little pdf
for my boss and then I send that off to
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him. It's now 12 pm my associate and I
are on the call with the client, just
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going through our questions
about the model, and my associate is the
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one pretty much leading the call. As an
analyst you maybe
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have a few questions with the client
here and there for something like this,
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but
normally for most calls, analysts are
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pretty quiet. During the call my
colleague knows that I'm working on a
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live deal super busy, so I've messaged
him earlier
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to just get me a salad- whatever he's
getting i'll get the same thing- and he
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drops it off during the call I
give him a you know little nod of thank
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you and just go back to taking notes
It's now about 1 pm, my associate and I go
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into our managing director's office
and he's just gonna lay out for us page
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by page what he wants in the
presentation materials
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and they can include things like market
overviews, trading transaction comps,
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valuation analysis, accretion dilution
analysis,
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and maybe some appendix pages with some
extra research
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Throughout all of this my associate and
I are just furiously taking notes
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because we want to make sure that we
don't miss
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anything, and once the meeting's over, we
head to his cubicle again and kind of
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divide up the work
It's now 2 pm, I scarfed down the salad
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that my coworker got me, it's the first
thing I've eaten all day,
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and I'm working on the financial model
building out a discounted cash flow
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analysis with the management model, and
for the next
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let's say four hours or so, that's pretty
much all I'll be working on while my
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associate
creates a shell of the presentation that
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we're going to be building
So now it's around 6 pm, I've created a
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rough shell of what I think the
financial model is gonna look like
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and so I send that off to my associate
who's gonna be checking it over
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and during that time I do a few things: I
jump onto
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an order for food with my colleagues, and
I also am working on the market overview
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pages, and the trading and transaction
comps,
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trying to set that all up so that I'll
be ready to do that
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throughout the rest of the night. At
around 8 pm, my associate gives me
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the changes to the model that he'd like
to see, and over the next
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four hours or so that's when I'm working
on the model just
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non-stop straight, plugging in all the
numbers building out switches to make
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sure that the model is flexible
and around midnight is when I'm pretty
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much done with my next draft of the
model
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and I send that out to the associate. My
associate tells me that he'll take
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another look at the model
and knows that it's just the first draft
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and so there's probably going to be a
lot more work I have to do over the next
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few days,
but he tells me to work on the rest of
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the presentation
so over the next let's say four hours or
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so I'm spreading trading and transaction
comps and working on
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the rest of the presentation. So at this
point at around 4 am I'm pretty confident
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that I'll be able to get a lot of the
rest of the materials
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pretty much finished by the end of the
next day, and
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let's say that the following day after
that is when we have the meeting with
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the client
and so I'm just at this point so tired
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that I tell my associate hey i'm logging
off, going home, I'll be back in the
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office
around 8 or 9 am, and call an uber
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wash up just crash in bed at around
4:30 am
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Okay so that's an overview of a quote
unquote normal day and a bad day
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in investment banking. Hopefully you
found it helpful,
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if you're interested in going into the
field or if you're just always curious
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about it
So like I mentioned earlier on in the
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video, things change so much day-to-day
sometimes even hour by hour
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and I can tell you that I think the
worst day that I had was around 28
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29 hours in a row when all I was doing
was just working on a financial model
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and there were other days when I would
leave at around 6 pm
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after getting into the office around 10
am and sometimes
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I barely did any work except for just
maybe a few hours throughout the day
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So it can really vary so wildly in
banking
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So that pretty much concludes the video
as always thank you so much for tuning
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in
and hopefully I catch you next time in
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the next video, peace
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[Music]
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