Another Good Investment Banking Blog

The other day, while looking for ways to avoid studying for the CFA exam, I came across another pretty good blog on Investment Banking. It's titled "The Prince of Wall Street". Here's the Prince himself describing his blog:

...Prince of Wall Street is a regularly updated finance blog featuring original finance news, gossip, trades, and commentary. The commentary predominately focuses on M&A, private equity, hedge funds, and investment banking.

Now some basic personal information about The Prince. He is a senior at a prestigious college awaiting the start of his first full-time job as an investment banking analyst at a bulge bracket bank. He did three summer analyst stints at a prestigious bulge-bracket investment bank and then signed on to work full-time in the Financial Sponsors Group. He worked in prime brokerage sales for two summers. It is fitting that The Prince would study Philosophy and Economics as an undergraduate. The Prince also spent a term at University College in Oxford (god save the queen, and The Prince).

This blog was started when The Prince realized he spent way too much time reading finance blogs and newspapers. He hopes to also share some of the humor that goes along with working in banking and give some perspective to prospective investment bankers on what life is really like as an analyst. Even if his readers decide his commentary and analysis is wrong, he hopes they at least find it thought-provoking. That is all my loyal subjects.

He's got a nice touch - he writes mostly in the third-person, has a good sense of humor, and uses a lot of references to Machiavelli (hence the title). My limited reading gives me a sense that while the blog covers a pretty good range of IB-related topics, it would be particularly interesting to students (both grad and undergrad) hoping to break into the IB field. So, I'll be adding it to my blogroll.

Check out the blog here.

Enough bloggery - back to CFA review.

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Alumni Networks Matter

Ever wonder how much impact a school's alumni network has on career success? In the world of Wall Street, apparently quite a lot. In this article, DealBook reports on the school connections of major Wall Times figures. Apparently, there's a lot of "school clusters".

If you want to see a pretty cool visual of the relationships, click here (it comes up small, but click on the image to enlarge it).

You could interpret the relationships as anecdotal evidence that networks matter. But I think it's just as likely that these top schools are the major producers of future "masters of the universe". So it's not surprising to see a lot of big form Wharton (for one example) or Harvard (for another).

Some Fun Wall Street Jargon

I get a kick out of jargon and slang. that's one of the things that makes finance fun - the colorful language. One of the things I particularly enjoyed when teaching about Mergers and Acquisitions were the names for anti-takeover strategies. Just to name a few, there's the poison pill, the scorched earth, white knights (and also white squires and grey knights), and my favorite, the "Pac-Man Defense".

Here's a short list and explanation for some of the jargon used in the investment and trading side of the Street, like "dead cat bounce", "air-pocket stock", and the "cockroach theory" of bad news.

What Do Entry-Level Investment Banking Jobs Pay?

Many of my readers (all three of them) are finance majors and at least somewhat interested in what the $$$ is like working on Wall street. Just how much can you make on Wall Street?

Luckily, a former classmate from grad school (and one of my three regular readers) just sent me this quick look (from DealBreaker.com) at the bonus side of the Wall Street Cheddar for Investment Banking analysts. These are median figures, by the way:



And this piece on WallStreetPrep.com gives the typical first year salary for analysts as being in the $55-70K range, with a signing bonus of about $10k. So, adding it all up. total first year compensation (not counting signing bonus) ends up around $145-$180K.

These are for analyst positions, which are the likely spot that an undergrad would start (the associates are usually MBAs).

This seems like a lot of money for a first job (and it is). But when you consider that the typical analyst regularly puts in 80-100 hours (or more) a week, it's like having two full time jobs (in fact, based on the emails I've gotten, 100+ hours isn't uncommon, and an 80 hour week would be considered a vacation by most bankers). That's too much like work for my tastes (which is why I'm an academic). But not surprisingly, thes jobs are highly sought after. If I was 22 again and wired that way, I'd' probably try to go that way too. But I'd end up burning out after a couple of years, even if I made it that far.

If anyone has similar figures for Venture Capital and Private Equity, let me know.

update: Here's another link to salaries and bonuses for traders (compliments of Jim Mahar at Financeprofessor.com)