Day in the Life of an Investment Banking Analyst

Day in the Life of an Investment Banking Analyst: 1st Year M&A Group

In a prior post, we posted an actual pitchbook so you can see exactly what they look like.

Here, a new investment banking analyst in the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) group describes a typical day in his own words.

Sample Day in the Life of an Investment Banking Analyst

• 9:30am - Arrive at work and check email and voicemail
• 10am - Continue working on a buy-side client presentation (“pitchbook”) from yesterday.  Since you already finished with the “Public Market Overview” pages last night, you now begin inserting a graphical representation of possible exchange ratios.
• 11:25am - An associate calls to tell you that you have been staffed on another deal and you’ll need to put together a PIB (public information book) about the target.
• 12pm - You finish putting together the PIB and get back to work on the original pitch.
• 1pm - You grab lunch with your friends at the cafeteria.
• 1:45pm - Back at your desk, you open up a merger model you need to finish for another deal team by the end of the night.  Since you pretty much finished the model last night, you’re now checking your work for bugs, mistakes, formatting, and analyzing various accretion/dilution results based on different scenarios (sensitivity analysis).
• 3:45pm - Your associate from the buy-side pitch calls and tells you that the VP wants to meet in a conference room to look at what you've got so far and discuss how to move forward.
• 4pm - You meet with the VP and your associate.  The MD is traveling on another pitch so he’s conferenced in.  Basically, since 40% of the target company is owned by an investment company, their consent is vital for the success of the acquisition.  As such, you need to put in a few pages on this investment company into the pitch so the client (the potential acquirer) understands what he’s up against.
• 5pm - Back at your desk, you incorporate some of the changes into the pitchbook.  You include a profile on the investment company and a page on stock ownership.
• 7pm - You order dinner with your friends from a giant book full of menus that everyone uses on the floor. You eat in an empty conference room.
• 8pm - Around 8:00pm, things start to settle down and you can begin to catch up on all the work you were distracted from during the day.
• 10pm - Off to the gym for a quick workout.
• 11pm - Back in the office, you pull up your merger model that was interrupted by your afternoon meeting. You put the finishing touches on it and email your associate to let him know it’s ready.
• 2am - You call a car and head home

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