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