Investment Banking Monkey - The All Nighter

By popular demand you have been asked to provide a summer intern success guide. As many of you know, recruitment season has long past and it’s time for the fresh monkeys to crawl down from their penultimate year university trees, put on their best suits, shirts and ties and walk through the doors of the investment banking powerhouses.

A voice in your head wants to say “shut up”. Interns are nothing like what they used to be. Hard work is replaced with networking. The kind of guy who worked hard and learned how to comp and do price charts with weighted average trading prices superimposed in the hope of eventually being given the honour of doing a DCF (to be read as if DCF was written in fort size 100, Arial Black and bold) – well, this kind of guy is replaced with the chimp who messes up any numbers job he’s given on purpose (even though he’s a maths and physics joint honours student)so that nobody will ever think of giving him anything numbers related to do. Instead, this guy has beers with Rupert in the hope of landing the full time offer by drinking him under the table with Tequila shots.

You think to yourself… do these guys really need an intern guide? I mean come on. These are kind that have read every single vault guide. Kids who pay good money to get valuation skills even before they step foot inside an investment bank. Kinds who wonder whether ones tie needs to slope upwards (if striped) given that it’s a bull market?

To cut a long story short – YES THEY DO. The market is more competitive than ever, that with all these little cowboys running around like a bunch of consultants, clocking higher BPMs (see glossary) than some VP level bankers, it will be the skill set one cannot learn from online valuation training or the vault that will land them the job. So, ladies and gentlemen, get ready for a new series of All Nighter posts on successful interning