Career in Finance: "Ask Me Anything" Q&A with our Student Community (Part 2)

Welcome back to The Deal Room and part 2 of our mini-series on Ask Me Anything, which is a Q&A from our student community of analysts on our summer program. So in part 1, we talked about lots of things from, if I didn't do a spring week, am I doomed? The timeline of career progression within the investment banking department and lots of other good stuff. So go back, Listen to that if you haven't already done so. There's no real set order to listen to this mini-series. In this one, though, we're going to tackle a whole brand new series of 5 questions, which we'll kind of divvy up between myself and Stephen. So let's get straight into it. And a shout out to Hector Thornacraft, who came out with the first one for you, Stephen. Hector asked, what is the difference from a technical and cultural perspective of working in the UK versus the US?

Thank you so much for that, Anthony. Hector, what a brilliant name. Hector Thornycroft. I'm going to look out for that name. 20 years' time, I reckon. Pretty senior, bit of a bigwig, I reckon. But anyway, thank you for the question. So yeah, the difference between working in the UK and the US. So I've had experience working in Canary Wharf for HSBC and then moving over and doing the same thing in the US. Now, there's a couple of different ways that you can take this. The first is from a generic work perspective, there is a percentage increase in the intensity and the expectation in the US. Everything from you don't get as much holiday, you know, 15 days a year is pretty standard, 20 days probably. In the UK, you're hoping for 25. It's, it's longer working hours. I'd say you're probably in a probably more competitive environment because the industry is flooded with MBAs and incredibly technically smart people. So I definitely say it ramps up. In New York, it's a more fast-paced culture in general. You're busy every evening, you're busy every day. Interestingly enough, just as an aside, they drink a lot less from a social perspective in the US relative to the UK. So, again, this has changed a little bit in the last 10 or 15 years. But in the UK, quite a lot of the relationship building would be over a lunch. And over a lunch, you'd probably have a drink. You wouldn't have 100 drinks, but you might have 1 or 2. Whereas in the US, I think I made the mistake when we had our first client lunch and I ordered a, ordered a drink and everyone else went soft drink. And I thought, oh gosh, maybe I've got this a little bit wrong. So there's a slightly more slightly less relationship, slightly more hard-edged environment. The second thing that I want to say is it depends what bank you're working for, right? So HSBC was one of the big dogs in Canary Wharf, and it was a great place to work because we were the first phone call that most organizations made when they were looking to borrow money or, or do something interesting. Whereas in the US, working for HSBC, you're probably the last phone call. So from a work environment, it was lovely to be in the UK, not so good to be in the US. And just have a think about that from a career perspective. Join the bank that— in the department that is flying in the geography that you want to work, and then you get access to the best deal flow and things like that. And do you have any experience? Have you ever worked in the US?

No, no, no, I haven't. So But yeah, I've definitely had clients in the US that I've interacted with a lot, both in current and old job. And yeah, perhaps a little bit different in terms of the, when I would get to meet them often would be in the social context. So they'd come to London, I'd have to go out to entertain essentially. Yeah. And there's a little bit, you're right. There is definitely a difference in, did you, yeah. What I was gonna ask you was the same as then. So in terms of improving the value of your stock within an organization. I'm assuming then it's building those bonds at the pub after work often where you can make a lot of that, build that capital. But in the US then, is it just how good you are essentially?

Yeah, I think one, one of the questions that didn't quite make it into our list was, look, I don't drink, but a lot of my colleagues do. And is that, to what extent is that a problem? And happily today is much better than it was 10 years ago, and I'm sure it'll be better again in 10 years' time in terms of the acceptance of different lifestyles and things like that. My, my advice or my bottom line is if you are good enough, your talent will win out and your resilience and determination will win out. Yes, you might feel like you're missing out a little bit by not going out and doing, doing the social drinking. I still encourage you to go and be sociable. But by the way, just remember, if you're the one that's not drinking, just remember there's always someone that's drunk too much and they're probably making a bit of a fool of themselves. So maybe you're playing a little bit of an ace hand with regards to that element. But yeah, I, you know, you know, someone asked me, you know, do you still need to play golf? No. And if you're part of an organisation that is a little bit you know, old school, and you don't feel like you fit that culture, well, it's a good opportunity to think about what culture would fit you. So, you know, there are different cultures in different banks and different organisations, and you'll feel the sense maybe during an internship or during a work experience that that culture is the one for you.

I think one thing I might add there is that not geographic difference, but when I first started my career in 2006, our predominant interaction would have been with proprietary traders from prop shops. This is pre-financial crisis, and this was kind of the kind of classic— Barrow Boys were very common, and they definitely liked, um, to burn a candle at both ends. And one of the things I think that I was, um, kind of well brought into that community, even though I only did about 5% of, let's say, the extracurricular activities that were happening. The difference was I was always there, and I did a good job in the office. I helped in the process— it's the analyst and they're the trader— of helping them make money. And then I was there present then in the evenings. Um, and there was also— there was always a lot of, like, built-up then trust that helped then the fluidity of that relationship in the office environment. And I wasn't necessarily doing, like I say, even half the stuff that they were doing. You just— so you don't need to, is the point. But you— but I feel like you do have to be part of that to be— like in any tribe, if you just sat over there and you're not doing anything, well then it's going to be hard for people to really bring you in and trust you. So there's a degree of just getting involved, I would say.

So yeah, I guess, I guess a follow-up question— we'll, we'll jump around a little bit here— but to what extent To what extent do you think that office politics are important to progression within an org, within a firm, especially a, a relatively kind of hierarchical firm? Do you have to play the game?

Yeah, I mean, we could probably talk about this with different perspectives because I've always generally worked in fairly small outfits where it's much more flat, I would say. However, with that comes with, um, there isn't an HR and all those other wonderful, weird and wonderful departments to sort of go to and speak to. You have to deal with a lot of that stuff upfront yourself if you're going to manage it. I think that's a big difference. So being able to get used to confrontation, kind of management if you like, and being okay with that. As a young person, it's so difficult, like, to stand there and hold your ground or speak up or know when the line has been crossed and things like that and not have a kind of external third party to confide in. So yeah, I think there definitely is politics to a certain degree. I think you have to be sensible. I think there was still even at that level, a degree of optics. I think senior people still do expect you to be there at a certain time to have a certain length of lunch break to, Basically, I think a lot of the senior people, from my experience, set the behavioral norms. And if they're doing it, then they expect as a baseline minimum that the junior people to them are doing at least the same. So that's, that's been my experience of it.

Yeah, I think I'd add to that. I think, you know, office politics, yes, every organization has office politics. The most important thing is whether you're good or not. So your progression in the firm will be determined by just how good you are. If you, and actually if you're trying to, you know, brown nose your boss or whatever it might be, it might actually fly back in your face. Get your head down, do really good work, be present, play the game. You know, you might have to show up at the right time and leave at the right time, but that's just what's expected of you as a junior. Beyond that, trying to play politics as a junior, it's probably more likely to get you burnt. Just, just be good. That's, that's the, uh, that's the best advice I can give.

I guess, I guess one thing that I definitely got to learn through my early career was being able to not like someone but have a perfectly good relationship with them. I don't need to invest overly my energy into them. I don't need to give too much time to that, that relationship, but it needs to be managed in a way where you don't know when your paths might cross, or they might be a decision maker in a process. It's understanding how to manage people that you have natural frictions with and flourish with people that you naturally are drawn to. I think that's a skill that it's hard— you have to learn that through early career life experience, I think.

Yeah, don't have enemies. Don't have enemies. That's, that's the absolute key, uh, especially in, in— well, throughout your whole career, actually. What about this next one? Um, what attributes would you want junior analysts to have? Paint the picture of the perfect junior.

Um, okay, so for me, I can only speak of myself, so you other hiring people will have different perspectives. For me, when I'm— when we're talking about, let's say, grad level or students at university level, to me it is 100% about attitude. Because at this point, there's generally been a process which is vetted for general basic things like academics and so forth. So they've kind of cleared the necessary or jumped through necessary hoops. For me then, it just comes down to hunger, desire, motivation. I honestly believe apart from maybe a 10% of the jobs that exist in financial services, maybe less, maybe 5%. That anyone can learn these jobs. I don't think they're, I think they're artificially kind of barriered, well, probably for good reason by the people that sit in the powers that be to keep it a certain way. But I honestly think anyone can learn a lot of these roles. The difference between those who can do it and have success and those who can't and fail purely comes down to attitudes. In my opinion. So that's number one. So when I look out for someone on the desk, what is their energy, their demeanor? How do they operate with others? How do they receive feedback? How do they act on constructive criticism? How do they bounce back when something's gone badly? And a lot of that is totally non-technical. All of it is because at the beginning, why should you have super deep technical knowledge. You've not had any application of it in the real world yet. So that's my best judgment then of your future potential, I would say.

Yeah, I really like that. I mean, attitude is so important. I was just thinking about the times when I've had a direct report and they've just been absolutely brilliant. And it's just the, the most wonderful thing when you have a junior that's just fantastic. And the 3 things that come to mind, the 3 criteria that come to my mind, uh, for the perfect analyst, the first is they've got to predict things before you even ask for it. So if I say, hey, can you get me that report? And they say, I did it this morning, I've already done it. Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. You can't beat that. So they need to kind of get into your mind and go, all right, what does Stephen want today? I'm gonna do it before he even asks. That's number one. Number two, you need to have high enough quality work So that after 4 or 5 times that I check your work, I trust you. There are no errors in the first 4 or 5 times. So that is going to save so, so much time, me thinking that I have to check every single part of your work. So really, really smash it with regards to attention to detail at the beginning. And then thirdly, showing initiative. The last thing that I want is someone that's spamming me 100 times a day. Asking things that I can, you know, that they can probably figure out themselves. So if you have those 3 attributes, you're just gonna make the most, you know, if you make your senior's life easy and better and more enjoyable, A, they're gonna like you. B, they're gonna invest more in you because you freed up time, you freed up some of their time, and they're gonna wanna invest that back into you. So yeah, those are my 3. Gosh, you'll be a great analyst if you do those.

Yeah. And, and also not belittling what you can and how you can add value. Like, you do so much work with the Microsoft Activision, let's say, modeling. It's like, okay, you might be a gamer and you know infinitely more about the gaming suite of Activision. Well then share that because actually you've got great intel and you might go on to Reddit feeds and things like that, that you could present to a desk, for example, and go, oh, have you seen this? They're talking about that and they're connecting it to this. It's like, again, you know, just because it's not traditional doesn't mean it's not valuable. Alright, so back to you then. We had Sam Hoffmans from the Summer Group, and Sam asked, what are common misconceptions about investment banks that you wish more students understood?

Oh, good question, Sam. I'm going to keep this brief. I'm going to do two, uh, two common misconceptions. The first is that you work 16 hours a day intensively every single day. So we've just got off the back of, of the Summer Analyst Training Program, the second cohort, and they do a 24-hour M&A sprint challenge, and that is really, really intense. They have to put together a financial model and a a full pitch deck, and they often work very late and very intensively. Now, that is quite representative of some days in the office. But although you're expected to be at the office for quite a long time, the cadence of your day is not always mega, mega intensive. So you might, you know, get in at 9:30 and you've got some things to do, got some things to update, some emails to send, and then Maybe you send a pitch deck, a draft pitch deck to a director, and you're waiting on feedback, so you get a bit of downtime. Maybe you go to the gym, maybe you grab dinner with your fellow analysts, and then you've got some, you know, some markups to do from 9 till 11 PM. Yes, the days are long, but you're not, you're not glued to your screen for 15, 16 hours every single day. So it's maybe slightly less intensive than people might imagine. It's not, you know, sometimes it is very intensive. And then the second, this is an obvious one, but investment banking does not equal M&A. And we've spoken about demystifying IBD over the last few months. We've done a blog series on it. There are so many parts of IBD from an advisory perspective, you know, from a capital markets perspective, equity and debt capital markets, from a coverage perspective, sector coverage teams that we spoke about last week. So it's not just the big deals. The M&A, that's not investment banking. That's not the only thing that we do in investment banking. It's a lot more than that. So those are a couple of common misconceptions.

Yeah. My, my two quickly would be this idea that you have to have this kind of alpha personality because it's so competitive. You've got to be like fairly sharp and look over your shoulder and all these sorts of things. And yeah, as much as some of that will exist amongst a small minority of individuals. I think actually some of the most successful people I've seen from a graduate perspective have been those who are just nice people, super smart, but super collaborative, easy to get on with, and good, you know, good personality overall. And so you don't have to be this kind of, this generic kind of movie-style Wall Street person to have success. And actually, I think as you progress through the ranks. Someone who just looks out for themselves only to the disbenefit of others, I think can make some headway early on, but I think they get found out then as you start to go up the food chain when then people start to make more decisions about you, particularly managing and working with other people. My second one is exactly an extension of your second point, which is don't forget that within an investment bank overall, there's lots of other roles that are non-banking, non-trading. Technology is a massive one where I can't remember how big it is now. Tens of thousands of people at JPMorgan work as technologists. There's then salespeople, there's then people who work in law, accounting, in marketing. You know, there's so many other outlets there for people of different skill sets. It doesn't necessarily just need to be um, the obvious ones.

Okay, well, look, I mean, I'm going to ask you a question that might run counter to your, this is no longer an alpha environment. The final question that we've got, um, from an anonymous: did you ever get shouted at and why in an office environment? I'm sure you got shouted at a few times, An.

Well, yeah, a few. More than a few. Well, I think you said this earlier, the, you know, we started our careers probably around the same time, so around 2006. And at that period, it was a lot— I would say it was a lot different in terms of the immediacy of feedback that we used to receive from the trading floor as being part of, say, a research desk. And so there's two I can remember— there's, well, there's two I guess I can remember for different reasons. One was my first week and I didn't know anything at all. 'Cause I, you know, my story's a bit different where I got drafted in as a helping hand on a desk on the request of my brother. And I was reluctant to do it 'cause I didn't want to work in finance at the time. But I thought, look, he's asked me. I actually took a holiday off my current job at the time to go and help him. And then, um, on the desk one morning, and then my brother, it was my brother himself who was teaching me the ropes on a few things. And it was, what time was it? It would've been 7:30, I think was the short sterling open. So this is short end UK rates. And so my job in the morning was from 6 till 7, he wanted me to read all the news related to the UK. And then he asked me, how is short sterling front month, like, gonna open up or down? And I said down. And then he, then he absolutely lost his shit basically. And he was, he, because it was quite simple that I just, having not studied any finance or economics, I didn't get the principle of, you know, good news means high yields means bonds goes down. So that principle of bonds and yields, I'd never even been taught it at that point. And little to him, because my brother was old school alpha, alpha, super alpha, and he absolutely busted me to the point where I got sent home at 7:45 and told not to come back for the rest of the day.

Wow. There you go.

So that was, uh, that was one where it was, um, pretty brutal. But like I said, this is all very old school style and being taught. And then the one that actually stuck with me more and actually led to a very positive change, even though it felt very hard at the time, was I remember, um, the team I was managing was gradually getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Now, the problem that I had was all of the clients, because my voice was to speak on a microphone to transmit market news in real time, market surveillance, to lots of different trading floors. However, What ended up happening was because all of the clients requested my voice on the mic, I found it really hard to step off the mic. So therefore, I was doing kind of all the analyst work and doing all the mic time and not really letting them do a great deal. And I remember I had to go to hospital for an appointment and basically the desk missed something and it was quite catastrophic for our users because they missed an opportunity to make money. And it's very black and white in trading. And then I remember at the time my boss called me up and he absolutely destroyed me. And I remember thinking, oh my God, like I work so hard. Like I work so hard. I get up at 4:30 in the morning. I go to work at 6. I run this team. We're faultless every day. And then I step away, a wheel falls off and I just get busted. And I got really upset about it. But then actually, once I'd got over that kind of trauma, I actually thought, right, it's not healthy actually for me to take on the responsibility of like 15 people. Of course I can't do it because what's being demanded of us is just compounding. And that was a trigger point of when then I had to start to learn to delegate for pretty much the first time in my working life. And I mean delegate effectively, where I used to have to like handcuff myself to just not go on that desk near that microphone. And they were bad to start, and I'd have to just swallow it and just watch them. But gradually they got better. And then the manager's dream, or the coach's dream, the players outperform whatever I could have done, and they were better than I was. And that was That was then when I thought, okay, now I've actually learned how to manage people. Um, and it all came from that— was a really hard period because I was about 27, I'd say, at the time. So I was not young, but getting to the point of tipping into managing a bigger team, basically.

How about you? No, so I mean, look, in, in, in IBD, it's less— is, is probably a less shouty environment. I remember getting shouted at once, and I don't have any of the stories that you do, but I remember getting shouted at once for something that happened. And it was actually, you know, I don't think that what I did was particularly wrong. It was something to do with the pitch deck. But actually turned out that that director ended up getting fired a few months later. So it was actually like, you know, that is not the way to behave. and he got called out. You know, a number of analysts actually made complaints in a bigger organization. That's, that kind of stuff is not gonna stand if it happens a lot. And there are much more effective ways of communicating frustration and disappointment. Everyone is human, but, uh, I think if you do it repeatedly and you don't learn to, to manage your temper and things like that, then you will get called up, especially in one of those big organizations with big HR teams and things like that. But no, I, I, you know, not too many people shouted at me.

One thing I— yeah, I mean, that fundamentally might be a bit of a difference with the trading floor. And again, this was quite old school. But my final thing to say on— to conclude was just this idea about having a thick skin. I was quite, I guess, primed because I played competitive sport at a fairly significant level where it was serious at quite a young age. So I was used to not playing sport for fun. Sport was supposed to be played to win at all costs. And so therefore, it was run like an army, basically, with the way we trained, the way we do everything. So I'd already kind of had that training, and that actually was somewhat the key to my success in the early part of my career, because some of the really intellectually gifted analysts just couldn't take that nature of confrontation that would naturally happen because in trading it's very black and white when a mistake happens or something goes wrong. And there are multiple deadlines that exist throughout one single day. So it's not as long in terms of overall time as say banking, but it's very high intensity. And you need to get comfortable. And this is one thing I was always comfortable with, and I think the traders actually liked me for that reason. They could bust my balls, I'd take it, I would learn, I would not make a mistake again, and we would all go to the pub afterwards and be mates.

Yeah.

And it's like, if you can— it's hard to do that. Some people could not do that. They're like, oh my God, that guy, I'm gonna like, gonna kill him. But that's just toxic then. Once that seed is planted and it manifests, it's bad.

And that is one of many reasons why I've never set foot on a trading floor.

Cool. All right. Well, yeah, thank you, Stephen. And, and thank you to everyone for sharing their questions. If you have any more questions and you're listening to this, there is the option on Spotify, I know, to leave a comment. So please do. We do see them, I promise. And if we see enough of recurring questions, we will definitely, definitely incorporate it into some future episodes. So hopefully this mini-series of 2 episodes was useful. I wish everyone the best. Have a fantastic summer. Uh, it sounds like we are going away. We're not. We'll be back as normal next week. So see you then.

Thanks, Ant.