Since we discussed research in detail, I thought it might good to get a thread on S & T. I have heard that T compensation closely represents M & A without as many hours.
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Lanter 1

"Lunch is for wimps."

This is a good analysis. A few other points that I wanted to bring up:

1) I believe that M&A/IBD made up a large portion of the banks revenue streams in the 70s/80s/possibly even 90s? Nowadays, if you go read the annual reports of most banks you will see that investment management and S&T make up a significantly larger share of overall revenue than do the fees earned from investment banking.

2) In S&T, there are guys that can pull down $25M/year, $50M/year, and obscene sums of money like this if they are good. I wouldn't find it surprising to see the top trader at a bank be compensated the same as the CEO in a good year. It is also very easy to measure contributions and compensate people accordingly. IBD Managing Directors for the most part can expect to cap out at the 2-5M range unless they attain group head/global head of M&A type titles.

3) S&T is obviously very quant oriented. At the junior levels, IBD is about analysis, but at the senior levels it is just as much about building relationships. S&T people laugh at IBDers for working the long hours, but IBDers often have the rebuttal that their work is far more interesting and that S&T work is repetitive and somewhat anti-social.

They're both very different paths that require very different skillsets. Accordingly, the exit opportunities out of each are very different as well - S&T going mostly into investment management or hedge funds, and IBD going to private equity/corporate development.
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I totally agree with you here. I believe that goal perhaps caused my downfall at most of my applications. My background is tech consulting, which is not really a common ST feeder - but I tried to justify the technology aspects with modern trading systems. On hindsight, talking about an MC goal would have worked better ...

And here's a scary assessment of the financial industry:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... refer=home

Financial Firms May Make Deeper Cuts, Eliminate 175,000 Jobs

By Josh Fineman and Deirdre Bolton
June 24 (Bloomberg) -- The world's biggest financial firms may lose as many as 175,000 jobs by this time next year as Citigroup Inc. and other banks shed workers amid slowing revenue and billions in writedowns, executive recruiters say.

Financial companies have announced plans to trim more than 83,000 jobs since last July, according to figures compiled by Bloomberg. As more employees are fired, workforce reductions may exceed those from the market slump of 2000 to 2003 when technology-related shares collapsed, recruiters said.

``The worst is yet to come,'' Russ Gerson, head of New York- based recruiting firm Gerson Group, said yesterday in an interview. ``We are going to have a major contraction. This is affecting all areas of the investment banking universe and it's affecting all areas globally.''

Mortgage defaults have caused firms to incur almost $400 billion of writedowns and losses. New York-based Citigroup, the biggest U.S. bank by assets, has announced more than 13,000 job cuts, about 4 percent of its worldwide workforce. It may shrink further under a plan to trim the trading and investment-banking divisions by 10 percent, said a person with knowledge of the matter.

``For financial services this is about as bad as I can remember,'' John Challenger, chief executive officer of Chicago- based outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., said in a phone interview. ``The deal flow is not there. You just don't need as many people.''

Companies have announced more than $1.5 trillion of merger and acquisition deals this year, a 33 percent drop from the same period in 2007, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

`Chopping Heads'

About 17 percent of banking and securities jobs in New York were wiped out from 2000 to 2003, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said. The current round of cuts may claim 35 percent to 40 percent of the industry, said Gary Goldstein, chairman of New York-based financial recruitment firm Whitney Group.

``They just keep chopping heads,'' Goldstein said. ``They'll wake up one day and realize that they've cut too deep and now these businesses have come back and they don't have anybody to do them.''

New York-based Bear Stearns Cos. is cutting more than 9,000 jobs, or 66 percent of its workforce, as it was acquired by JPMorgan Chase & Co. Zurich-based UBS AG has announced 7,000 job cuts, and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. has trimmed 6,300 employees.

The Independent Budget Office in Manhattan said in a report issued last month that it expects 33,300 finance jobs in the city, or 7.1 percent of the total, to be cut from the peak in 2007. The industry lost 52,500 jobs in New York during the 2000- to-2003 market drop.

Wall Street's Tendency

``Wall Street has a tendency to over-hire in bull markets and over-fire in down markets,'' Goldstein said. ``This is just another example of that.''

New York has lost 10,000 financial services jobs since last August, a 3.5 percent decline, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington. Those figures don't tell the whole story because employees receiving severance remain on payrolls.

London will suffer 19,225 finance-job reductions in 2008 and 2009, or 5.4 percent of the total, according to estimates from the Centre for Economics and Business Research in London. That compares with 15,340 jobs, or 4.7 percent, from 2000 to 2002, the CEBR's data show.

``This is unprecedented,'' Gerson said. ``A lot of jobs are going to go away.''

thanks for the input...i think for me S & T or research are better options since I am married and would probably be divorced within a year of entering M & A due to the hours. I work til 7 or 8 now and i can't see my wife entertaining the idea of 11 or 12 especially if we have a child at that point.

sudden or pelihu, what are you insights on the future/current status of research?
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Lanter 1

"Lunch is for wimps."

S&T : Much less structured than M&A. If you like less structured work environment, go with this. Unless you've been in consulting, or other job function that is less structured than the others, you have no idea what this kind of work environment is like

M&A: More structured, process oriented.

in S&T, hour depends on what you specialize.. you could be working grave yard shifts to cover market in Asia. Obviously you guys are just thinking in terms of the money and think S&T is better than M&A. Don't do this for the money.

Some great info on this thread regarding S & T.

Do any of you have thoughts on what schools are best to get into S & T? I am not competitive for top seven US (dinged at Columbia), but Cornell, Haas (part-time), Oxford, Duke, USC, and maybe UCLA, NYU, LBS, Yale, Kellogg are within reach. I am open to working in any geography to start.

I realize some of these schools aren't traditional finance, but I've heard that the smaller candidate pools at such places can sometimes help distinguish you. I appreciate your thoughts on what might be realistic (or unrealistic) for a career-changer here.

Thanks.

Glad to have revived this thread.

For those of you who used to (or currently) work as traders on Wall Street, where do banks recruit from, apart from the usual suspects (Wharton, Chicago, Columbia, NYU etc)? Or does it vary by firm?

Buy side refers to asset management companies who buy stocks and other products and sell 'em later to make a profit.

Sell side means brokers trying to flog products to buy side funds to get rich on commission.

But I don't work in either so hit up one of the experts on here if you want more than the ladybird version...

PS since that joke probably only works in the UK, Americans please note: ladybird = ladybug = publisher of children's books.
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If I said something intelligent, it was probably by accident. But click "kudos" anyway - it will make me happy.

Hi - quick question, why would you put Harvard as a tie with Chicago, and leave out Wharton entirely? It seems to me that with a case-study-only curriculum and a focus on leadership, Harvard is interested in CEOs, not market makers.

LBS should be at the very top for doing S&T in the City, but I'm not sure if it translates to NYC.

Kellogg apparently has a surprisingly strong finance program, but it's overlooked because of the general perception that it's a marketing house.

UCLA feeds in directly to the LA and SF banking offices for most bulge brackets, but it's usually for investment banking, not trading - and it's in the West Coast, not NYC.

Wouldn't know about Cornell.

In general, S&T is rarely more than 15 per cent of the graduating class - even at the finance powerhouses like Chicago and Wharton, if you look at their employment reports, it's maybe 7-9 per cent. At Harvard, it's literally less than 1 per cent, same with Stanford. At a place like Rochester, brokerage is probably around 3 per cent.