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Greed is an emotion as old as time. It's asking too much of human beings to expect those on Wall Street to take as detached a view of the commodity they see pass through their hands as would a manager of a power-generating station takes of kilowatt-hours. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of millions of members of the Anglican Communion, suggested that investment banking bonuses should be capped, and... Read more

Following our previous article on off-sites , and given that they seem to be on the return and that you are practically certain to be attending one sometime soon, here are six people to look out for: 1. The One Who Doesn’t Want To Be There Usually a relatively senior manager and the one most people want to schmooze. They genuinely believe that off-sites are a total waste of time (and usually... Read more

I was a newbie in a bank once, so please don't take this the wrong way. I’m writing this in the context of “things I wish I knew then”… 1) You’re useless One day, with careful nurturing, you might be useful, but until you wise up you are a cost centre. Whatever your job title you are an apprentice. 2) You’re dumber than the people you work with Banking pays better than real... Read more

Back in the day, JPM derivatives desk was known as being the most aggressive of the bulge banks(it still had the legacy team of Bill Winters tenure at the time). Certainly, for challenging interviews it blew all the other banks I looked at (GS, Deutsche, Merrill, Morgan) out of the water. This was the main reason I accepted JPM in the end: I knew the guys on the desk thought in... Read more

In the same way that Margaret Thatcher (allegedly) said that anyone using a bus aged more than 26 can count him or herself a failure in life, can the same thing be said for anyone aged 35+ who’s obliged to send in their CV for job applications? Some people seem to think so. “If I received a CV from a standard candidate who’d left university aged 21-22 and was a senior VP... Read more

There’s no issue more sensitive than age. In the UK, and the US age discrimination is illegal, which means banks are unlikely to explicitly ask you how old you are. But this doesn’t mean that they won’t be able to work it out. Most banks will assess your “age” by looking at how much full-time work experience you’ve had after graduating from university. Chances are that 10 years of full-time work experience... Read more

So you work somewhere in the middle office (risk/finance/trade support), and you want to work somewhere in the front office (sales/trading/structuring)? What do you need to do to your CV to make this happen? Firstly, a qualifying point. It is not that easy to move into the front office from a middle office role. It is especially hard if you are attempting to do so on the basis of sending your... Read more

The headlines are deafening – Goldman Sachs has committed massive fraud, Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan bought Washington Mutual on the cheap because he belongs to a secret cabal of politicians and Wall St bankers, and Stanford and Madoff stole money from old ladies under the regulators’ noses. And yet, every day, juniors at investment banks participate in a huge Ponzi scheme –the analyst and associate programmes. Wrap a cold towel around your... Read more

The counter offer can be a nightmare for everyone concerned: candidates, recruiters and employers. So how should you decide if you should stay or go? The counter offer is reactive If you strip off the emotions and set aside the tangible components of the counter offer, it becomes plain that it is a defensive strategy by the bank. Only after you resign does your employer swing into action by ‘looking into your... Read more

One of my favourite quotes is film director Woody Allen’s line, “80% of success is showing up.” But once you show up, how long do you need to stick around when it comes to your workplace? The perennial question of “face time” (i.e., extra time spent at work beyond normal working hours, especially to impress others) can be tricky to navigate, and the uncertainty can drive even the most self-possessed... Read more

Where do you want to be in 10 years’ time? Do you want to be a managing director at a ‘top tier’ bank, bringing home million dollar bonuses? If so, making this your explicit aim may not be the best way of achieving it. For many of the most successful business leaders, the explicit aim is not making money: the thrill lies in the job itself. Bill Gates was driven by... Read more

I love investment banking, and was a banker in a previous life, so I’m not about to embark on a spree of banker-bashing. I enjoyed and relished every moment of investment banking (I’m not being sarcastic here): the long hours, the tight deadlines, the arrogance, the shallowness, and even the odd maniac director (who obviously had been caged up in his office for one too many years). However, having... Read more

As Goldman Sachs' ordeal clearly illustrates, hubris can lead to horrible grovelling. Remember this: financial services is a cyclical industry. Things change fast. You may be popular now, but that won’t always be so. As a junior in an M&A team, I saw a stream of my peers move to roles in private equity and hedge funds. They were paid better and, more importantly, they did more interesting work. My CV... Read more

If you want to work in financial services and your CV includes long periods of inactivity and doesn’t chart a perfect career trajectory of the kind we described last month, you may be feeling a little sweaty. Long gaps in a CV never look good. This is particularly so in investment banking, where organizations like Barclays Capital run dreaded Chronological Indepth Structured Interviews lasting many hours, with the intention of... Read more

Our research suggests that most financial services professionals either overestimate or underestimate their abilities. Working with a sample of 105 experienced, educated financial services professionals, most of whom held senior positions in banking, we looked at the difference between how these individuals rated their ability to forecast the US-Dollar-Euro-exchange rate, and their actual forecasting success. The results were illuminating. They revealed that 51% of our target group were overconfident of their abilities,... Read more

Accepting a buyback is commonly considered tantamount to throwing your career under a bus full of members of Weight Watchers and reversing over it for good measure. Headhunters argue vehemently against buybacks. Admittedly, you can say that headhunters would – they don’t collect their full fee if, at the last moment, a candidate decides not to move. On the other hand, they may also have candidates’ wellbeing (somewhere) in mind.... Read more

If you want to go into trading, but you didn’t manage to get a position as a trader straight out of university, you may be feeling a little thwarted. Most banks hire fewer MBAs into sales and trading positions than into M&A or capital markets, so it can be difficult to ride the top business school route into trading. Fortunately, there are other less expensive paths to the trading desk.... Read more

Midway through every year, a whisper starts growing at investment banks everywhere. “This sucks. I’m gonna quit.” Sometimes it’s so bad that you just want out immediately. Other times, you plan to wait and stealthily make an exit as soon as your bonus hits your bank account. So here’s how you can break out of investment banking – without dying in the process. Your Mission It’s not as simple as announcing that you’re leaving and... Read more

It’s the time of year when you really ought to be getting calls from headhunters. If you’re not, and you want to, you may be doing something badly wrong. Following on from our previous article on how to get yourself headhunted, here’s what may be preventing headhunters from chasing you down. (Equally, if you want to avoid being deluged with headhunter calls, the points listed below act as a guide... Read more

If you’ve been out of the market for a little while, either on gardening leave, voluntary abstention from work, or as a result of redundancy, you may be a little rusty when it comes to remembering how things work in an investment bank. Here are six things to get you back on track: 1) Find... ...the toilets, the canteen and the exit, probably in that order. Then work out where all the... Read more