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Showing posts from April, 2009

Invesment Banking Series: Deal from Sourcing to Completion

Investment Banking Series Post 2: Deal from Sourcing to Completion 1. How hard can it be? Very How hard is it to close a deal in investment banking? Very hard. It is extremely time-consuming and effort-intensive process. However, I believe that at least a large portion of that effort comes from sheer inefficiency and stunning arrogance of the management, but later on that. Let's concentrate on the workflow for now. 2. Typical workflow The order below is not a fixed one, but rather a guidance to what it may look like. The tasks will change from product to product, and from deal to deal, but this should give you a good idea of the process (and help me remember in the future). Sourcing A deal may be sourced from a newspaper article or a bold idea, but most commonly it comes from the corporate clients themselves. This is where the coverage bankers' ability to consume alcohol and entertain clients pays off, because they are often able to identify a business opportunity m

Investment Banking Series: Introduction

Investment Banking Series Series Introduction I am starting a series of posts on investment banking. There is a dearth of books out there that tell about investment banking, some of them even actually written by i-bankers, and I am not in any way trying to compete with them, but merely want to reflect on what I was doing up until about a year ago, how it worked and what where the lessons I learnt while being there. This will be about the way it is done in Japan, and more specifically in Japanese companies, and this is very different from the way it is (or was until very recently) done on the Wall Street. This post will be an introductory one, outlining the investment bank's functions and typical departments. The following posts will go into more details on specific products and real-life situations. Post 1: Introduction to an Investment Bank 1. What does an investment bank do? This is a simple question the answer to which may prove rather elusive. Historically, inves