Name That Deal

So we're now four weeks into our six week training program, so far so good. Of course, that doesn't stop most of our managers from having us do plenty of work. Take today for instance, a nice beautiful Sunday in London, here I am reading a few hundred pages about infrastructure, a dream come true really. Anyway, that's neither here nor there, the point of this post is to tell you about one of the great wonders of banking, deal naming.

Seeing as most of what we deal with on an everyday basis is price sensitive and that we do a lot of reading on the Blackberry, etc. it's quite important that anyone looking over my shoulder can't see the email talking about Exxon Mobil's plan to buy British Petroleum (For those less knowledgeable in finance, I promise you that is NOT a real deal). So what do we do...we code name things, just like MI-6 and the CIA.

Now you might think wow, who cares, but this is serious. When things are busy in the Spring, there's little time for creativity. You get names like Project Fruit, where Apple has three parts, skin, seeds, and core but they want to divest seeds to banana who is interested in diversifying their own position. I know that may have made little sense, but the bottom line is, it's project fruit, that's boring.

Now when things slow down in August, it's time for the creative ones among us to recreate Michelangelo's work on the Sistine Chapel. For instance, there could be Project Blackhawk or even Project White Shadows. I know you like that last one, I am pretty sure it was in fact stolen from the Coldplay song. So far the analysts are allowed to play a quite serious role in these epic decisions. After all, we're the ones working on finding a value "seeds" all night on a Saturday. So next time you ask an analyst what he's working on and he replies that he is selling seeds to banana, I promise you he's not hallucinating.

Begging to be Bitches

Some hear about the interview process to become an investment banker and think wow those guys must get it good once they get an offer. Well they could not be farther from the truth. I'm not basing this on rumors from older analysts, this isn't a scare tactic, analysts really do beg to be bitches. Let's take my first ten days in London as an example...

I arrived on Saturday morning, the corporate accommodation is great, a Ferrari or two in the car park, Lamborghini, you get it. Well it's all a tease, truth be told I needed to pass FSA exams before training started in 10 days. No drinking, no welcome to London pub night, I've got to hit the books for a solid week non-stop to have any chance of passing. They give us three days of formal exam training instead of the normal minimum of five simply because they can. Oh and for those lucky few of us, we were expected to be working on deals for our managers because hey, why not. We're in the city, it's not like our managers feel they need to care about our exams, that's our problem, not theirs. The classic story is one of Luc, a Parisean graduate, who unluckily enough for me was working on a project with me. Luc decided after the three days of exam training that he couldn't be bothered by this shit, packed up his things, and took the next Eurostar home, leaving the job behind. Now that's style...

Just the beginning I'm sure, so stay tuned for Begging to be Bitches Part Deux once "full-time" work starts after training in five weeks.