This guide is your starting point to an overview of the skills required to work as an analyst in the investment banking industry. This is a technical training guide, and it will go into great detail to explain the analytical and quantitative work that junior investment bankers do on a daily basis. This guide is constantly being updated and improved, and it should be able to give you the tools necessary to successfully begin a career in investment banking. Specifically, mastering the technical concepts laid out in this guide will help you become an efficient analyst and thereby facilitate your development of the many other soft skills required to be a top-rated analyst at the bank you work for.
For context, we at Street of Walls are ex-investment bankers from top banks in New York City. We have also worked in related fields, such as hedge funds and private equity firms. While in banking, we structured actual corporate finance transactions, such as equity offerings and acquisitions, and provided advisory services to our clients in a variety of industries. We can attest from personal experience that the more you have mastered the concepts contained in this document, the better and more efficiently you will be able to perform the seemingly endless analytic tasks you will be called on to perform as a junior banker.
Our goal is to educate investment banking professionals and job candidates on what they need to know to perform their job well, and as necessary, to prepare for investment banking interviews. (These skills also apply to other related positions and fields, such as Private Equity, Hedge Funds, Business Development, and Finance roles within corporations).
When you are working as a banker, you will be working with financial and accounting concepts many times every day. Your peers at the bank you work for will be doing the same, and your performance on the job will in large part be determined by how well you apply these fundamental concepts in the work products you create. The field is intensely competitive—if you don’t know what you are doing, you will have a huge disadvantage and therefore have a very hard time being successful. Our path to learning these concepts was quite difficult, but as our experience demonstrates, investment banking technical concepts can be learned and mastered with the right source materials (such as this document) and tons of practice.
Valuation: A Conceptual Overview→