Mergers & Inquisitions

The biggest problem with the corporate finance vs. investment banking comparison is that it’s not a 1v1 match. It’s more of a 3-way comparison between corporate finance jobs , investment banking jobs , and deal-related jobs that often get the “corporate finance” label. For example, some Big 4 firms label their internal M&A teams “corporate finance,” and they may use the term for related groups, s…

Along with “influencer” and “digital nomad” coaches, there’s an abundance of trainers eager to teach management consultants the secrets of moving into private equity. It makes sense: Consultants love to complain about their jobs, and they have the money to spend on career training. But you must be careful. While it is possible to move from consulting to private equity, it is not necessarily proba…

Oil & gas modeling is difficult to summarize because each vertical is quite different. It’s not like FIG , where you can broadly create two groups (banks/insurance vs. everything else), or even like mining , where there are also two broad groups (producers vs. miners) Instead, the three main verticals – Upstream, Midstream, and Downstream – are basically different industries . And to make things …

Canadian pension funds always seem to generate strong reactions. Depending on the source, they’re either a lower-paying, more “boring” version of standard private equity careers or a top exit opportunity for bankers . The confusion begins with the fact that these pension funds are huge, with many different teams operating in various areas and paying different amounts. The biggest pension funds ha…

If you’ve searched online for asset management interview questions , you’ve probably walked away disappointed. Yes, there are bits and pieces of information, but most “lists” are quite generic and gloss over detailed questions. Asset management interviews are like the “Generalist Olympics” because you need to know about a huge range of topics: The standard fit/behavioral questions, the firm’s inv…

Talk to any advanced degree holders in biology/medicine, and you’ll hear a few complaints repeatedly: “The pay is terrible! We grind away for peanuts in research.” “It’s boring.” “Why did I bother with this degree?” For many, the solution seems obvious: Break into finance to earn more and do something more interesting. There are plenty of options, such as healthcare investment banking , biotech h…

FIG private equity might sound like a contradiction or an impossibility. After all, “everyone” knows there isn’t much private equity activity in the financial services sector. If a PE firm acquires a certain percentage stake in a commercial bank, it gets classified as a “ bank holding company ” in most countries… which translates into heaps of new regulations and restrictions on the firm’s activi…

If historians ever write The Rise and Fall of the Internet , LinkedIn will be Exhibit A. Back in ~2003, it launched as a nice, intentionally limited social network. People logged in to update their profiles when they switched jobs, and they occasionally looked up former co-workers to see who had switched firms or moved to new areas recently. Even people with thousands of connections used the site…

I’ve covered the topic of artificial intelligence several times on this site, including why I stayed away from enterprise AI startups last year and a quick review of ChatGPT for investment banking a month after it launched . But a lot has changed over the past few years. These tools have advanced and become multimodal (i.e., they work with text, images, files, and video), many vertical AI apps ha…

The “commercial banking vs. investment banking” question is a bit silly because they’re not in the same category. Yes, some students apply to both roles, and some people move from one field to the other, but they serve very different functions and represent different types of careers. If you look at most online content about this topic, it’s a mix of AI slop and “comparison” articles authored by …