Customer Reviews

Bigwig Briefs: Become an Investment Banker - The Real World Intelligence Necessary to Become a Successful Investment Banker

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I would highly recommend this book to anyone going into, or thinking of going into investment banking. I am now an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, and this book was really helpful to me landing the job (and getting integrated)

The excerpts from leading investment bankers is extremely useful and really helps for interviewing or just getting integrated into a new investment bank. Especially useful was the chapter written by the head of investment banking from Merrilly Lynch.

The book is short and very easy to read. I highligh recommend it for anyone interested in investment banking.

This book is a collection of general advice from 10 professionals in banking and venture capital. It's short (which I found to be both a pro and a con) - about 90 pages long (in huge font with large spacing) - and takes 1-2 hours to read.

The advice in this book concentrates on personal qualities and work ethics that will help a beginning banker become successful in his/her career. It does not cover what a job at an i-bank or a private equity firm would actually entail (i.e. job responsibilities, corporate structure, hours, pay, etc.). For that information, check out the Vault Career Guide for Investment Banking - it is very comprehensive, despite its poor rating and reviews here on Amazon.

I found most of the advice given in this book very repetitive and, in most cases, rather obvious. Most of the professionals stress that you need to have good "people skills", understand issues from the client's perspective, and build a long-term relationship with the client based on mutual understanding and trust. Most of the other advice given in the book stems from these three basic facts. Sure, it is useful to know this - but I think that most readers of this book already do.

A significant area covered by the book is a very high-level discussion on various methods of valuation - what you should keep in mind right now, how to project future value, etc. I found this pretty interesting, but too high-level - not really exploring any details. Only the last chapter (from Alex Wilmerding of Boston Capital Ventures) features some actual numbers - but, again, with very little detail and no explanation of how many of the numbers are derived.

I was hoping to see more information that would be helpful in preparing for an interview at one of the large firms presented in the book. However, I found almost nothing of that sort. A couple brief pieces of advice are scattered throughout the book. Here's one from Eduardo G. Mestre of Salomon Smith Barney (and later repeated by Patrick Ennis of ARCH Venture Partners) that has some use: "A stint at a real job in some nice, big industrial enterprise would also probably be helpful, especially if you intend to become a so-called industry specialist. Believe it or not, it actually helps to have at least a notional understanding of the business you are trying to finance, buy, sell, or restructure" (49-50).

In conclusion, the book provides very basic advice that you, as the reader, will most likely already know - either from common sense or from other extremely basic knowledge of the banking/finance world. However, the book is very short and might be worth reading just for the few useful pieces of advice scattered throughout. Plus, perhaps you can quote these guys to impress your interviewers.

Pros:
+ short, quick read
+ a few useful tidbits of advice scattered throughout

Cons:
- short, simply not enough discussion of details
- a lot of repetition
- most of the advice is very basic - stuff you probably already know