Sunday, July 6, 2008

So for the Fourth of July I worked for a few hours in the morning and afternoon. An associate that just came into our group from another group in the bank is on his first deal. He is really paranoid about his first book because he wants to make a good impression on the senior people in the group, so he basically has been hand-checking every calculation in the book.

It's been crazy because for every number I put in he wants to know where it came from, how it was calculated, and why I did it that way. It makes for a solid book, but when you're the lowest guy on the wrung and the associate wants more and more work done, you end up working a LONG time just checking and re-checking the numbers. Today is Sunday and I put another 8 hours in on this book before we sent it off to the Vice President.

One of the things that I worked on today was company profiles. This is something I've done a lot of as an intern. Basically you put together a profile of the business segments, put historical and other financial data together with projections, pull shareholder info (basically find out who the top 10 shareholders are and how much they hold), and make a few charts with historical price data. It's about three or four slides per company, with six or seven companies in the book. You use it as a backup for your comps.

One of the hard things about scrubbing the numbers in a book is that you pull numbers from a lot of different sources, but they all have to be the same throughout the book. It makes sense that if you look on page 25 and see that estimated EBITDA for 2008 is $435, that on page 68 the EBITDA number should also be $435. The problem is that on the first page you calculated it yourself using 10-Ks and Qs and projections based on historical trends, then on the other page you take it from research reports. Basically it's tough because you have to figure out what the research analyst did to get his number and then reconcile that with your own numbers. It's a time-consuming project but it has to be done to make it perfect.


The 4th of July was great because I got to see a really good fireworks show. It rained a little, but it didn't matter. I met up with my other intern friend out here and we went down to the water. We watched the fireworks then went out with some other guys that he works with to hang out. We don't drink, but the other guys do so we went to a bar and just talked about our different experiences at different banks. It was really interesting to hear the similarities and differences between the different banks.

Yesterday I actually got tickets to see Wicked. I didn't win the lottery that they have going there, but some girl that won ended up giving me her ticket because she couldn't use it. It was awesome - I was on the front row in the middle and could see everything just fine. It was cool to see the faces of the actors and catch the nuances on stage that you miss from the back row.

Well it was a good weekend and now I'm going into my last week. Weird. Wish me luck!

1 comment:

Gary Wong said...

I have been having a great time reading your blog and it really gives me a lot of useful information.

I wish you luck to receive an IB offer in the end and I would definitely write an internship blog like you if I had an offer in the future.

Cheers!

Gary