<p>Do I-bankers really work 90 hours a week on a regular basis?What is the average? That seems high to me because if one were to work from 6am to 6pm, Mon-Sat that would be 72 hours(12x6)?How do they come up with 90? Thank you.</p>
<p>They work a lot later than 6 pm. Thats how.</p>
<p>90 average with spikes that can hit 120-140 during deal time.</p>
<p>Work longer than 12 hours on some days + work on sunday = 90 hours or more. There will be times where you will have to pull a double or even triple all nighter.</p>
<p>Wow,thats amazing. Thanks. Can others confirm this,do you have any links. Thanks</p>
<p>I found two sources that agree with 70 hours a week not 90...uhmmm.I show the facts.</p>
<p>Princeton review is a very stupid source to look at.</p>
<p>read The Running of the Bulls by Ridgway, it talks about wharton kids and how some go into banking. One girl joins Lazard as a summer intern and pulls a 140 hour week. Read Monkey Business, they reiterate the fact that the hours are bad.</p>
<p><a href="http://careers-in-finance.com/ibskill.htm%5B/url%5D">http://careers-in-finance.com/ibskill.htm</a></p>
<p>notice the 120 hours. The 50 hours listed on that site though is totally off base -- unless you working at some bad low level regional investment bank.</p>
<p>
[quote]
We've asked insiders at leading investment banks to offer us insight into a day in the life of their position. Here's a look at a day of an I-banking analyst at UBS Investment Bank.
8:00 a.m.: This is a good time to start for first-year analysts; everyone else comes in a half an hour or an hour later.</p>
<p>8:03 a.m.: Upon entering cube/office, check to see if voice mail light is on. If it's Monday, pray to God it's not on, because that means you didn't check it over the weekend and someone might have had work for you to do and wants it in an hour from now (or worse, wanted it yesterday).</p>
<p>8:05 a.m.: Get hot coffee or tea; you'll need it to wake up. Also, out of camaraderie, get one for other analyst guy who didn?t go home in the first place. He'll thank you for it, though he probably won't know your name in his state of stupor.</p>
<p>8:10 a.m.: Check e-mail. Receive a bunch of transaction announcements from all over the world, as well as some newsletter relevant to your industry/group sent out by another analyst to everyone. Unless you're into the latest news on, say, regulatory decisions on telecoms or the roofing equipment industry, it?s safe to delete and go on with the remainder of e-mails. E-mail might contain information requests by others in the firm, asking for case studies, connections with certain personnel at client firms, etc. As an analyst, you won't know most of this stuff anyway, so hit delete.</p>
<p>8:30 a.m.: Look nervously around the corner to see if associate or director has arrived, so nobody catches you reading a chapter in that novel you've been trying to finish on the weekends and spare morning hours for the past six months.</p>
<p>9:00 a.m.: Office/floor officially running, phones ringing, workday starts. Greet the assistants. Don't call them secretaries. Make sure they like you ? so you can avoid a short-lived career.</p>
<p>9:15 a.m.: After waiting for five minutes for slow network to load, find your files and continue on research/model ? whatever you didn?t finish the night before because you knew you still had this morning.</p>
<p>9:17 a.m.: Phone rings. Director/associate calls you for status on the one thing you haven't finished yet. Hold him off until you can finish it and curse yourself for not finishing up last night.</p>
<p>9:30 a.m.: Phone rings again. You know what director/associate is going to say so right off the bat you say, "I?m almost done." Then in between a lot of "okays" you curse your computer for being so slow.</p>
<p>10:00 a.m.: Conference call with deal team, which may include people from other product and industry groups who work in conjunction on a project with you. Managing director is likely to read over material that you were 90 percent responsible for ? but only your associate and director know this. Pray nothing?s wrong with numbers and grammar.</p>
<p>11:10 a.m.: Too early for lunch but you're already hungry. What to do before lunch? Put together a few public information books ("PIBs"), work on a pitchbook or still try to balance your model, which won?t happen because you?re too hungry to concentrate.</p>
<p>11:15 a.m.: Call up any other analyst buddy in some other group or office and make small talk. He won't have time to talk to you anyway, but it beats having to look at the model again.</p>
<p>12:30 p.m.: You're really hungry but you must print out some files for your associate/director before you leave, so nobody will come around looking for you when they need the printouts. E-mail only if they ask for it. They'll forget it's there anyway.</p>
<p>12:45 p.m.: Lunch across the street or, if you feel rich, pick up food from some fancy sandwich place a few miles away as a sign of your protest to the cafeteria's overpriced salads. Always take cell phone with you.</p>
<p>1:45 p.m.: Return to work and hope nobody cared that you were gone for an hour. Hope the firm is truly ?European? and understands your need for long lunches.</p>
<p>2:00 p.m.: Try not to fall asleep because of the heavy wrap or potatoes you had for lunch. Drink lots of water. Sit down with associate to talk about some preliminary research he needs you to pull from all kinds of sources. He tells you a few other things and goes off. Take notes to not forget a single thing. Best excuse later: "I only did what you told me to." This works only if you really did exactly that. Wait for presentations department to turn around a job you sent with the director?s changes. He always has some.</p>
<p>3:00 p.m.: New business coming in through another managing director. Your task, should you accept (and you will), is to fill out the first in a long series of forms that will be submitted to one committee after another for review. Essentially, every form looks the same and involves a "company overview." If this is a form for a credit approval committee for a "risky" company, be prepared to write 75 to 100 pages worth of memo, the contents of which are virtually identical with the company's 10-K. But, it has to be in UBS format so you can't just pass along the 10-K. You will agonize over the outline and dig through countless sources to extract information and dump it, re-formatted, into your growing file. This will take the rest of the week if your managing director planned ahead. Otherwise, the loan commitment is due in two days and you will not sleep.</p>
<p>4:30 p.m.: It's fair game that anyone, anywhere, anyplace can walk by or call you up during this time for tasks/chores, like putting together a set of trading/transaction comparables, make more PIBs, do extra research, fetch a few industry reports, download files accessible to everyone on the Internet, make printouts, put together working group lists for deal teams on a transaction, etc. Help out other analysts calling for some files or work you've done on something so they don't have to start from scratch on their related project. Sometimes a managing director calls and asks you something you could not possibly know. Sound as smart as possible and then defer question to your associate.</p>
<p>6:30 p.m.: Order dinner. At UBS, any dinner ordered before this time is not eligible for refund. Adjust stomach and eating habits accordingly from day one, or suffer irritability and lack of concentration going forward. Everyone asks you to put it on your corporate Amex card. Make sure you have enough on your personal bank balance to pay the full amount when the bill is due later, since your refund through the ubiquitous UBS expense system will take a month to process. Run around with list of who wants what, don't make suggestions, don't write down the wrong thing, and get on with it.</p>
<p>6:35 p.m.: Wait for dinner. (An alternative to waiting might be: A managing director/executive director gives a director a call. The director calls an associate. The associate calls you, and you?re evening/week/weekend is ruined because a client wants presentation and model X by the end of next week. The managing director assured the client we?d deliver model X by Monday, "no problem at all." He also said, "While we're at it, we'll also supply Y, Z and A and the reverse of X for two other companies? to further elucidate the issue for the client, who said he really doesn?t need all this. But after gentle insistence by the managing director, the client consents, and is glad he went with an ambitious firm such as UBS. After the director gives last instructions to associate or you, then wait for dinner.)</p>
<p>7:45 p.m.: Eat dinner, chat with other analysts about what's up. Take great interest in rumors, gossip and all kinds of BS that would get you fired if you spoke about it outside the conference room you?re all huddled in.</p>
<p>8:35 p.m.: Return to work. Call up internal library for some research you don't have access to and hope someone's still there, or it will be a tight morning tomorrow.</p>
<p>10:00 p.m.: Associate leaves, giving you a couple more things to do on way out. "Take your time, no rush," he assures and thanks you for the good job you've been doing in advance. You appreciate his gratitude but would also like to go home at some point.</p>
<p>11:00 p.m.: Discounted cash flow model inputs take very long and the model still doesn?t balance. It will be a long night.</p>
<p>2:00 a.m.: You check your e-mail one more time (in fact, you never close it in the first place, as this is the first rule of survival for anyone in investment banking), then you make sure everything is saved, and log out the computer. Call a car or and get some sleep.
[/quote]
<p>The hours are NOT good. Why else would they pay a fresh college graduate $100,000 dollars?</p>
<p>If you want to live in fairy tale 70 hour a week land go ahead.</p>
<p>I see, this is credible evidence.Thanks. Do you think there could be slow times. Maybe the description above is a special occasion. It's imposssible for one to work 120 hours a week for 50-52 weeks,the human body would shut down... There has to be slow times during the year. Butover all agree,the hours must stink.</p>
<p>70 hours is way too few for an investment banker. If you searched Princeton Review for financial analyst, Princeton Reviews' average hours is the average for all financial analysts not just ibankers. Most financial analysts at Fortune 500 companies (Disney, GE, etc) don't work that many hours. The hours are much more typical.</p>
<p>like I had said above, 90 average with 120-140 spikes during big deals.</p>
<p>I regularly speak to an alumni who's in i-banking and many times he'll contact me at 11 pm on a sunday saying he's just getting out of the office.</p>
<p>dcfa is absolutely correct. I don't have links or studies (and I can't imagine that any of them would be accurate, because anyone who is actually working as an investment banker on Wall Street doesn't have the time or the inclination to answer a survey), but I have lived the life and I know plenty of people who have and who do live the life. </p>
<p>Look, I'm a corporate lawyer, but it's Sunday at 11:15 p.m., and I'm taking a break from my work by posting here. I have to work another hour to hour and a half before I'm done for the evening, and then I have to get up in time to be at the office tomorrow morning before 8 a.m. I'll probably work tomorrow until midnight or so, unless something unexpected comes up, in which case I'll have to work a bit later to sort it out. This is not unusual, nor will I get any sympathy from my colleagues for working so much (because they all do the same). I have the good fortune of being senior at this point, so I am working from home unlike the junior bankers working on the deal I'm working on tonight, who are in the office scrambling to keep up with all of the changes to the deal that the senior bankers and lawyers are throwing at them this weekend.</p>
<p>Then would it be accurate to say: Working as an Ibanker is one never ending perpetual job.</p>
<p>Yes. The only thing is, it's a neverending perpetual job until you get fired, get fed up and quit, or die on the job. :)</p>
<p>why does anyone do this? Is their life that driven by money?</p>
<p>money and exit opps.</p>
<p>
[quote]
why does anyone do this? Is their life that driven by money?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Maybe they love the work... some people find a passion for this stuff... just like professional athletes who work about 90 hours a week during the season... they make a lot of money, work a lot, and it's due to their passion.</p>
<p>No one has a passion for doing endless hours of scanning. I guess if you're a head honcho trader I could understand this "passion" but the average i-banker is in it for the money; the field would be desolate if the govt. set the maximum payment at even $100,000.</p>
<p>Also, what athlete works 90 hours a week during the season? That's 13 hours per day! Take baseball, for example, the most "everyday" sport there is. Even if you consider loafing around during pre-game and shagging fly balls in batting practice "work," no baseball player comes remotely close to even 7 hours of work per day. Not to mention that most of the time their just sitting in the dugout or picking their nose in left field. Practice on an off-day is no more than 4 hours. Just a ridiculous comparison.</p>
<p>I think he means everything including play time, training, time spent on the road. If you factor in all this pro athletes spend just as much time away from home as Ibankers. Watch MTV cribs don't you notice that the celebrity/athlete always has a near empty house and fridge ....its cause they're always working.</p>
<p>How bought this, in the last 2 weeks i have spent about 40 hours doing something i have never done before and i have made 2,000 dollars. I created blogs and coded cron jobs, added new css and html files with help of friends etc etc. 40 hours. And an ex coworker has a family member that graduated from purdue for computer sciences who designs sites for mcdonalds, purdue etc etc, and he is gonna help me. I am just learning as well, pay can only go up. Obviously this isnt something stable because pple wont keep buying custom coded blog sites over and over, but once i get better and create more traffic/established websites, i will make more than first year ibankers and still be in college...haha suckers</p>
<p>Diezel... most professional athletes practice year round... if it's not doing skill training, it's lifting weights, or cardio work, or sitting in team meetings planning different strategy.... they work a lot.... plus the stars give up their personal lives for the most part.</p>
<p>
[quote]
How bought this, in the last 2 weeks i have spent about 40 hours doing something i have never done before and i have made 2,000 dollars. I created blogs and coded cron jobs, added new css and html files with help of friends etc etc. 40 hours. And an ex coworker has a family member that graduated from purdue for computer sciences who designs sites for mcdonalds, purdue etc etc, and he is gonna help me. I am just learning as well, pay can only go up. Obviously this isnt something stable because pple wont keep buying custom coded blog sites over and over, but once i get better and create more traffic/established websites, i will make more than first year ibankers and still be in college...haha suckers
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I mean that IS possible. I know someone who works only 4 hours a week on his website but makes six figures a year from it, and it's a website he started in high school. But it's something that's pretty rare and very unstable.</p>
<p>Same goes with designing. I've got a friend who pulled in over 100,000 last year doing design, this year he's pulled in nothing, it's a good thing he's pretty frugal with his money because he would have been screwed</p>