‘Nothing is more succinct and articulate than just doing the jerk-off hand motion.’ –GS Elevator
In a nutshell, a roadshow involves taking borrowers (bond issuers) to meet potential investors. A roadshow is a series of back-to-back investor meetings and group investor lunches, all sandwiched in between market update calls and flights to the next city, where the process repeats itself. (…)
The worst job, by far, on any roadshow is that of the analyst. Analysts are the pledges of the financial world. It’s where everyone has to take his two or three years of licks after coming out of the training program. It’s masochism born out of stupidity. What at first seems like the big time soon turns into eighteen hour days, seven days a week, all of it mindless crap like churning out pitch books and just about any other shit work the Associates don’t want to do.
On roadshows, analysts are responsible for carrying pitch books and prospectuses, which can be fucking heavy. In addition, they oversee all logistics (hotels, flights, cars, etc.) and most importantly, do anything the client asks. All of this has to be done without fucking up – period. The job fucking sucks, but all analysts want to do it.
When I was an analyst, if another bank was responsible for roadshow logistics and I wasn’t traveling with them, I would often give their analyst intentionally incorrect information, the wrong floor, or the wrong tower, anything to make them look bad. Although the banks may be working together on one deal, we’re always competing for the next one.
{ GS Elevator | Continue reading }
When asked about his job at cocktail parties, Alan Johnson has a curiosity-piquing line. “You know those big paydays on Wall Street?” he says, typically waiting a beat to deliver the punch line. “I have something to do with them.”
Mr. Johnson, a consultant who speaks with a light twang from his native Alabama, has never worked for a bank. Nor will his company, Johnson Associates, pay million-dollar bonuses to any of its 12 employees this year. But as one of the nation’s foremost financial compensation specialists, Mr. Johnson is among a small group of behind-the-scenes information brokers who help determine how Wall Street firms distribute billions of dollars to their workers.
“The misunderstanding many people have about this industry is that pay is whimsical,” Mr. Johnson said in a recent interview at his company’s Manhattan office. “It’s not.”
Compensation consulting is an obscure corner of the management consulting industry, where practitioners operate in the shadows of high finance. Large Wall Street banks, as well as hedge funds and private equity shops, rely on such consultants to help them structure bonus payouts and devise severance packages, and to provide data on what competitors pay.
“You can give them some insights,” Mr. Johnson said of his clients, who have included the boards of Credit Suisse and Lehman Brothers. “You can say to them, ‘You’re being too wimpy this time,’ or, ‘You were being too aggressive last time.’ ”
This year’s bonus season, which began in late December and will continue until February at some companies, is expected to be the worst for industry employees since 2008, as regulatory measures and economic uncertainty have cut deeply into profits and made pay pools smaller.
In his annual compensation survey, a closely watched report that was sent to roughly 800 of the company’s clients in November, Mr. Johnson estimated that bonuses in the industry would fall 20 to 30 percent from last year’s levels.
That would still leave employees at firms like Goldman Sachs, where the average worker took home $430,700 in total compensation in 2010, much better off than workers in other industries. But it would represent further slippage from the sector’s highs before the crisis.
Bonus math in a financial downturn is a delicate art. Because the payments typically make up at least half of an employee’s yearly pay, erring on the low side can mean losing a star performer to a rival firm.
“Someone on Wall Street might go apoplectic when he heard he got $3 million and another guy got $3.5 million,” Mr. Johnson said.
previously { Today is the day when many at Goldman are finding out what their bonus will be. And it’s “really ugly.” }
photo { Brian Finke }
