Together With Reorg |
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Welcome Back! I've got an exciting newsletter for you guys today. |
A Message from Reorg: |
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Reorg, the premier global provider of credit data, analytics, and intelligence, recently released its second-quarter 2024 earnings analytics report of U.S. private and public sub-investment grade borrowers. The report finds that the median U.S. company's top-line growth continued to decelerate year over year, while EBITDA growth finally picked up after dropping for nine quarters in a row. Interest coverage has also moved up quarter-over-quarter. The report is crafted by Reorg's team of expert analysts using data from Fundamentals by Reorg™, our proprietary financial data platform. |
To access the full report on our website, follow this link. |
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Let's Talk About The Buysider's Dilemma |
A lot of information in this newsletter piece is focused on what I struggled with after my 2+2. Aka, I spent 2 years on the sellside, and then 2 years on the buyside. That's standard for a lot of finance professionals, but the big question a lot of people struggle with is what to do after. |
If you talk to the average finance professional 4-5 years out of school, they're starting to reach an inflection point in their career. They've followed xyz predefined path and then maybe they're continuing to follow a predefined path by starting their MBA at age 27-29. |
Not everyone will follow the 2+2 math perfectly, but it's generally that type of timeline within the first 4-6 years of someone's career. |
But for a lot of folks they're dealing with something entirely different: |
They might be ready to leave finance They might be ready to leave New York They might not be getting that Senior Associate/VP promote.
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The third point is potentially the biggest problem. I hadn't realized how things are getting relatively dicier for mid-level folks out of work, so it felt important to start writing about this. |
 | Wall Street Gossip @WallSt_Gossip |  |
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Hadn't realized until recently how many 5-10 years of experience Wall Street guys are out of work right now | |  | | | 3:00 PM • Jul 16, 2024 | | | | | | 27 Likes 0 Retweets | 2 Replies |
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This pyramid below is the best visual you should be thinking about as you progress with your career - the amount of seats at each level can decrease over time. There may have been 20 Analysts you came in with…5 Associates in your Buyside seat group…and like 1-3 Senior Associate seats at that same Buyside shop. So many firms naturally have "Up or Out" structures. Once you get past the Associate level, get ready because you're now 1) not a junior resource and 2) you're now expensive if you're not bringing in $$/executing. |
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Many firms on the street follow "you have three months to find a new seat" policies when pushing people out. |
For a deal-making role (banking/private equity/private credit) there's a lot of understanding about what you need to do to get to each level. It's also pretty visible whether there's room for a VP or not. For public credit, the progression is a little flatter and more about taking on increased responsibility and recommending investments that perform well. |
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Let's Take A Look At Some Of The Options |
1) Stay in your current role: Maybe you're happy and safe in your role! If that's the case, pat yourself on the back, you did it. But you should still read the rest of this newsletter just in case. |
2) Go back to the sellside if you like it over there instead for some reason: Some people actually hate the buyside and want to go back to banking or on a sellside desk. It might be a P&L thing which I certainly get - the stress of trying to find outperformance in the market can be a lot. |
3) Pivot to PE: Are you in a non-PE role pre-MBA or early on and still want to break in? You're at the age where there's a reasonable path to break into an off-cycle seat. If you're in private credit but invest in minority equity, then you may have a good chance to pivot over. If you're back/mid-office PE at a smaller, flatter shop, you can try to pivot over one day. |
4) Pivot to an "Ops" role in PE, or work in a Portfolio Company: Don't want to be a PE Associate but want to stay within the ecosystem? This could be for you. You get to roll up your sleeves and try to focus on value creation levers. |
5) Pivot to a Hedge Fund: This is certainly a different skillset from IB or PE that you need to learn, but all it takes is a good year or two at a Hedge Fund to set yourself up for the rest of your life. This a very common path for the 2 years IB + 2 years PE crowd. |
6) Go Get an MBA: While I'm anti MBA due to hating studying (as opposed to taking action) and not wanting to lever myself, a MBA is a good fit for some folks and may be a good fit for you if you need to pivot, if you're getting supported by your firm (or parents), or if it aligns with your career advancement. |
7) Pivot to Credit (Direct Lending or Buyside Credit): At a certain point, a lot of younger PE or Banking folks pivot into Private Credit or Public Credit in order to get a better work life balance, while still having high compensation. PE Associates/Senior Associates make really good Direct Lending candidates too. |
8) Go to a new firm but do the same type of work: Maybe you were just at the wrong firm? This is a likely possibility. Some places are a lot chiller than others and maybe you were just at a bad place with bad culture. If this is the case then this could be a huge sigh of relief where you still may be able to enjoy your work, get paid well, but work with better people. |
9) Move cities: There's a point where for a lot of people, NYC becomes a dump. Some people never like NYC, some people only like it in their 20s (this is my stance), some people will happily stay forever. Figure out your preference. Whether it's NYC or elsewhere, sometimes a change of scenery is nice. Whether it's for job opportunities, better weather, better livelihood, or moving with a significant other. |
10) Leave the industry and do something F500 or Corp Dev related: Sometimes this doesn't happen by choice for a lot of folks. But I'd say if you're ready for the pivot, then make the pivot. The amount of bloat and heads in a lot of Fortune 500s can definitely support someone pivoting from a highly efficient finance role. |
11) Get into Tech: So much talent has headed from Banking Analyst Classes to Tech over the years. There's so much $ floating around in the Tech ecosystem and if you as a non-technical person can find the right seat then you're getting into a fast growing industry full of an abundant amount of firms and jobs. |
12) Get into the Startup world: Maybe you want to join a startup/make a startup - if you have a great idea and an MVP then this could be the move. |
13) Go buy a SMB: The Harvard Business Review Guide to Buying a Small Business has motivated a lot of Ivy League MBAs to go out and buy a small business. I've written about the phenomena here, as generational issues are leading to a lot of boomer owned SMBs to sell to bootstrapped entrepreneurs. As long as you're okay with PGs (personal guarantees) then go ahead and buy "five bodegas". |
 | Alex Press @alexnpress | |
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lol |  The Cut @TheCut
This is the 'Summer of the Finance Bro,' so writer Joanna Rothkopf set out to talk to men 'in finance, trust fund, six-five, blue eyes' about their dating lives. trib.al/n3yPGCP |
| |  | | | 8:32 PM • Jul 17, 2024 | | | | | | 4.02K Likes 152 Retweets | 21 Replies |
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14) Go become an entrepreneur: Have a DTC or SaaS business idea? Go ahead and start it if you think there's demand for the product. |
15) Find a slower paced role in the same industry, or in the same company: Definitely doable and goes back towards the point that you may just be working with the wrong people or at the wrong company. |
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So What's The Answer? |
The answer comes in a variety of different forms. But you need to have a conversation with yourself on your ideal earnings vs. life outside of work balance. Only then can you figure out what's best for you. Beforehand though, I'd say there's a handful of questions you need to answer: |
What is the trajectory of my career? When do I want to buy a house? Where do I want to buy a house? Do I want to get married? When do I want to get married? Do I want kids? When do I want kids? How many kids do I want? Am I okay today if I was unemployed for 12-18 months? (If not I would recommend thinking through how to fix that.)
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But back to the main question - what is the ideal scale of time vs. health vs. money you want? Hopefully health supersedes both of those - so it's really a time vs. money thing. |
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Different people have different work goals. You need to align in your organization or career path for that and if you're not then there's a fundamental problem you need to fix. You need to figure out your best hours vs. earnings trade-off, and presumably this may be different at age 25 vs. age 45. |
If you're a type A driven person who moves very fast, then you can operate very well in that a quick moving, entrepreneurial environment and may love the thrill. There's truly a lot of people who love working intense hours into perpetuity. For anyone who read the Steve Schwarzman book, you learned he regularly sleeps only 5 hours a night, which he's somehow able to sustain at 77 years old. He's been well compensated as a result (he's worth over $41 Billion). That's certainly an extreme example and an outlier of someone who is okay on 5 hours - but you get the point. |
It's very important to acknowledge people have different goals and different preferences which leads to different outcomes. But even if one person says "you should work over the weekends to get ahead" it may not align with someone who is okay with a different outcome. So we're not here to subject ppl to one certain path….just to weigh tradeoffs. |
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What am I doing? |
You need to walk through your own goals/preferences/outcomes framework, but I'll walk you through mine (although I may be semi-atypical given I created optionality for myself) |
Ultimately, I'm going to focus on growing High Yield Harry, as well as other platforms I own into something bigger. The time to go all in is in around 2 years, or less. But I imagine things will look a lot different two years from now, and more so five years from now. |
I've been very entrepreneurial minded on here, while continuing to make sure the community comes first (I'm posting memes and videos constantly, I've posted something every single day since I've started doing this), and that we're all having fun and/or learning new stuff on here. As it relates to the Time vs. Money debate, Freedom > Money is probably my preferred order. Not going into the office 4-5 days a week and being able to head down to Florida during the winter whenever I want is putting a grin on my face while I write this. But of course, all things come with sacrifice. |
An entrepreneurial type of end game works really well for me, because the reality is I kind of have an abnormal work ethic where I'd prefer to just be working instead of spending the middle of the day watching Netflix or one of the 168 baseball games a team will play in a season (on that note, NBA and NHL regular season is also pretty worthless IMO). Likewise with day drinking constantly. Or aimlessly scrolling social media without a purpose. I'd rather save drinking, hanging out, binging a show on Netflix or whatever until the evening when I've already got stuff done during the day. This changes around when the weather is nice, but there's nothing to do in the city in the winter. |
A lot of people that know me know that I respond to emails quickly and at an abnormal hours. Or that a typical weekday may mean that I wake up, hit the gym, go to work, eat dinner, do HYH related work, and then fall asleep after watching 30-50 mins of TV. |
So if you can be "always on" and are okay making a lot of upfront sacrifices, then I certainly recommend a more entrepreneurial path. This is what I prefer so I don't have to live in or commute into Manhattan and can have locational flexibility. |
Ultimately, I want to focus on helping you guys |
Since July 2023, I've really ramped up what I'm doing with this page including 1) creating credit and buyside career resources, making strategic bolt-on acquisitions such as Wall Street Gossip and The Wall Street Rollup to increase scale, and improving sophistication on sponsorship pricing and re-occurring revenue. |
There's a lot more work to be done. But ultimately I'm 100% dialed into serving wall street professionals and figuring out how to make your lives easier or how to entertain or inform you all. That's my core goal. That's what I'm zoned in on. |
I'm playing around with some ideas…but sooner rather than later I'm looking towards getting a bunch of job opportunities in front of the community. |
There's a reason why Finance Meme accounts have generally gravitated towards also having a recruiting arm. The audience is there, recruiters are an expensive middle man, and processes are very lengthy. Making a more efficient, faster, and cheaper process for recruiting finance talent is a no brainer. |
Given a lot of you guys work in Finance (and more specifically work in Credit, Private Equity, or Investment Banking) it should be pretty seamless to get jobs in front of you all. |
The biggest headwind to finance meme pages recruiting at a large scale is that a lot of thinking at financial institutions is quite antiquated and is less adaptable to disruption, or trying new things. |
But of course, one firm's loss is another firm's gain. |
I'm in the early stages of exploring this, but feel free to reach out if you want to collaborate or partner as your group looks to add headcount. |
Anyways, that's all I've got. Speaking of Jobs - I've got a list of postings below 👇️ |
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In Other News: |
Credit Jobs: MidOcean is hiring a Senior Credit Analyst to focus on TMT coverage. Bloomberg Intelligence needs a Senior Credit Analyst. Waterfall Asset Management is looking for a Private Asset-Backed Credit Analyst. Liberty Mutual is looking for a Direct Lending Associate. |
HYH Premium: Want full access to HYH Premium? HYH Premium is my Library of Credit Career Resources and City Guides; including the materials I've used to land high-paying jobs in Private Credit and Public Credit. We just put out a new city guide for San Francisco and San Diego last week! |
Upgrade Below Before Pricing Increases in January 2025 👇️ |
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Want more Finance Newsletter Content? Subscribe to our twice a week 5-minute finance newsletter The Wall Street Rollup here. |
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