Future and Opportunity of Investment Banking

[good one]

What is going to happen to those salaries and positions now? Will someone entering as an analyst, trader, etc. still be able to make $1M+ after 10 or so years?

To me you should look at what happend when the dot com bubble collapsed.
The days of being a computer science major and dropping out to become an overnight millionaire with recylcedpaintchips.com is over and will never come back.
That doesn't mean though that there is no money to be made in the software business now.
Same thing with IB....an easy path to a million dollar salary was always unrealistic and unsustainable. That doesn't mean there will not be a ton of money to be made in investment banking in the future though.

 

[Mecro]

Quote from rmurphy00:


Will someone entering as an analyst, trader, etc. still be able to make $1M+ after 10 or so years?

This was never true. Most IBankers, by a very wide margin, burn out within a few years. The percentage of those who make it past the associate level is not high and never was.

Trader and analyst are two different sides of the industry, by the way.

 

[EMRGLOBAL]

Very true, IB and Private Equity guys burn out very fast. It can be very stressful, and even more so with the currenty psychology of "DOOM" being pounded everyday.

However, plenty of money to be made if you can handel the stress and turn the "DOOM" into hope for certain key area's you are funding.

 

[EMRGLOBAL]

PS: at the end of the day, one of our top guys, clears 700k a year, did not attend MBA school and went to Mich.State for undergrad.

MBA means nothing to the front line, it works if you wana push paper and crunch numbers. In negotiations, Sales, and relationship building, MBA falls to give you advantage.

"What They did not teach you at Harvard Business School " is a required reading when I joined my group.

 

[trade4succes]

Quote from ctheo1:

ray -

i spent approx. 10 years in that business working for bulge brackets.....most of the time.

without being overly dramatic, the financial industry and in particular wall str as we know it has disappeared. a new structure will emerge. don't ask me what, as i don't know.

that said, you need to sit and think what you want out of your life and out of your career. some of the things you mention in your post give me the feeling that you're looking at that sector for the "wrong" reasons. these are usually the people who on the one hand are lucky enough to get in line, but on the other, never get to the front of the line to drink from the well. i will give you a very brief example: i started my career at a top firm after going through their "mba training class". [basically a bunch of mbas indoctrinated to the ways of the bank....] there was 57 of us at the beginning.....

...... guess how many of us were in the industry (let alone the bank) after 2 years....15!!! what was interesting was that most of the people who had left, were people with really super grades and the like. anyway.....

time is on your side. find out what you have a passion for and what you're interested in. then go for it. do not care if it is "fashionable" or not. do not care what other people say. the world of high finance, or money shuffling as i'd like to call it, will always be there one way or another. money will always be made. but the people who have the passion are the ones who will also be fulfilled in the end.

good luck

starting with 57, ending up with 15 after 2 years..

any idea where those 43 guys could have gone?

 

[Anaconda]

Quote from trade4succes:

starting with 57, ending up with 15 after 2 years..

any idea where those 43 guys could have gone?

Grad school or hedge fund/private equity/venture capital.

Of course, now it's different so who knows. Besides grad school there is the choice of unemployed, moving back home to parents, corporate finance or small business.

Oh yeah. Don't forget daytrading.