Do investment bankers travel a lot?
Depends on your role and level in the Organization. Client bankers tend to travel with their clients on global roadshows for equity or debt. M&A professionals will travel to analyse and negotiate cross border transactions. Energy and Project finance bankers tend to travel to where their clients' largest Projects are.
You travel to a potential new client for a pitch meeting to build trust. Traveling also ramps up during due diligence, where Investment Bankers coordinate management meetings and site visits with the potential investors. Traveling is usually reserved for Senior Bankers as they primarily manage the client relationship.
Typically, entry-level investment bankers, for instance, can expect to receive around 10-15 days of vacation per year. This can increase to 20 or more days as they gain seniority and move up the ranks.
The short version here is: Yes, investment banking hours, especially in your first year or two, are always bad (think: 70-80 hours in the office per week). But junior bankers also tend to exaggerate their hours, often by not subtracting downtime or breaks during the day.
Ways to make a lot of money in this world
Sure, anybody can make a good living being a doctor or a lawyer or an investment banker where you can make ~$200-500K per year a few years after you finish with your studies, but you hit a ceiling very quickly unless you start your own practice (aka start your own business).
If you want to work in regular office hours and have a social life, a career in investment banking is not for you. Want to know why? At bulge bracket banks, you would find the analysts working for more than 100 hours a week.
Investment banking is often described as a high-intensity, fast-paced career that's as demanding as it is rewarding. The phrase “time is money” couldn't be more relevant for investment bankers whose days are filled with meetings, data analysis, financial modeling, and constant interaction with clients.
The well-known bulge bracket banks like Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Bank of America tend to work analyst-level investment bankers at the industry standard scale of 60-80 hours per week.
Investment banking is not a normal 9-to-5 job — investment bankers can work anywhere from 60 to over 100 hours per week, depending on the company and the deals at hand. According to a 2021 Working Conditions Survey by Goldman Sachs, first-year investment banking analysts work more than 95 hours per week, on average.
Average number of hours slept by financial services professionals by age, 2024. Table with 2 columns and 7 rows. Bankers, generally speaking, are not sleeping well. Across all respondents to our survey, people working in finance got an average of 6.72 hours of sleep a night.
What is the Goldman Sachs 15 minute rule?
Have you ever heard of Goldman Sachs' 15-minute rule at Goldman Sachs? It means you have to respond to an email in 15 minutes or less no matter what. It doesn't matter if you: - showering - hiking in the mountains - attending your son's wedding - saving someone from a drowning vehicle Unreasonable?
Is It Even Possible to Date an Investment Banker? The good news is that, while most definitely more difficult, it's still quite possible to both date a banker and date as a banker. Plenty of people do it and plenty of people have found their lifelong partners while working as bankers. There will be rough patches.
Age Range: It's nearly impossible to reach this level before your early 30's, so we'll say 35-50 for the range. Few MDs continue working until the official retirement age (65-70); it's a stressful, high-pressure job, and past a certain net worth, it's just not worth it.
Hedge Fund Manager
To make this one of the jobs that pay $1 million dollars a month, you'll need to be one of the absolute best in the world at it.
| Position Title | Typical Age Range | Total Compensation (USD) |
|---|---|---|
| Analyst | 22-27 | $140-$190K |
| Associate | 25-35 | $225-$425K |
| Vice President (VP) | 28-40 | $450-$650K |
| Director / Senior Vice President (SVP) | 32-45 | $550-$750K |
Investment banks often compete to attract and retain top talent, which drives up salaries. 2. High Levels of Responsibility: Investment bankers handle complex financial transactions, such as mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings (IPOs), and large capital raising deals.
The world's biggest banks reportedly slashed more than 60,000 jobs in 2023. It was a year in which investment banks suffered their second year in a row of declining fees amid a downturn in dealmaking and companies going public, the Financial Times (FT) reported Monday (Dec.
New York. New York is widely considered to be the financial capital of the world, making it one of the best cities for a career in finance. Home to some of the world's largest banks, insurance companies and credit rating agencies, New York is a leading city with a red-hot investment banking and securities market.
Investment banking is very well paid, but sign-on bonuses and a healthy pay packet come at a price. To survive as an investment banker, you need to have a high stress threshold. You also need to be willing to say goodbye to your social life for a few years.
It's very common to work 75+ hours per week in investment banking because of the culture and job expectations. If you're in a top-performing group at a top investment bank, you'll constantly be on live deals that require lots of weekend work and late nights.
How long do investment bankers make?
The average salary for investment bankers is around $118,200 per year, according to Payscale data from January 2024. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects that securities, commodities and financial services sales careers—which include investment bankers—will grow by 7% from 2022 to 2032.
All this is time consuming, and investment bankers work long hours. Work weeks of 70 hours or more are common, and all night sessions before deals close are the rule rather than the exception. Still, the work is extremely interesting, and those who stay in the profession report high levels of job satisfaction.
You're probably losing 1-2 hours of pure free time a day and you'll have to do a little bit of work on the weekend. At 60 hours per week, you can still celebrate a glorious work-free Friday night. You can get off around 5-6 pm and not touch your laptop until Sunday.
In the high-stakes and fast-paced world of finance, the work-life balance of Investment Bankers often teeters on a fine line. Known for their grueling hours and the high-pressure environment of financial markets, Investment Bankers are frequently at the mercy of market fluctuations and client demands.
Now while senior bankers generally prefer that the junior investment banking staff take their holidays around Christmas while it's quiet, they do need a few bodies to man the pit and take the bullet for any Christmas staffings.
