How old were you when you first broke into finance?

21, equity research associate, no certifications, junior year internship at leading investment management firm, and lots of student loans to pay off

Did a couple internships while in college, but went non-finance directly out of school for a few years.  I was 26 when I really got going.

ohai wrote:

I suppose it’s reasonable to ask when someone got the first job that was satisfactory given their personal standards. Or even, when did they first achieve certain compensation categories. Questions about when you “made it” in some finance industry always seem nebulous to me. 

Totally agree – was just having a very similar conversation with a buddy from HBS who has been working in sell-side equity research for the last couple years, and both by nature of the current economy and also circumstance (he’s switched teams a couple times because his lead analyst got sacked), he’s basically making pretty much the same as he did before he got his MBA. Yet given the state of the overall finance industry, nobody in the field is complaining and people seem delighted just to have a job. It’s a totally different world in finance these days, especially in many sell-side functions and I would guess to some extent on the buy side as well. Timing is everything.

For what it’s worth I started working in 2004-2005 and part of me thought that things would be much better after I graduated from business school (I left for school in 2010 and couldn’t imagine things getting much worse than they were). Well I don’t think things have become horribly worse but the overall hiring prospects in the industry certainly haven’t improved much, if at all.

I stole $20 from my mom when I was 9, does that count?  I’m gunning for Jon Corzine’s job.

I stole $64 dollars from my sisters’ babysitting stashes over the course of a couple weeks when I was about 4 or 5, and I hid it in the radiator in my bedroom.

I ended up getting caught after bragging about it to a neighborhood friend, who ratted me out.

I was born for this industry

Haven’t broken in yet. Currently working in accounting in Big 4 since I couldn’t get a job I wanted in finance or banking. Nobody would sponsor a work visa for me given the awful job market and ready supply of US applicants, and I couldn’t get a desirable job in Canada due to the lack of finance jobs, and again bad finance job market.

Going to hang out here for a year or 2 and get my credentials, then hopefully be able to move into a better job.

took me until i was 28 to get a buy side job, still going through CFA program at the time.  it took me a while after college to differentiate my ass from my elbow, so i figure i started about 3 years behind a normal schedule for a front office path on the buy side.

finance = FO @ SS or BS

Sorry if this seems like a daft question, but I have to ask why it is that if the reputation of the CFA charter is the “gold standard” in finance, why does it seem like so many people in finance don’t have the charter, yet so many people outside of mainstream finance do? My question is a bit influenced by my participation at a recent NYSSA social hour, where it seemed like there were a bunch of charterholders but there was nobody else in a traditional sell-side or buy-side role other than a couple of people there (out of the 20 or so that I met).

numi wrote:

Sorry if this seems like a daft question, but I have to ask why it is that if the reputation of the CFA charter is the “gold standard” in finance, why does it seem like so many people in finance don’t have the charter, yet so many people outside of mainstream finance do? My question is a bit influenced by my participation at a recent NYSSA social hour, where it seemed like there were a bunch of charterholders but there was nobody else in a traditional sell-side or buy-side role other than a couple of people there (out of the 20 or so that I met).

Come on Numi, your skills are better than that.  THe answer is obvious isn’t it?

people who have “made it” in finance, are in a good spot career-wise, have a much less likely chance of attending a NYSSA social event.  

One the flip side, everyone trying to “make it”, people from either in back office or non-investment/revenue-generating believe that “networking” at these events is an awesome way to get in, and so these events always end up like this.

Pick up lists of PM’s and I would bet easily the proportion is probably around 70% have the charter (which keeps going up btw)

I dont know…maybe its the type of firms I’m interviewing at, but they all are interested in having interview candidates pursue the CFA program. In many cases, there are multiple charterholders at the firm and all respect the designation.

The other thing is that “the gold standard” in financial accreditation is a marketing slogan promoted by the CFA institute.  As a charterholder myself, I don’t particularly mind it being percieved that way, and it is not entirely implausible: people do tend to think that - for portfolio managment - it is a very challenging and relevant designation (which is not to say that it covers everything, or that everything it covers is relevant in all roles).

I do think that the CFA does promote conservative portfolio management practices.  Someone a few years back here pointed out a study that compared CFA only and MBA only portfolio managers.  The conclusion was that there was no distinguishable difference in absolute performance, but that CFAs tended to run more conservative portfolios from a risk standpoint.

One of the things I have been pondering, but don’t have the data or time to test, is the sense that the best portfolio managers may not necessarily be the ones who are obvious.  We go into environments that reward risktaking and those which punish it, and so the superstar returns that attract attention tend to be the ones that are outliers.  And outliers may almost by definition be people who took crazy risks and happened to get lucky, or had one good call that put them on the map (Paulson?  Whitney?).  They may be competent (this is not an argument that all good returns portfolios are just luck), but it’s still difficult to tell if they are really great, or just riding on a particular trend that the market has decided to reward for a few years.

The ones who are good portfolio managers may be the ones who are consistently grinding out single hits and keep them coming in, over time learning how to turn singles into doubles, etc..

I’m not 100% sold on this, because I do think Buffet has talent, and I suspect that Jim Simmons actually has something real there, but I do think that the media has a tendencey to pump up as a genius whoever it is that has done well over the last 3 years, and the public has a tendency to just go ahead and believe them.

Whether or not that is the case, I think it is true that there are probably plenty of managers that are talented that go under the radar.

i m 23… have been working in compliance for a while… still havent managed to break into finance :(

Went back to finish undergrad at a later age (state school). Broke into finance when I graduated at the age of 30. No CFA and no connections…built a network from scratch.

Career progression has been Back office -> MO -> sellside research -> buyside equity analyst.

Best of luck to all of you pursuing a job in finance.