Hello all, I wanna get your advice on something. I have a few interviews coming up and I was wondering if you could give me some guidance. I was invited to take the test for the financial advisor-training program, PMD (Practice Management Development) with Merrill Lynch, an interview for an entry level position in transfer pricing with Deloitte, and an interview and exam for a mexican private equity firm (entry level position also). I wanna get an MBA in 4 or 5 years from a top school, so which option do you think will help more in achieving this goal? Assuming I get offers from these three places, should I go with ML, Deloitte, or the PE firm? Any advice is welcome! Thank you!
PE firm
girls just wanna have fun dude
Dont know how many top 5 MBA programs based in Mexico if that narrows it down. UOP?
I wanna get a top 10 MBA from the US. What do you think?
I say definitely not ML - advisor path is not for me/most.
rezje Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I wanna get a top 10 MBA from the US. What do you > think? I hope you had great grades and will have a great GMAT. Differentiate yourself.
Thanks guys! I’m just concerned with the career progression that a financial advisor has… which from my point of view it seems that there is none. You know how in investment banking or private equity you progress from analyst to associate to vp and stuff, right? It seems to me that being a financial advisor doesn’t have much career progression. What do you think?
I actually interned at a ML branch office when I was in college. I’d agree that there is no progression per se in this business. Most people will leave within 2 years because they can’t build a book of business. Those who are successful ast bringing in money tend to stick around and make good money. If this is something you are going to pursue, expect to:1-make tons of cold calls 2-work long hours and weekend for the first 5 years as the targets for new FAs are quite high. Of course, there is always some 30-year FAs who take home $600K working 40 hours, but those tend to be the rare exceptions.
ML - No, unless you want to be a glorified salesman Deloitte - No, unless you want to be stuck as a bean counter PE - Yes, you will not only do interesting deals, you will be exposed to international work which you can build on for your MBA application.
I am a retail broker with ML and as much as I hate to admit it, everything mentioned above is correct… If you are young, your tea-bag full of testosterones and want to go far in life and do interesting stuff, stay away from ML. If on the other end you are older, want to settle down in a comfortable family life, not work crazy hours and bring back good bacon (or course granted you are successful at building a book), then ML is not all that bad! Yeah…. And the title thing is so true…. In 10 yrs, went from PMD, to FA, to senior FA, AVP, VP, FVP and I promise you that nothing else changed apart from a few more trees wasted on ordering new business cards and a few more gray hair….
You probably have most “cachet” saying that you work in private equity for a lot of the reasons that others have mentioned on this thread. However, even so it totally depends what you’d be doing there. Even private equity has a middle and a back office like every other company. What matters more than where you work is what you do.
jackofalltrades Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > ML - No, unless you want to be a glorified > salesman > Deloitte - No, unless you want to be stuck as a > bean counter > PE - Yes, you will not only do interesting deals, > you will be exposed to international work which > you can build on for your MBA application. Agreed. I would rank it this for MBA: PE > Deloitte > ML For job security, it would be: Deloitte > PE > ML
PE > abism …Deloitte > …cliff … ML
PE sounds the most exciting here. As a transfer pricing consultant myself at a big 4, I have to say its a pretty good job, so dont discount it. But I do admit, PE would be number 1 for me. However all 3 jobs vary quite a bit in waht they are, so pick whichever job you think you’ll enjoy the most.
transferpricingCFA Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > PE sounds the most exciting here. > > As a transfer pricing consultant myself at a big > 4, I have to say its a pretty good job, so dont > discount it. But I do admit, PE would be number 1 > for me. > > However all 3 jobs vary quite a bit in waht they > are, so pick whichever job you think you’ll enjoy > the most. Thanks for the advice! Could you tell me more about what you do as a transfer pricing consultant? I’m not very familiar with this term, so if you could give me some insight or tips to prepare better for my interview… I would appreciate a lot!
TP is great for delving into multinationals. You have to look at their operations, functions, and risks to see how profits should be split. Its nota science TP its an art. It involves a lot of research into a group and the industry, so you do learn a lot about it. The most interesting work is working on planning projects. Could be the shift of Intellectual property within the firm or soemthing like that, and it requires valuiations to be done etc, and deciding strategically if its a good idea etc. Other interesting work is tax aligned supply chained stuff, shifting functions and risks around subsidiaries in the supply chaiin, working with consultants to get the most effective operation and aligning it with ta to ensure that taxes are kept low. Also lots of restructuring work these days, TP work is needed to be done for it, which is also very interesting, again relocation of functions due to restructuring, valuations of them, planning the TP for the new restructured group etc. Probably the nuts and bolts work which is not done as much thee days as its not so sophisticated is the producing of TP documentation and benchmarking. This involves putting together full documentation on the group company, involving the industry, economy, pricing and reasoning, functional and risk analyses etc. Just everything, so reuqires a lot of research and you get to understand a group and how it operates. The benchmarking is the tedious process of finding comparable independent firms that are performing similar functions and risks to determine if the profit level ois in an adequate range. This kind of work for me was interesting at first and I still dont mind doing, but can be tedious at times, particularly benchmarking. Its very interesting work, and in my opinion is one of the best areas to work in at big 4.You really get a broad top down overview of a business. Ive been doing it for over 18 months and its true there is not much travel (personally i dont want to do much anyway). I do it in europe, most of the travel is just out to the clients office in your home coutnry and to other countries in europe generally for trainings, but sometimes to visit client subsidiaries. But then again most of the work you do at the low level is going to be documentation, which is comparability searches etc, and justifying the price setting. So this could be a bit boring for some. As I said, I like it, but Id probably rather do PE, but couldnt get into it.
So CFA does not lead to PE jobs, good to know now. Only a top MBA can get you in the door it seems. CPA, CFA, CAIA, etc won’t help either
Isn’t transfer pricing just tax?
Isn’t transfer pricing just tax?