You know you are having a terrible social life when...

Your typical weekend is spent watching highlights/re-runs of old cricket matches
You find yourself in the gym on a Saturday night and compete for treadmill with 60 year olds.
You actually start missing those days when you slogged your a$$ off for days at a stretch without weekends and worked till 2AM everyday
Your google reader has no unread posts
You have posted in all your Orkut/Facebook groups in the past week and eagerly wait for replies refreshing the page
You have nearly exhausted watching the contents of your 500 GB Hard disk
And last but not the least, even your maid feels you spend way too much time at home on weekends (which means you are forcing her to cook!!!)

End of I-banks

The saying - 'Every dog has its day' has never been more apt. Investment Banking is having such a bad time that even my house maid has an opinion or two on its future.

A couple of days before I had a conversation with my taxi wala

Driver : Saab, aap kaam kya karte ho?
Me : Stock market mein kaam karta hoon
Driver : Sunaa ki bahut bure din chal rahe hain and logon ko nikala ja raha hai, fikr mat karo is ke neeche market nahin jaayega. Bhagwan se prarthana karoonga. Aap log nahin hoge to raat ko 1-2 baje kisko le jaaoonga?

So much so for the predictions by the hotshot bankers sitting at Wall Street!!!

And lately even my batch mates in marketing companies seem to be taking keen interest knowing about the Subprime lending and how Lehman managed to lend so many billions in bad housing loans ( and some even add that they never knew Lehman gave housing loans !) Some wise ones even take a dig at you with an irrefutable argument- " People might stop buying CDOs, but would they stop taking bath?"

To irritate you further, you get to see headlines such as " End of I-banks", "I-banking no longer a sought after job in the IIMs" and consultant batch mates grinning at you and saying - " I told you so!".

Meanwhile the cartoonists are having a field day, I liked especially the one above...

And with Sensex crashing the way it did yesterday, a terrible diwali at the Dalal Street this time around and some more time for my taxi driver to hone his Buffet skills...

Jai Mallya

I still remember the first cricket match I saw live in a stadium. I was in my first year of engineering at Anna University, when our hostel decided to watch the India vs England match at Chepauk. We went for a stupid Arnold movie ( don't remember the name) at 10 PM. Carried blankets and mosquito coils along with us to sleep outside the ticket counter. We thought we were smart, only to find there were about 500 people before us. We managed to get a 200 rupee ticket ( that was 20% of the monthly allowance sent by my father) and each of us were allowed only two tickets. We managed to sell the other ticket for 500 rupees and used the money to buy the exorbitantly priced items in the stands ( lemon rice for Rs.70). We were in the queue at 8.30 AM for a day-night match and people who came late at 12 didnt get a seat inside!!!!!! India managed to win that game but all of us were dehydrated in that heat, managed to catch a 21G and returned to our hostel in Guindy. I promised myself that I would never watch a match live again.

Fast forward to 2008, I choose to watch the IPL match between Bangalore Royal Challengers and Chennai Super Kings at the Chinnaswamy stadium. I go to ticketpro.in, enter my CC details, get the tickets delivered to my house. Me and my father reach the stadium at 6.30 PM for a 8PM match, no frisking whatsoever, was allowed to carry everything except waterbottles. Get a super seat in the second tier of the stadium with 2 electronic screens staring at us. And cell phones having blue tooth had regular updates of the players coming in, state of the pitch, weather etc... wow!!!! Although RC lost the match, we had an enjoyable time. India is surely growing and you bet, IPL is set to change the face of sporting events in the country

P.S : - For people who are wondering why my post is titled, 'Jai Mallya', our team owner is Vijay Mallya. I guess he didnt hear the cries of politicians asking for the cheerleaders to dress decently. Washington Redskins danced merrily and god promise, I have never seen so much skin show live !!!! Thankfully, they were dancing in the tier below and I was standing on the top tier while my father was sitting. This avoided the embarassment....

Miss u L LAN....

I had tried a lot, but never managed to blog until I get bored to such an extent that I have nothing else to do. Today is one of those days. After the convocation, I'm back to Bangalore for a month before heading to Mumbai to start my career again, this time at Enam IB.

Most of us hated the rigor at IIML. Staying up till odd hours, managing with 4-5 hours sleep, cases, presentations are a norm in most B-Schools today, but at IIML it was just a little bit more taxing and during the first year we were constantly reminded of how around 40 students were thrown out in our super senior batch.

In the second year, though the rigor increased, we were able to cope up with that as we learnt to beat the system. All people knew what range of CGPAs each one fitted into and however hard you may try going to the next band of CGPA wasn't easy. So junta started optimizing their time utilizations in such a way that they had a good resume to show to the companies during final placements. All cases were not read, all presentations were not prepared for and the amount of time put in any assignment was directly proportional to the amount of value it added to the resume. This way, junta started having lots of time (relatively!) in their hands for leisure (read for stuff from L LAN)

The resources available on the L LAN were amazing. Any movie ranging from the ' The Great Train Robbery (1903)‘ to American Pie VI was available. Most of the sitcoms telecast on the US television were available the same day on the insti LAN. And after coming to Bangalore, even to lay my hands on an mp3, i was made to think twice as my Airtel internet connection has a 3GB download limit. Then unable to restrict my usage, I upgraded to unlimited data transfer but still downloading is painfully slow through bit torrent. At last count, How I met your mother's latest episode has been downloading for the past 3 hours. Miss u L LAN!!!!!!!!

Aussie media's preparation for the Indian tour

Came across a funny take on the Aussie cricket reporters today. I had been waiting for a while for an Indian reporter to take on the Aussie media. My wait is finally over :) - Link.

Just an other entry

just thought I should put a new entry in my blog
Updates from my side....
I finished the internship in Mumbai and back in namma Bengalooru for a week before I head back to Lucknow. Got an offer to join back the company which I'm seriously considering...
I had mentioned in my previous blog about writing a follow up post about I-Banking. No enthu currently.So its been put in the back burner...
I'm jobless after a long time, so actually finding it hard to kill time. Favorite pass time these days is Orkuting.Beleive me, browsing through various profiles and reading scrapbooks is a good way to kill time though some people might think its invasion of privacy. My point is - When its in public domain, who cares!!!

I-Banking

I am returning to blogging after about 8-9 months. If you had read my last blog, you could have seen the enthu in me. New place, new people, full of expectations. Now after 9 months, I am doing my internship in Bombay. 3 terms are over, all those lofty ambitions of international i-banking summers and topping the batch have disappeared. New batch is going to join and these days I'm busy answering their queries. I feel just like it was yesterday that I got my IIML admit. Now in another 8-9 months I would be out of L.

When I joined IIML, I wanted to be an investment banker. Didnt know the ABC of Finance, leave alone investment banking. Applied to all the investment banks which came to campus, got shortlisted 2-3 and talked loftily about how exciting and challenging the field is and what not. Now I feel so embarassed when I look back at my rantings. I didnt know anything about I-Banking and I told all these to the VP, who had come down for interviewing, somehow managed to impress him with my knowledge of Glass-Steagall Act & relation between Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan (thanks to Wiki) and landed up in my current assignment.

Now I am working with that Investment Bank in Bombay. I am an Analyst here. But contrary to the popular perception about glamorous i-banking jobs, this job is a killer. I work for 14-15 hours per day, six days a week. People work like hell here. Personal life just doesnt exist.

Ok now for the million dollar question.... What do investment bankers actually do?

At Analyst level, you analyze the balance sheets and make pitches to the clients urging them for a potential M&A or fund raising or debt restructuring etc... If the clients like your pitch, they take the proposal to the next stage and ask you for a more detailed report. Once you give that, your job is over. Rest of the deal is taken care of by the Associates, VPs, MDs... Even in the intial pitches, you do a very small part of the work.If your typical output is 8 slides( the pitches are given in the form of printed ppts called a pitch book), 2-3 slides goes into the final pitch book.

Now back to I-banking, there are also a couple of other career paths here - Sales & trading and Equity/Credit Research. Sales & Trading involves buying & selling of bonds,shares & other such instruments for large buyers.It is equally paying as Corporate Finance, as my division is called here because we deal mainly with corporate houses and our work involves raising funds through IPOs, M&As etc... Equity Research is another area of investment Banking. They dont have direct clients but do sort of a syndicated service - tracking companies regularly, predicting their future cash flows, EBIT, EBITDAs and giving a recommendation on whether to buy, sell or hold the stock.It is by far the most Finance intensive job in Investment Banking. But strictly speaking, the term investment banker is used only for Corporate Finance guys, though Sales & Trading people also lay claim to it. Equity Researchers are not considered to be I-bankers.

After 2 or 3 years, you become an associate and if you are in NY or London, your peers would leave to pursue their MBA. And after another 2-3 years you become a VP. So in 6-7 years, at about the age of 30, you can actually be a VP!!!!!! But there are so many VPs in Investment banks.

To be continued...