Your First Year in Equity Research

If you’re a junior in sell-side equity research today, you’re entering at a strange time.

The pay isn't what they used to be. Budgets are tighter, headcount is leaner, and senior analysts are being asked to do more with less. That tension shows up everywhere.

And quietly, many senior analysts are frustrated. And they are DMing me the same complaints: juniors are immature and lazy, they don’t present themselves well, and they don’t take ownership. Fair or unfair, that’s how seniors feel about you.

At the same time, I have noticed not the best college graduates are heading into finance.

I’m an evangelist for helping capable people from non-target schools break in. But I’ll also say something uncomfortable: on average, a candidate from a target school is stronger than one from a non-target. That isn’t elitism; it’s pattern recognition. And today, I regularly see people landing sell-side associate roles from schools I have never heard of.

And I understand why this is happening. The money is not there anymore. The most capable people now have more leverage than ever. They can use labor, capital, distribution — the internet and AI — to build something of their own. If they don’t start companies, they choose tech for better pay and lifestyle. The competition hasn’t disappeared; it has simply shifted.

But here’s the paradox. Because the best talent is not choosing sell-side equity research, there is opportunity for those who stay. The bar to stand out might be lower now. #1 analysts are going corporate, those who stay can either claim the throne or move up the rank.

The question is whether you’re positioning yourself to be competitive when that moment comes.

If you are just starting out in sell-side equity research, this article is about what you can control — and how to position yourself to win.

Control what you can control

Now let’s talk about what you cannot change.

You cannot change your senior analyst. You cannot make the industry as lucrative as it once was. That is structural.

You can leave the industry, but let’s not romanticize the alternatives. Investment banking has worse lifestyle and tougher personalities, with many people exiting within a few years. Corporate roles come with politics, slower progression, and lower pay. The buy-side does not reward effort, it only pays those who produce (alpha). No path is perfect.

There is also no shortage of middle office and back office people who would gladly take your seat tomorrow.

So what can you control?

You control how you show up. You control your maturity, your ownership, your work ethic, your professionalism, and your reputation. You can decide whether you become part of the complaint or the exception.

If you want to get paid, you have to be good.

If you don’t want to read any further, take this with you: if you aren’t good, you aren’t getting paid anywhere.

Wall Street — like any high-paying profession — does not reward average. If you are average, you become replaceable. And replaceable people eventually get cut. In the AI era, this dynamic will only intensify. The top performers capture a disproportionate share of the value created. The mediocre get automated and laid off. That’s why the top AI companies are handing out eight-figure compensation packages to elite talent — they understand power laws.

It’s true that sell-side research does not pay what it did in its golden era. But what it still provides — especially early in your career — is an extraordinary skill stack.

You learn how to analyze businesses and industries at a deep level. You observe how companies create value and how they compete over time. You learn to communicate clearly and to sell ideas persuasively. You learn to manage relationships and carry yourself in front of executives and investors. Most importantly, you gain a real understanding of how the capital markets ecosystem works.

The operational and sales skills have been invaluable in my own journey as a founder.

If you want to make serious money, you have to solve other people’s problems well. And the only way to solve problems well is to build rare, valuable skills. That requires hard work. There is no secret formula. No hack. No shortcut.

Why is it called "sell-side research"?

On my first day as an MBA equity research intern, my mentor David took me out for coffee and asked a simple question: “What do you think your job is this summer?”

I answered confidently. I said my job was to become an expert in Cable and Media (that’s the team I was assigned to), do good modeling and write clear notes. In my mind, technical excellence was the obvious answer.

He laughed.

Then he said, “No. Your job this summer is to get everybody to like you.”

I thought he was joking. I wasn’t there to win a popularity contest. I was there to prove I could do the work.

I didn’t get a return offer.

And the reason wasn’t my modeling ability or my industry knowledge. The real issue was that I didn't build a strong relationship with someone on my immediate team. The feeling may have been mutual, but that didn’t matter. In a small team environment, that dynamic is decisive.

That was the lesson.

This is sell-side equity research. The selling part is real. Whether you like it or not, a big part of your job is making the people around you want you there — starting with your boss.

Understand your senior's job

You’ve probably seen the meme about the IB MDs who’s always out golfing with clients but don’t even even know how to open a PDF. But that’s the point.

Their job is to win business. Deal mandates generate fees. Spreadsheets and pitch books don’t on their own — relationships do. And while an MD absolutely knows how to build a model or edit a deck, that’s not the highest-value use of their time. You, as an associate, can run the model and the pitch book. What you cannot do is convince a Fortune 50 CEO to hire your bank for deal execution.

The same principle applies in equity research.

In an ideal world, senior research analyst’s time should be spent almost entirely on growing the team’s brand on Wall Street (in reality, some seniors are too hands-on on modeling and writing.) That means publishing differentiated research, doing TV appearances, marketing ideas one-on-one to buy-side clients, building relationships with company management teams, and hosting high-quality client events.

That is how the team generates revenue. If your team cannot add value to clients, the team eventually gets cut.

And your boss’ job is harder than yours, in both intensity and difficulty.

A typical senior analyst may cover more than twenty stocks, which means maintaining forty or more relationships with CEOs and CFOs. They answer questions from hundreds of institutional investors with differing needs. They interface internally with sales, traders, corporate access, and event teams. On any given day, they are pulled in a dozen different directions at the same time.

You may think they are distracted. In reality, they are juggling a far more complex mandate. As a result, they do not have as much time as they would like to give you guidance about the job and your career.

What’s your job?

In my first job out of college, a senior consultant told me something that forever changed how I approach work:

“Your job (as a junior) is to take more and more off your senior’s plate every day. So your senior can do bigger things — and you can do your senior’s job. And in most places, you only promoted when you are already operating at the next rank.”

In equity research, there is no shortage of busy work on the sell-side. The more you can handle well, the more your senior can focus on growing the team’s brand.

Every morning, ask yourself: What more can I take off my boss’s plate today? And how can I upskill so I become more useful to the team? If you do that consistently, the effect compounds.

Broadly, your tasks fall into two categories.

• Analytics: updating and maintaining models, building exhibits from large datasets, and understanding accounting — the language of business. If your technical knowledge has holes, plug them on your own ASAP.
• Writing: drafting research notes, preparing one-liners for equity sales, and copywriting event materials. Clear communication is not optional in a profession that sells ideas.

Equity research is a highly self-sufficient profession. If your work is sloppy, your boss is better off doing it from scratch. Remember, they were once a junior too — and a strong one — which is why they made to an analyst with coverage.

Your job is to deliver work that is as close to final as possible. If your deliverables require minimal revisions, you earn your first like from the most important person to your career in equity research – your senior analyst.

Your boss has good relationships with public company C-suite and investors, earning your boss’ confidence will help you no matter where you want to go in your career.

How the sell-side research value chain works

On your first day in sell-side research, your boss probably told you to read old notes and play with the models. Everyone was busy. No one really explained how the sell-side value chain works. Even if there was an orientation, they likely didn’t tell you what actually matters.

That’s unfortunate, because the value chain is complex — and understanding it changes how you behave.

Inside the bank, you work with equity sales (usually sit on the trading floor), traders, corporate access, and event teams. Externally, you interact with public company C-suites and buy-side clients — portfolio managers and analysts from hedge funds, mutual funds, and family offices.

Your behavior reflects not just you, but your boss and your team. Don’t act like an idiot. Wall Street involves handling money. It’s serious. Carry yourself accordingly and make people comfortable working with you.

With equity sales, build relationships. After market close on a Friday, go to the trading floor and say hi. But never share views that haven’t been published. You passed your Series exams for a reason — follow the rules.

At client events and non-deal roadshows, dress conservatively. Pressed slacks. Clean shirt. Good fit. When you need to go full suit, do it. You don’t need to go Hermès and Ferragamo, but you do need clothing that fits. 

Don’t have crazy haircut or beard. I heard beard is allowed – that’s why I said no crazy beard. You ain’t Mark Leonard (of Constellation Software). Your boss won’t have an awkward hygiene talk with you, but people will judge silently.

When I was in MBA, I heard a classmate recruiting for investment banking had body odor. No one told her directly because she was an international student, so feedback risked being misinterpreted. But people still talked. The lesson: News spreads fast. Don’t lose on basic things you didn’t even know were hurting you.

When meeting buy-side clients or C-suite executives, you don’t impress by being loud or funny. You impress by knowing your sector and asking thoughtful questions. Also don’t take yourself too seriously. Don’t be obnoxiously aggressive. Some elite schools and certain banks are notorious for producing juniors who are like that. We don’t need more of those in the world.

You’re a sell-side junior. Company C-suites and buy-side clients don’t need to acknowledge you. If your boss introduces you, say hello and be normal.

Every client wants to feel like they’re your boss’s most important account. They aren’t — but your job is to make them feel taken care of. Respond to emails quickly. Be attentive. Make them feel important.

And the basics — which I assumed were obvious, but seniors have asked me to state clearly:

• Stand up when greeting someone
• Give a firm handshake
• Make eye contact
• Smile
• Be on time
• Put every earnings call on your calendar. Dial in early and press *1 so your boss can get into the queue to ask a question
• Read your emails and respond promptly.

And no, most of your personal obligations are not more important than your job.

I don’t care if you can’t miss your 2pm Equinox class three days a week. If you’re about to leave for dinner with your partner and Amazon announces it’s acquiring Whole Foods (which happened during my internship), you go back to your desk, and start drafting a note on what that means for your team’s coverage.

That’s the job.

If you want flexibility and predictable hours, don’t work on Wall Street.

Investor mind is earned

I get this question constantly — "how many years do I need to stay on the sell-side before I can go buy-side?" There's no magic number, you might be ready now or you may never make it to the buy-side. The only certainty? Staying longer on the sell-side won’t make you a better investor.

For the first two years on the sell-side, you are learning about the industry and companies within, about the company management, what moves stocks, how investors think about your companies. But after that, the skills you need to succeed on the sell-side have little to do with being a good stock picker. Writing initiations, managing relationships, selling your views, don't have much to do with forming quality views that make money in mispriced stocks.

If you want to go buy-side, you have to invest your own time to gain skills that are outside your job description.

There was a guy who sat next to me when I was on the sell-side — a quintessential "closet buy-sider." We would lose track of time chatting about businesses, stock ideas and great investors. That curiosity was contagious.

I'm not saying you need to be that obsessive as we are. But if you don't have genuine curiosity about investing, that will catch up with you fast on the buy-side. If you think your sell-side boss is hands-off, wait until you meet your future PM. They're not going to beg you for ideas. If you're not making money for them, you will be replaced by someone who will.

Here's what you should be doing while you're still on the sell-side: discover your investment style. Cover the companies as if you are a buy-side analyst – who is the winner, who is the loser, value them properly (not what’s the picture below) and why. You have valuable access – you can get feedback on your views both from the market and from buy-siders whose opinion you value. Over time, you get better at calibrating your views and earning respect from the buy-siders, which can be a way into the buy-side.

One important caveat: when you talk to buy-siders on the job, you can only share your team's view. Sharing personal views while representing your firm is a regulatory violation. You want to grow as an investor while keeping your sell-side job, I presume.

Own Your Coverage

You should operate like a founder.

Eventually, you will be responsible for a basket of stocks that you know better than anyone else at your firm. That's the job. The question is how seriously you take it.

Even if the buy-side isn't your goal, you need to grow on your own. Most seniors are too busy to push you - the bad ones just churn-and-burn you and the good ones are too busy to care. If you're self-motivated, they trust you to get to where you want on your own. If you're not, you will drift out of the industry.

Here's what you need to do: read about your industry, follow company news, dig into sector publications, talk to experts, and do all of it with a clear purpose: understand what happened in the past and where things stand today, and form a well-reasoned view on where the industry and its companies are heading.

Learning a company's past is actually the easiest part, and it's enormously valuable to buy-side clients who call looking for context — you save them time.

Go through your team's old notes and the company's earnings transcripts and public filings, and pay close attention to the moments where something changed. Take a CPG company that grew at or above GDP for decades, with obvious exceptions like 2008 and COVID. But in 2017, the industry grew 3% and this company revenue declined 5%. Why? Investors use the outliers as a pattern recognition tool to stress-test a position before they put it on — thinking through what could go wrong before they commit. If you can walk a client through those stories fluently, you add a lot of value.

Being "on top of" your coverage doesn't happen suddenly. It's a habit developed day by day. Follow the news on your stocks. Practice active reading — form a view on how a news impacts the business and stocks, and then track whether you were right. That feedback loop is how your instincts sharpen over time.

As your pattern recognition develops, pitch ideas to your analyst. If you think a stock is too cheap to ignore and end markets are turning positive, pitch your boss to upgrade it. If five clients ask you the same question over two days, propose writing a note that addresses what the market is getting wrong.

That's how you add value to your team, that's how the team adds value to buy-side clients.

Get to interpretation ASAP

With AI in the picture, the pressure to go quickly from Excel monkey to real value add is higher than ever.

Buy-side clients use the sell-side for fewer and fewer things – they can get cleaner pre-built models from independent vendors. They can get research from newsletters run by ex-buy siders.

You need to get to adding values to clients ASAP. Build models from scratch so you know what drives your companies and makes you faster at executing earnings updates, but more importantly, makes you credible when clients ask questions about financial performance.

The sooner you are solid on the technicals, the sooner you can focus on what actually matters: industry expert, company historian, ecosystem relationships and debate on the future. That's what people will pay for regardless of what AI can do, because quality judgment and human relationships are still hard to replicate.

So whenever you are doing a task, always ask yourself, why and so what? What does this mean for the business and for the stock? How is this note or analysis supposed to help clients? Making that a habit on every single task — no matter how routine — is what separates you from the people who just blindly do work.

Always Be Peacocking

When I was on the buy-side, I saw my PM's inbox was flooded with 20+ emails from equity salespeople across different brokers, each pitching their firm's top research. He'd open maybe three each day. He knew what he was looking for and just didn't have time for the rest. If your firm's sales email consistently lands in the other 17, your days on the sell-side are numbered.

Marketing yourself isn't optional — it's mandatory when the sell-side product is commodity (we saw the race to the bottom of standalone research subscription post MIFID II).

Ultimately, you either build a brand or sell-side research is a dead end job for you. Sell-side research is a business of selling ideas, and that favors people who are comfortable being visible.

Extroverts like myself have a natural edge here. I was always walking the floor, stopping to chat with associates and analysts from other teams — oil, banks, consumer, chemicals, didn't matter. If they were interesting and kind, I wanted to hear how their industries worked and share my story.

After market close on a Friday, go to the trading floor and say hi to the sales people, the traders, and others you will work with daily. Listen to what's on people's minds, whether it's personal or job-related.

As you just get past the "just doing work phase", equity salespeople start voting on you, which directly impacts your bonus. Those votes aren't purely about research quality – people vote for analysts they like. Consistent internal support is what gets your research "sold" to buy-side clients, which is when you can start building an external brand with buy-side clients.

From there, the channels expand — TV, podcasts, conferences, newsletters. But all of that starts with learning to be visible within your own firm first.

If you're an introvert, I have good news. You are not doomed. Let your work do the talking. Think about what problems your clients have, and solve them better than anyone else. There was a senior analyst at my internship who would walk past me every morning, eyes straight ahead, never making eye contact. I wasn't offended — I was fascinated. Someone with that personality was thriving on the sell-side, which told me his work had to be exceptional.

A mine-by-mine demand and supply model. Legal liability analysis based on precedents? End market channel checks for industrial distributors? The opportunity to add value is endless – just think about how do I save buy-side clients time or make them money.

Keep It Old School

If you have studied another language, you understand the importance of good grammar and vocab foundation as you progress to the next course. I think the same way about learning everything in life. Elon Musk, the most remarkable founder in our generation, calls it "first principles", but the idea is the same.

I believe you should develop good fundamentals, especially as LLMs begin to embed into people's daily work lives, because a good foundation helps you get the most out of AI and avoid making mistakes because of overreliance on it.

Write your notes yourself first. Okay to use AI to proofread, not to draft. Some of the most successful analysts — including II Hall of Famers — are English majors who built a brand because they write well and tell a story.

Most sell-siders aren't elite stock pickers. Many have long careers and make good money simply because they communicate exceptionally well. AI slop should not carry you, and neither will stating the obvious (stop publishing a note on a company’s press release without discussing the "so what" to your coverage).

Build your models in Excel. Start from a blank spreadsheet at least once for each company you cover. There is no better way to understand how the three statements connect, and more importantly, how to identify the revenue and cost drivers specific to your sector. You have already seen your team's models are full of named ranges that are #REFs and all the analysis that doesn't feed into other parts of the model just clouds what really drives the model.

I understand things move fast on the sell-side and you'll use AI to get tasks done — that's fine. But do the work the slow way on your own time too, because strong fundamentals come from deep reading. Learn to properly read a 10-K. Read the original documents yourself — front to back. LLMs aren’t guaranteed to surface every key point, and that one overlooked detail can become the core of a thesis. More importantly, doing it yourself trains your judgment, which is one of the very few things that will protect you from obsolescence.

The same principle applies to note-taking. You don't need fancy tools. Word and OneNote are more than sufficient.

For low-value tasks that require no judgment, use AI — no brainer. But for anything involving forecasts or opinions that clients are paying your team to produce, think twice. Buy-side clients also use AI. If you hand them LLM output and call it research, you will embarrass yourself.

Workflow, Workflow, Workflow

Every team has a set of recurring research notes — at minimum, an annual outlook. In practice, the annual outlook report is largely a search-and-replace exercise: update the themes, swap in language from notes you published throughout the year, throw in new data, change the year, and you have another year's version. It shouldn't take anywhere near as long as the first time. The difference between a team that churns it out efficiently and one that scrambles is workflow.

Between compliance requirements, disorganized bosses, and the constant pressure of speed, your team's workflow is almost certainly suboptimal. I'm not suggesting you go propose a process overhaul to your boss. But you absolutely should be refining your own workflow for the tasks within your control.

For example, say you have twenty pivot tables in an Excel file tied to a single dataset tracking valuation multiples and KPIs across your covered companies. Pivot tables bloat file size, require manual refreshes when data change, and are one misplaced row away from breaking every range definition — you have to rebuild all twenty pivots. Maybe you replace them with AVERAGEIFs. So you open the file faster and it's less likely to crash during a save. That one change could be the difference between leaving at 11pm or 1am during earnings season.

Small things compound. Your goal is to move from executing tasks to forming opinions as quickly as possible, so any efficiency gain in execution is a direct investment in that transition. And when you are efficient, your teammates’ lives are better too.

A business is really just a collection of repeatable processes. Whether you work for someone else or eventually for yourself, you get more done and done better when your workflows are tight and constantly being refined. On the sell-side, where low-value tasks are unavoidable and abundant, that optimization mindset is what creates the space for the work that actually matters.

I hope this helps. Reply to this email if you have questions and suggestions.

Be sure to read my equity research masterclass and check out Stacy Rasgon's (Bernstein semi analyst) career advice on Twitter.

Thanks for reading. I will talk to you next time.