Part deux

Okay, part 2. Remember, this is just to give people an idea of how a starter job/internship may be like.

Well I used to get a bunch of calculation jobs from Laurent but most of my work came from Javi and Paulo, two associates with the department. They started giving me some grunt work, doing some basic research on industries, editing presentations to make them look pretty, other such things. NO FILING though, which I was very happy about. I hate filing. Javi and Paulo started getting me into a lot of economic analysis for a bunch of industries. For one, which was the greatest moment of my working life, was when Paulo asked me to do an industry analysis for the video gaming industry specifically concerning UbiSoft…::drool:: finally, those years of playing halo and command & conquer paid off lol. He liked my analysis, which, if I do say so myself, was absolutely exquisite. I even went into an analysis on how a company’s revenue can be accurate predicted from a game based on previous in the series, the preorders, and reviews. I applied this analysis to Microsoft stock when halo 3 came out and made like…6% or something in about a week. Well anyway, Paulo put me in charge of doing the weekly and bi-weekly statements which were basically internal reports on portions of the economy. Specifically, the high yield, high grade, treasury, and private placement markets in addition to general economic information like inflation, CPI, and oil prices. I had to pull data from about 8 different sources as well as read 25+ articles a week to keep up to date on everything. After I put in all this information, I needed to do an analysis on what it means in the future. I remember, this being summer 2006 right before hurricane season, I read a lot of reports on the previous year’s weather (8 billion hurricanes that season) and this year was supposed to be just as bad. Thank God it wasn’t but, at the time, people were predicting just as bad. The thing is, after seeing the weather reports, I put in an analysis that insurance companies with clients in the area might take another large hit again and they might be short on liquidity so companies in question who weren’t preparing for that might be in trouble. I remember Javi and Paulo telling me that it was a really good idea especially considering the idea came just from weather reports for the next season.

One other task they gave me, my most tedious and irritating one was the Private Placement Market Database. I took a free daily report for the previous 6 years and inputted every private placement deal into an excel sheet. Not only that, make it searchable, graph-able, and useable by an idiot (that’s a quote). I think it was 20 columns and 7,000 rows full. ‘T’was a bit of a job I tell you. I could only work on it for 4 hours a day before I wanted to kill myself.

To a large extent, my job was pretty routine after the very beginning: I read the economic reports, I inputted into the database, I edited presentations, and hung out with Aileen (my bosses secretary) and alleviated her boredom. Word of advice, always be friends with the secretaries, they get things done when no one else can. A lot of this stuff isn’t all that difficult to a large extent. It’s mostly doing the same thing every day efficiently and correctly.

Well, I hope I didn’t bore yall too much with this. Just my experiences, yours could be different. Stay tuned next week for something completely different, same bat time, same creepy-dude-with-cape channel.