Head of Consumer Group - Mark Howden

Investment Banks have the most extraordinary number of jobs within them - it can be completely mind-boggling. Every time we went near one, we found a whole new department or group of people that did something we’d never heard of. This seems to be due to the immense specialisation within banks, where it can be quite possible to sit next to someone but have no idea what they do.

There are a couple of major distinctions worth highlighting. Investment Banking or ‘IBD’ tends to be the department which most people imagine when thinking about an investment bank. They are the ones doing huge M&A deals, putting in incredibly long hours (14 hours plus each day - including weekends, for months at a time - is not uncommon) and schmoozing with business leaders. Work/life balance is not easily found, but on the flipside the work you do will likely be high-profile and give you an enormous breadth of business and finance experience. This means that if you want to leave London or Investment Banking at some point you shouldn’t have a problem, as the skills gained are very transferable. We've met ex-bankers in companies ranging from renewable energy start-ups to large pharmaceuticals.

Capital Markets is where you’ll find the traders, salespeople and research analysts. They’re market-based and are the ones you see on TV shouting down phones and pacing frantically in front of five flickering computer screens. They’re monitoring market activity and reacting immediately to any changes. It’s noisier and a bit more adrenalin-fuelled than IBD. One of the big perks of Capital Markets (other than the actual job), is that the hours tend to reflect those of the market. That means early starts, with most people in the office by 6.30am, but it also means you tend to be out by six in the evening - and there is almost never weekend work. So if you’re an early riser the work/life balance is pretty good, especially compared to IBD. One limiting factor is that you’re in a highly specialised, role usually in a very specific market area, so there’s not much in the way of transferable skills. If you’re an FX institutional salesperson it’s not that easy to move into another product area, and you’re going to be tied to working in London (or another major financial centre).

Beyond these two areas you have a massive range of middle and back office functions. There’s Technology, Operations, Legal, Finance, Marketing and HR for a start. So if banking interests you then it’s definitely worth looking at the breadth of what’s on offer. The other thing that struck us about banks was just how diverse they were. Without doubt, they had the most mixed workforces we saw, with every member of a team often from a different country. While this makes for a really dynamic and interesting work environment, it does mean that when you’re applying for a job, you’re not just up against your peers in this country but across the whole world - so that application form had better stand out!

Who are you and what do you do?

Graduate Jobs and Internships in Banking and Investment.

What is Investment Banking?

What is an investment bank? An investment bank doesn’t deal with the high street customer, it is not a bank where you nor I would take our savings, it is not a bank where you nor I would have a cheque book or get mortgages. An investment bank is involved in all things investment-related within the economy and is usually involved with big institutions and big companies who are doing that. So if you think of it in the basic sense, it is about moving capital around, it is about moving resources around. And so when a company wants to finance something, there are two ways they can finance it; they can either do debt, get a loan basically; or issue bonds, or they can issue shares in their company, they can give away part-ownership in their company in exchange for money. And the facilitation of either that big company-scale debt, or the share issuance and the capital transfer and the money in that that entails, is something that investment banks are facilitating. So we are kind of the middle man - but instead of being the middle man between you and your mortgage, we are the middle man between the company and its tenure warehouses or its tenure factories.

What attracted you to this career?

To say it was a happy accident 15 years ago probably is remarkably true. I think that I wanted to do something that was interesting, that involved smart people, that involved selling stuff and that involved being paid well - and by a happy accident this career kind of managed most, if not all of those.

What does your job involve?

It involves pulling together the strings between our research effort, our sales effort and our trading effort - so I have really got the people who are right in the research of the companies and try and figure out which stocks we should buy. I have got some people who are charged with the responsibility of selling that to the investors, and that is the job I did traditionally and that is my background. Then you have got the traders, who are actually responsible for actually trading the stock once we receive the order, once an investor wants to invest or to sell what they hold.

What do you do on a typical day?

A typical day is alarm clock at six o'clock, then roll over and swear at my wife and try and convince her to get in the shower first. I then get to my desk at about six-thirty - as well as kind of running the group I am very much still involved in the sales effort, so six-thirty to eight is about figuring out what has gone on overnight, what releases or company reports or profits or anything else has come out first thing in the morning, and try to have some kind of view before the market opens at 8 o'clock. Me personally, in my role, I would be putting that together in an email which goes out internally to the sales floors, which goes externally to the investor, to the clients so we can push out to the market place that says: 'These are the stocks that are of interest today, these are the companies we should be buying and the ones we should be selling.'

Why Sales?

I think there are different characteristics that make people good at sales or research or trading. The sales thing is probably obvious, because we see sales every day outside the financial markets, so it is about being able to relate to people. It is also about the ability to assimilate information and think about what is important to be able to present that back and present an argument like a barrister would, if you will. Research is a nerdier profession - I mean that in a good way - because some people are really excited about the numbers, really excited about analysis. They are wonderful at Excel and wonderful at ripping company balance sheets or income statements apart, really digging into the finer details of how a company works - and to be fair, coming into the industry, that is a fabulous skill set to develop because that really allows you to go anywhere because once you realise how to dig into a company really know how to pull a company apart, how to analyst it, how to value it, you can do a whole kind of different things with that. But that is a generally nerdier, that’s the brains trust, that is the heavy artillery. I am not the heavy artillery, I am kind of the warm-up guy and the heavy artillery really is impressive when you see the level of detail they go to - and some people are more built like that than others.

The traders sit at the other end of the scale - they have an attention span of about five seconds but they have a wonderful ability to assimilate the relevant information, make the appropriate price, take on board the relevant risk and manage the banks exposure, because all the time we are trading we are not just executing an order for a client by turning around and selling something into the market place, we are sometimes committing our own capital by buying if off the client and then turning round and getting ourselves out of that position. So we obviously have some risk and so their understanding of risk, what we have, what we can and can't do, what is going to happen in the next half an hour that is going to send the market in the other direction, is a tremendous skill. It is something I would be terrible at because I don’t have a mind that works quite that quickly or numerically.  So you have got real nerds, in different ways, at either ends of the spectrum - and then you have got me in the middle doing a little dance.

How do Sales, Trading and Research work together?

It is a challenge to manage the way it all fits together. It is always a tremendous opportunity because those three areas - Research, Sales and Trading - kind of bring different things to bear. And by that, I mean, a Research Analyst knows the company backwards, understands the debt position, understands how much cash they've got, understands the long term strategy, understands why the management are the way they are. The Trader doesn’t really know all that stuff, but the Trader understands who has been buying and selling the stock today, what else is coming out news release-wise, economic data-wise, and has a real feel for technical aspects of how the stock is moving - but that is a different skill on a different information set than what the company is doing. The Salesperson, the specialist Salesperson is someone who just focuses on that sector, because I run that consumer group, so myself and my colleague Philip are the Salespeople for that specialise in sub-sectors within Consumer. So we have Consumer Analysts, Consumer Traders and Consumer Salespeople - which is slightly different from the general sales model where you just do the whole European market - but the Salesperson's job is really just talking to the market. So we have a constant flow of information from all kinds of different investors - hedge funds who are slightly more aggressive and sometimes quick return investors; what we call the long owners with the big fat traditional money mangers who will be investing in your pension, and they will have different views and thoughts about what is going on. So the Salesperson is a wonderful gateway into all that.

So rather than there being different points of view, there are also different values to add and the value is putting all that together, and you actually get to learn from each other and you get a complete picture. It is not that the research analyst thinks buy, the trader thinks sell, and the sales person doesn't know - although that quite often is the case - it is that we all bring something different to the party and then as a group we can come up with something that is a fairly intelligent view.

What are the best bits about your job?

I get to talk all day. I think, very seriously, the interaction with people is very important to me - I think, originally, why I went into the job I wanted to sell things. This isa  'nice' kind of sales - it's not about selling a fridge and then never seeing that customer again, its about building a relationship with somebody over a period of time - having them understand and respect your view and what you have to offer, and understanding how they work and the kind of things that are of interest to them - and kind of building that long term relationship rather than short term. That is quite fun, there is a lot of interaction with smart people so that makes it challenging, because you have got to know what you are talking about. You can maybe sell a fridge without knowing too much about how the fridge actually works, but it is a lot harder to sell a company unless you have some understanding.

What are the worst bits about your job?

My alarm goes off at five a.m!

What has been your greatest achievement?

One is that I have managed to have a 15-year career without working weekends, going to bed at a reasonable hour. More than that, actually balancing work and life - thinking about, this is my one shot and this is all I've got, so I don't want to spend 15 to 16 hours a day sat staring at some screens. I think that is important and I have always been very passionate about that and I think that is a good reason not to be an investment banker by the way. Don't spend 17 hours a day through your twenties and into your thirties and wake up one day when you are 37 and wonder why you haven't got any energy or any life or any friends or any wife or anything else - actually balance it through. I've been doing it for 15 years and touch wood, I have balanced it all the way through. So my greatest achievement is that I have had a wonderful life and haven't had to sacrifice that for the career. The second way of looking at achievements, I suppose, is just kind of the biggest thing that happened. One of the things we were involved in was when Carlsberg bought Scottish and Newcastle, the British brewer, and being a part of that - obviously being part of the consumer industry group, helping the bank in the early stages, all the way through the process, and at the end of the process we had to help raise the money by issuing new shares that would pay for the transaction and that was the biggest transaction of its kind so far this year - that is kind of the biggest trade or biggest event that I have ever been involved in, in 15 years, and being a significant part of that actually makes you realise you are doing something real.

Any regrets?

Honestly, no, I wouldn't change anything, because the balance has been good and also I have been very lucky. I think it is very important to refresh and to change and to grow and to think about where you are going. Somebody very wise, who has been a mentor to me, once said that you basically need three years in any job - the first year you have no idea what you are doing and you look like a deer in headlights, the second year you nail it, the third year you start to get a bit bored because you have been there and done that - and I have been lucky in that I have literally over 15 years have probably had four or five different parts, sometimes very different jobs, sometimes evolutions of the same job. But what that has meant is that there has always been refreshment, there has always been change and always been a new challenge and a new direction. Part of that has been geographic, part of that has been that I used to do Generalist Sales for the US market and moved from there to do Global Sales for the Consumer sector, from there to do European Sales for the Consumer sector, from there to running the Consumer group - and I have done that at three different firms, it has evolved and changed over 15 years, so I have been pretty lucky.

What is the pay like and are there any perks?

The pay, I think I am supposed to say, is competitive - and it is. There are a couple of things to say about what we earn - don't do it for the money. Because if you come in here and you sit here 12 hours a day just because you think you are going to earn a dollar, and it is not something you love, first of all you will be miserable and no amount of money can compensate for the misery; and second you will be rubbish at it, because you aren't enjoying it and so therefore you will not end up earning the money anyway. The second thing I would say, once you've come in to it for the love and you have chosen the thing that you are really, properly enthusiastic about - you are going to out earn the accountants and the lawyers anyway, so don't worry about it.

How long is a working day and do you have to work out of hours?

The nice thing about being market-facing, so when we think about the Sales and Trading side of the organisation, the Equities part, is that most of what we do is revolving around either the market or the client, or both. So that tends to gives you some sort of construct. You come in nice and early, because if you are like me you have a very small brain and you need to work it all out before everybody else works it all out, and so you come in at six-thirty and you've got an hour or so to work it all out before your clients wake up. That is really important, but at the end of the day by the time it gets to five o’clock the markets have closed and things have calmed down. Now I am running the group I find myself pushing that little bit more and I guess in the early years when you are trying to learn things it is a bit open-ended because you don’t know anything and you need to, so you need to find your own time to learn some more, but actually it has always been pretty well framed in that 12 hour window. Now 12 hours seems like a lot - but I think if you can make a deal with yourself that it is a 12 hour window and you are going to do 6.30 to 6.30 or whatever, and that is the deal you making with yourself, and you are going to do that and try hard while you are there and you are going to get stuck in, and you are going to see where that can take you, then that is ok. I think when you look at it the other way round and say: 'What do I have to do to make it?' and then you do whatever it takes and you stay until midnight, you stay until 2am and you get involved in investment banking and you never go home and all that crazy stuff, then it comes back to that life balance question of 'I don’t know what the point is.' I think if you flip it over and say, not 'What do I have to do to make it?' but say 'Ok, that is what I am prepared to give, I can do 12 hours a day, I am young and enthusiastic, it is interesting, let's see where that takes me'. And try not to spend all your time there, try to stick to that. That is my own personal philosophy - it doesn’t work in the investment bank, you know some areas you have to work in the evening to write the research or work in the evenings to complete the investment deal, or whatever, but the market-facing stuff tends to be contained in that 12-hour window.

Is there much in the way of travel?

The travel stuff is good on all kinds of levels. First of all, day-to-day if you are client facing then your clients tend do be around the place - I have clients in London, I have clients in continental Europe and I’ve got clients in the US - all big kind of names that people would think about in this context, and so going to visit them is very important. That sounds very glamorous but actually getting the 7am flight to Frankfurt - because you didn’t want to go the night before because there is nothing to do in Frankfurt - isn’t actually as glamorous as it sounds. Going to the US is obviously more glamorous and going for more than one day is obviously better than the fairly tiring day trips, but its ok. The second part of the travel, which I think is more interesting, is the opportunity to live in different places over the course of time - and obviously markets are global, for Equities the important markets are the US, Europe and now Asia, and over the course of a career I don’t think it is very surprising to find yourself, or to have the opportunity to go to a couple of those places. When I started in New York in 1994 I did a couple of years in New York and came back to London. People have talked to me about Asia several times, but I have never bitten the bullet. I would love to have a conversation at some time in my career about going back to the US for a couple of years - that kind of stuff is fairly easy to do if you are of a mind to do it personally, and also I think there is a tremendous opportunity to follow the grain because investment banks just reflect what goes on in the economy more generally, because they are chasing the business.

Do you have to be based anywhere in particular?

I strongly believe you have got to be in the financial centres and there are a couple of ways to think about that. First, if you really want to be involved I think you need to be in the main financial centres, so you need to be in New York, you need to be in London or you need to be in Hong Kong. That construct may change and we mentioned Dubai and Moscow, that may be becoming more important, or are becoming more important over time, but that is were the main stuff is. Having said that it is still very possible to have a career in Paris, in Frankfurt, in Milan - in some of the, what I would call, regional centres, which are regional to Europe. It isn’t going to work out of your kitchen in Somerset until you are very, very good, because what happens is you come in, you forge a career, you learn how to take balance sheets apart, you learn how to invest in companies, you maybe move from what we do, so the brokering stuff the selling stuff, and become an investor and work for some great finance house like Fidelity where you really learn how to invest and you invest lots of money and so and so forth. Then maybe 15 years down the line you set up your own investment company, you are a great investor by this point, you can do what you like and that you could do from your kitchen in Somerset because you could get a couple of big screens, get your Bloomberg and other information services in, and as long as you have the tools and technology that allows you to make those investment decisions, you can run your firm wherever you like. And people do, and people live in fabulous places in California and on the coast somewhere pretty and run their investments - but that really is once you are extraordinarily successful, it is not a way to forge a career.

What is the working environment like?

There is a real difference among the functions, actually, and different among different firms I suppose. If you look across the firms I have worked and the trading floors I have worked, first of all it is a fairly young environment - people come in, they are enthusiastic, it is a 12-hour day and it is no problem, and they want to forge a career, make some money, buy a Ferrari - whatever it is that is incentivising them, and that attracts a certain level of youth and vigour. Some would argue that it also attracts a level of aggression or commitment or focus, so the floors are not full of very laidback, very liberal-thinking, very relaxed people - they are full of go-getting people full of Type-A personalities, and they want to get somewhere. So it is not a relaxing environment, but I think the demographics of the situation is that we recruit from all over and I mean that in terms of geography and nationality, so that is very spread, possibly in terms of socially all over - you know, my background is very different from the guy who went to Eton and had a very nice upbringing - but that is fabulous as well because then you get a real dichotomy of society coming together and all that actually matters is that you are smart and you are committed and you are excited and that is what actually drives it, and it becomes extraordinarily meritocratic. I think that is true of social grouping. I think it is true of ethnic grouping and I think it is true of gender as well, and some floors look different to others and some areas of the bank look different to others but there are tremendous opportunities and tremendous take up of those opportunities by women in the investment banking area, in the sales area, in the research area and so you do get a good mix. I think sometimes the sales trading looks a bit more male dominated and also a little older, actually, but I think a lot of the sales, trade and research stuff, and you have met some of my colleagues who can speak more directly to this, really are young, any gender, any ethnicity, any nationality and that becomes very evident when you spend time on the floor. 

Suits and ties, business dress for women - and I think the thought process behind that, without being too sarcastic, is a little bit behind the thought process behind school uniform. If you are dressed for it, you know where you are, you know where you are going, you know what you are doing, you project a certain image to the client base and you get on with it - you are dressed for work. I personally quite like that and it is very easy for me then to dissect my working life from my non-working life - the first thing I do when I go home every single day is I put my jeans and a t-shirt on, because this is work and when I leave work and I go into social mode then I need jeans and a casual shirt, and then my mind comes out of here into something relaxing and fun. Other places are more relaxed - I think some places have business casual which is usually not much different to this, just be a nice shirt with no tie, and it won't be jeans and t-shirts and things like that, so actually all you are really doing is taking your tie off. Where I used to work was like that and I used to dress like this with no tie, and the tie was in the draw because you needed the tie if you went to see clients anyway. Other places like the newer funkier investment shops like the Hedge Funds, it is jeans, it’s t-shirts, it’s trainers, they are very interested in what they do and not interested in what they look like when they are doing it because there is half a dozen of them in the room doing something funky, and actually projecting to clients is much less relevant to them.

What's a Hedge Fund?

A hedge fund is a slightly overused term at this time which means a new and slightly more alternative investment firm - so it distinguishes an investment firm from those investment firms which do pensions and tend to just go and buy stocks and hold stocks for a period of time. A hedge fund tends to be more flexible in the way they can invest - the verb 'to hedge' means actually to hedge out your risk - to find an insurance policy against what you have just bought, to find an offset in trade which mitigates the risk - and so hedge funds tend to be involved in the business of putting things together so they can isolate in slightly more sophisticated way whether they really want to be exposed to all the thing that buying a stock or buying an investment actually means.

How did you get into your job?

I got in completely by acciden; I was a relatively clueless, relatively frequently drunk undergraduate who had absolutely no idea what he wanted to do with his life, and I had applied for accountancy and I had applied for consultancy and I had applied for anything else everyone goes and does out of university because they don’t know what else to do.  Then I accidentally applied for an Equity Sales role, I didn’t really know what it meant and the only reason I actually applied for it, but don’t tell my employers this, was that it said ‘Year in New York’ on the advert, which sounded quite fun. To be fair, when I then read the advert and it talked about sales and what was required, I did kind of get the idea that maybe I should sell things for a living, because that was something that really resonated.

So the process I went through was: economics degree, applied through the careers service for this Equity Sales role and went from there. Having said that, it is probably not that easy to be that lucky now. What I am always really impressed by - I do a lot of interviewing with a lot of undergraduates - what I am really impressed by is the focus the interest, how much they know about it, what they have thought about, the point of which they become intereste. They come and do an internship in their second summer of university for example - I think I was drunk in Kenya for my second year, or possibly Kansas, I am not sure which, somewhere that didn’t involve investment banking - and that level of focus and commitment is impressive to me and does help people understand what they want to do. When I was interviewed I didn’t know the difference between the equity market, the bond market, sales and research all the stuff that we are talking about. In today’s world I would be kicked out of the interview with a flea in my ear for not really having thought it through. So I think an opportunity to get in early, do some work experience - give us a call and come for a week and have a look and meet some people, because then you start to get a feel for what it is actually about and how it works, then when you come to your internship interview you can say: 'I want to be in sales because I looked at Trading and Research and actually I am made like this.'  You don’t just stare like a deer in the headlights like I did. And then when you come for your final interviews a year later and you say 'Well I did the internship and it turns out Sales wasn’t so good after all, I guess I am a bit nerdier than that and I want to be a Research Analyst now', you have actually thought it through.

I think having some relevance in your degree to business or economics or maths is nice; I actually don’t think it is essential because most of what I've learned about what I do I have learnt since I got here, and I don’t think that I learned as much in my economics degree. It was nice to have, but as long as someone is logical, as long as someone displays some kind of achievement some kind of commitment to something, if they got a first in classics or Latin or something else, fine - they can clearly work stuff out to have achieved in that. If they would like to turn those talents to this, I have no doubt they can be successful doing this.

What's the application process like?

The easiest way is by CV and covering letter which in this technological age is all online, so you submit an online application with the appropriate CV with the appropriate covering note and it kind of goes from there. Having said that, that is the final application process along with gazillion other people who want to do this and you end up in a pile not dissimilar to an X-Factor audition. Maybe we take three steps back and do something which is the equivalent of sitting outside Simon Cowell’s house for a fortnight. Find a friend, find somebody who been in the business, works in the business, knows somebody in the business, dads, uncles, friends, mate's brother, it doesn’t matter. Come for a week or a day or an hour, talk to some people, figure out which part is interesting, figure out what you want to do, all the stuff we were talking about before. Because when we finally get to the application process, you can tell your mates, your dad's brother, 'By the way I've just put my application in'. You will always be judged in this career on your merits and it is a massive meritocracy which is why they are full of dreadful people like me, but if you have had an opportunity to figure some stuff out beforehand and meet some people who you think you might have interest in what they might do, then you are more likely to get an interview when you get there.

What's your top tip for breaking into your industry?

My single top tip for getting a job in this industry is it is about wanting it and have a level of enthusiasm and focus and drive - because a lot of people have these wonderful CVs and wonderful A-levels and its marvellous, and you send your CV in and they think 'This guy looks great, this girl looks great – get them in', and they arrive and they are a plank and they sit there and they are scared and they don’t say much and they give one word answers - or even worse, they have read the company's handbook backwards. They trot out these lines that don’t mean anything, like a robot, and all of this wonderful potential that you saw on a CV turns into this very robotic, unimaginative and actually uninspiring performance. So the single top tip is, if you get to sit on the other side of the table from me or anybody else, look like you mean it, look like you want it, if I can see that level of enthusiasm, that focus, that drive, that commitment, that energy, that is someone I can see rolling their sleeves up and learning what they need to learn and making a shot of it - that is someone you can see yourself sitting next to everyday. The robotic performance that trots out lines from the annual report is never going to do it - energy, enthusiasm and just raw passion is going to go much further.

What are the key skills required for your job?

I think the key to sales in this industry is not about the quick buck, the quick turn or the aggressive sales stuff. It is really about being presentationally aware or very skilled and actually being able to give an argument to present some good structure, i.e. it's about the interpersonal skills - which is much overused, but being able to relate to people, being able to go into a room of strangers and strike up a conversation and find some common ground, understand what people are interested in, being a good listener. There is so much about selling which people think is about what we say and actually it’s about understanding what your client wants, because rather than following our own agenda all the of the time, understanding your client’s agenda and making sure you fulfil that is the easiest way to make sure you fulfil the relationship, business or otherwise. Sounds like dating advice - it’s the same thing, listen to what is wanted, listen to what is of interest - rather that just ploughing on your own sweet path because you must be interesting because you practiced before you went out, very similar thing. I think sales people do have an ability to assimilate information quite quickly and to think about the arguments, think about the information, take it all in and then really structure it. It is a little being in college and we've all done those essay questions and it says 'Please do the following in 45 minutes', and what we actually do instead of answering the question is write everything we ever knew about economics and stabilisation in Eastern Europe or whatever the question is about, but the question didn’t ask that, the question asked something very specific - and if you stopped yourself from going off on one and thought about it and delivered the A-B-C-D of what is really important to the case, then you have cracked it. And that is actually harder than writing everything you know about, because you really have got to pick the bits that matter. If you can do that and then present it and not sound like a muppet, then you are going to be in good shape.

What's the career progress and how quickly can you move up the career ladder?

Firstly there is the structure - you come in as an undergraduate, as an Analyst and if you get promoted you get called an Associate, then after two or three years after working really hard you maybe make it to Vice-President and then Senior Vice-President and then after that if you are really good - and this is the mythical pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, I am still looking for mine - is Managing Director. And that is the structure, which is kind of interesting, because this is a meritocracy and because it is about what you do and how good you are and how much money you make for the firm. You will make it up there in due course, and you will get promoted at a pace if you are good, but really what you want to do is come, in roll your sleeves up and be good at what you do, and the rest will sell itself.  You can be a very poorly-paid VP, or a very well-paid Associate - there are scales, forts and bands - but actually come in and do what you do, the title will take care of itself, and the financial reward and responsibility will change to what you actually achieve.

Where do you see the industry going?

Industry direction is a tricky one for the simple reason that it is very easy to be swayed by what is hot at the moment. In 1994 I started selling equities and I was told it was a dead business and I was told it was a very silly idea and the only reason I did that was because I got the first year in New York and it sounded kind of fun. But actually 15 years later some one is still employing me, I am still putting a tie on every day and I still have a perfectly nice life and a nice career. So I would always slightly think carefully about following whatever is hot today verses following what you find truly interesting because I think if you get stuck into something that actually makes sense to you or that actually really gets you excited then you have got a really good shot at being good at it. Understanding, analysing and valuing companies is never going to go out of fashion as long as we have a capitalist system, whether you do that in a construct of being what we call a self style analyst, research analyst who analyses the company writes the report and then goes to sell that view, or whether you do that on the investment side as the invest as the portfolio manager, as the person who is actually buying and selling, as a client. Or whether you do it as a funky private equity guy that keeps taking companies, private and buying up remnants and sticking them together and repackaging them and selling them on, it doesn’t really matter it is the same skill set. For me if you are interested in equities and stocks in companies, for those who have done any economics, if you are interested in microeconomics the economics of a firm, the economics of profit and loss and how many widgets you have sold and for what price, equities is the place for you in some way shape or form. Probably someone who is interested in more macro stuff and interested in inflation and growth rates and interest rates and all that macro economics stuff, you are probably more attuned to a career in Government bonds or currencies or that sort of macro field. So that is one thing to think about and another thing is, we talked about trade, sales and research and nerds, the uber-nerds and the jokers in the middle that  kind of make up the different characteristics or personalities of people that are good at different jobs. Having said all of that, one thing that is definitely growing and not going away is the kind of emerging growth angle to everything we do, and so the fact we now have representation in Dubai and the fact that there is a huge wall of investment money in places like that because of all the money that has been made in oil, Moscow is another obvious example, so the emerging stuff has been hot for a while and frankly stays hot over a medium term time frame so if you want to go an live Moscow and do something funky, now is the time to do it.

Is there scope for movement during or after this career?

I slightly naughtily always joked that I am qualified for nothing, I don’t put it quite that politely but I am qualified for nothing.  It is not strictly true but I think the sales role, certainly within this construct, is a little bit too specific to the sales role, because that is what I do.  We will talk about where I am going to take that in a minute.  But for now, if I was coming into the industry today the most transferable, most important, most obvious skill is that skill set to understand the company, to analyse the company, to take the company apart to understand the profit and loss, the widgets, how many at what price, and the costs, understand what margin you are making on what you are selling.  To understand what the balance sheet looks like how are you financed, what is your debt.  To be able to really be able to dissect all of that and to understand and be able to value companies is a massively transferable skill, because then you can be the sales side guy, like us the broker; you can be the investor, you can work in industry and work for the company itself.  Once you can analyse companies you can do what you want with that, so if you are coming into the equities business, one piece of advise would be get the appropriate skill set for equities business and think about a tool kit, which sounds awful but think about having the right tool kit and having a multi year career and taking in whatever direction you want and that is going to be increasingly important because you become more and more specialised.  So having a specialism, having something you can do, that no one else can, becomes really important. 

The second thing I would say about transferable or out of the industry or away to something completely different, which was the other thing, doing what I do, selling the way I sell, building relationships the way I build actually is a transferable skill at the end of the day because as long as I can relate to people, present to people, assimilate information and take an argument to people, I feel I could take that all kinds of places.  I have been approached to be the CEO of a charity before which maybe in five or ten years time when I am properly tired would be interesting and challenging, I think you could go be a teacher from doing what we do and really try and add value in a very different way, I think you could do all kinds of presenting jobs and personally I want Michael Parkinson’s job when I retire but that is another story.  I think there is a tremendous opportunity to do what we do and we talked about demographics and we talked about it being a young persons game and it is and if I am still sat here running this group and selling this stuff when I am 45, I think I might be a bit tired, because that will be 24 years of selling this stuff and I think at some point in the next ten years I might say, thank you very much it has been marvellous I have had a wonderful 20 year career or whatever and it is now time to write that book, teach those kids, run that charity, open that shop do something very different and I think that is another opportunity doing this career, that you are not going to be stuck doing the same thing until you are 65 and if you are you probably weren’t very good at it.

What are the industry resources that someone interested in joining must know about?

Read the FT, the journalists at the FT are actually very good and they actually get it and they write some interesting things and there is a tremendous amount you can understand about the macro economy and how it all fits together, what industries are doing and how it all fits together and how they operate, just by reading the FT.   Other stuff, if you really start to get into it, is a common resource but is one that we all used to use at university is Yahoo Finance, which I think does a very similar thing and does it in a way which is very relevant to the stock market, I know a bunch of people who have looked at this industry from afar and have learned through Yahoo Finance, it is not actually as bad as it might sound.

If you weren't in this career, what would you be doing?

I would either have Michael Parkinson’s job, Arson Venger’s job or Lewis Hamilton’s job.