re: How do you feel about young NY investment bankers being worked 80-100 weeks?

How it starts is a large company say BP has assets that they want to sell for whatever reason. They talk with different banks (JPM, Goldman, Jeffries, Credit Suisse, Scotia, Evercore, Bank of America, RBC) and figure out which would be best to have pitch it to other oil companies to buy. These banks can either act as financial advisors where they just help connect a buyer with a seller and negotiate a price, or they can actually supply debt themselves to buyer (only large banks like JPM or Goldman or BOA can afford to do it, boutiques like Evercore can't do it).

So BP wants to sell Haynesville assets. What an analyst will do is created a Net Present Value or Discounted Cash flow model to show what BP asset is worth (called net asset valuation for O&G). They accumulate all producing and future producing wells figure out what revenue-costs will be and then discount them back at the cost of capital (debt interest or equity expected return) to the buyer. That NPV is what the buyer should pay for it.

In reality, the reservoir engineers and finance analysts at the bank wayyyy overinflate how good the wells are, put way lower opex than actuality, and put in all these little tricks and nannies to inflate price of assets. They do this so their 2% advisory fee is bigger. After that they make powerpoints of the oil assets. Make the wells look good. Show very low decline rates on graphs. Show the area. THEY ALWAYS DO THIS: they show how BP or whoever has the very best Tier 1 wells in the area and have Tier 1 opex lowest cost compared to all others in the area. They show financial statements of their financial models. What the IRR is. What the reserves are for producing, and undeveloped fields.

After that, they put it all in data rooms for buyer to look at the pwpt and excel. They then visit the buyer in person and try to pitch the asset to them via pwpt and get them to buy it. After that it's term sheets and Purchase and Sales agreements but that's between buyer and seller and not really the banks. Banks may help a little. After they buy bankers get 2%. A $1 billion sale will take home $20 mil to bankers. They have no actual expenses besides overhead, so $20 mil is a lot split amongst employees in the office. So on and so forth.

Basically all investment bankers are is a middle man. That is it. I think they are pointless as are all middle men. Only when they can provide debt to buyer to help them buy the asset which only large banks like JPM or GS or BOA can do is in my opinion where they add value. Middle men are never needed imo.