1975

Charles Schwab Pioneers Discount Brokerage

When regulators ended fixed trading commissions in 1975, Charles Schwab saw an opportunity most established brokers ignored, charging ordinary investors far less to trade while skipping the research and advice that justified the old high fees. His firm helped turn investing from something reserved for the wealthy and guided by a broker into something everyday people could do on their own. That shift laid the groundwork for the self directed, low cost wealth management tools common today.

A retiree, worried about market volatility, wants to move the entire portfolio into cash-like instruments. What's the trap in that reasoning given their likely time horizon?

Retirement can easily last decades, and holding an all-cash portfolio protects against short-term volatility but exposes the client to a different, quieter risk, inflation steadily eroding purchasing power over that long horizon. The trap is treating short-term price volatility as the only risk that matters, when the real long-term risk to a multi-decade retirement can be losing purchasing power to inflation.

What Is Wealth Management?

Wealth managers work directly with individuals and families, helping them invest, plan for retirement, manage taxes and pass on wealth to the next generation. It's a relationship-driven business built on trust over years, not just picking good investments. Compensation and career paths lean heavily on how much client money (assets under management) an advisor eventually brings in and retains.

2023

Arm's IPO Was the Biggest of the Year

Chip designer Arm Holdings went public in September 2023, raising roughly 4.9 billion dollars in the largest IPO of the year and valuing the company at about 54 billion dollars. Arm's designs sit inside nearly every smartphone chip in the world, and the IPO came after a failed attempt by Nvidia to buy the company outright, a deal regulators blocked over competition concerns. The listing was closely watched as a test of whether investors still had an appetite for big tech IPOs after a slow couple of years.

Breaking Into Quant: What Recruiters Look For

Quant recruiting leans heavily on raw problem-solving ability, expect timed math tests, probability brainteasers, and questions on statistics, calculus and sometimes coding, often before a single conversation about markets happens. A strong background in math, physics, computer science or a similarly quantitative field matters more here than a finance degree. Many firms also run their own summer internship pipelines as the main door into a full-time offer, similar to how banking recruits analysts.

Guess the Number: what Sharpe ratio is generally considered "good" for an investment strategy?

1946

The First Venture Capital Firm

General Georges Doriot, a Harvard Business School professor, co-founded American Research and Development Corporation in 1946 to fund promising new companies with capital and hands on guidance, not just loans. Its biggest win came in 1957, when a 70,000 dollar investment in Digital Equipment Corporation grew into a stake worth over 350 million dollars by the time ARDC sold it. Doriot's model, professional investors backing early, risky companies in exchange for equity, became the template for the venture capital industry.

A VC firm's fund returns look mediocre on average, but one portfolio company returned 50x. Why doesn't that automatically mean the fund's overall strategy failed?

Given the power-law nature of venture returns, a single massive winner is often exactly what's expected to carry an entire fund's performance, while most other investments are expected to underperform or fail. The trap is judging the fund by its average outcome across all positions, rather than recognizing that venture success is normally concentrated in just a few standout winners by design.

What Is Venture Capital?

Venture capital firms invest in early-stage, high-risk startups in exchange for equity, betting that a handful of huge winners will make up for the majority that fail or return nothing. Unlike private equity, VCs typically take minority stakes and rarely use debt to fund the investment. The trade-off for that risk is the chance to own a small piece of the next massive company, bought in when it was still tiny.

2022

Thoma Bravo Buys Anaplan for $10.7 Billion

Software-focused private equity firm Thoma Bravo acquired planning software company Anaplan for about 10.7 billion dollars in 2022. Anaplan was a public company trading well below where investors thought its business was actually worth, a common target profile for PE: a good business the public market has temporarily soured on. Thoma Bravo has built its whole strategy around buying software companies like this one and running them more efficiently outside the public spotlight.

The IB to PE Jump, Explained

Private equity firms recruit heavily from investment banking analyst classes, prizing the modeling and deal experience those first two years provide. Recruiting for many large PE funds now happens absurdly early, sometimes just months into a banking analyst's first year, through a fast, secretive process run by headhunters. The pitch is real: similar or better pay, sharper focus on a smaller number of deals, and, for many, a schedule that's demanding but somewhat more predictable than banking.

Guess the Number: what's the typical holding period for a private equity investment, from buyout to exit?

Guess the Multiple: what's a "typical" EV/EBITDA multiple for an M&A deal in a stable, mature industry?

1975

May Day Ends Fixed Commissions

For over 180 years, the New York Stock Exchange required brokers to charge fixed commissions on every trade, no matter the size. On May 1, 1975, a date now known on Wall Street as May Day, regulators forced the exchange to let commissions float freely, and prices for trading collapsed almost overnight. The change gutted the old brokerage business model but opened the door to discount brokers and the high volume, technology driven trading floors of today.

Two bonds have the same yield to maturity but very different durations. Why might a trader still strongly prefer one over the other, and what's the trap in comparing them only by YTM?

YTM only summarizes the return if held to maturity under stable rates, while duration measures how sensitive a bond's price is to changes in interest rates. The trap is assuming identical YTM means identical risk; the higher-duration bond will swing far more in price for the same rate move, so the choice depends heavily on the trader's rate-risk views and holding period, not yield alone.

What Is Sales & Trading?

Sales and trading sits inside an investment bank and splits into two connected jobs: salespeople build relationships with institutional clients (like hedge funds and pension funds) and pitch them ideas, while traders execute those orders and manage the bank's own positions in stocks, bonds, currencies or derivatives. It's a fast-paced, market-driven desk job, closer in rhythm to a trading floor than a traditional deal-advisory role.

2023

Pfizer Buys Seagen for $43 Billion

In March 2023, Pfizer agreed to acquire cancer drug maker Seagen for about 43 billion dollars, one of the largest pharmaceutical deals in years. The logic was simple: Pfizer's Covid-era revenue was fading fast, and it needed new, high-growth drugs in its pipeline. Seagen brought a portfolio of cancer therapies, exactly the kind of growth engine Pfizer was missing.

A Day in the Life of an IB Analyst

9:00 AM: check overnight emails and market news before the desk gets busy. 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM: calls, meetings and requests stack up, often faster than they get resolved. 7:00 PM: the real modeling and deck work usually starts once senior bankers finish their own meetings and send feedback. Midnight to 2:00 AM: formatting slides, fixing a model, and waiting on one more round of comments before finally heading home.

Bonus Season, Explained

Across investment banking, private equity and hedge funds, year-end bonuses are often the majority of total compensation, sometimes dwarfing base salary entirely. Bonus season usually plays out from December through February, when firms finalize how the year performed and managers decide how to split the pool among their teams. It's also when a lot of hiring and quitting happens, since a disappointing number is often the final push someone needs to start interviewing elsewhere.

Guess the Number: what's a commonly cited average work week for a first-year investment banking analyst?