Prepare yourself to spend hours arguing with support staff in India, googling numbers and diving into marketplace reports. Your jobs will include collecting info from reports and databases on the business, reading annual reports to find information, creating profiles .The work will vary from interesting to boring. Drafting presentations and preparing pitches will take most of your time. What’s a pitch? It is an offer that aims to sell a project to a customer. Your pitch is a big presentation file detailing business landscape, current competition and finally laying out your proposition, together with corresponding advantages, risks, timelines etc. Your task as an analyst will be to draft the majority of the slides, and do bulk of work from creation to the stage when the pitch finalized, such as processing all the remarks and reviews from seniors and printing \/ sending the document around.

You will do presentation updates if you are working on a deal rather than pitching. Basically it’s the same kind of work. Here comes the part everybody is so frightened of. Financial modelling, company valuations, Microsoft Excel formulas. As an investment analyst is basic, crunching you do. Typically make sense of them and you have to find the numbers. That’s, input in Microsoft Excel financial statements. Based on metrics try company’s operation. Compare basic ratios across the industry. Calculate certain values based on several fixed formulas. Before you begin as an analyst you’ll get extensive training on the way to do that. So do not be afraid you’ll learn everything in no time at all.

All sort of tedious and dull tasks. Sending updates taking notes in meetings, scheduling conference calls, checking spelling, printing copies. You got the point. In general research and pitching is something you will do the majority of your time.