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.

What does 'drawdown' mean, and why do investors pay close attention to it?

Drawdown measures the decline from a fund's peak value to its subsequent low point, before it recovers back to a new high. Investors watch it closely because it captures the worst pain an investor would have actually experienced along the way, which a simple average annual return figure doesn't reveal on its own.

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.