Statistically, the top-tier investment banks (defined here as a bulge bracket or elite boutique banks) accept ~1% or less of their applicants each year (for actual statistics, visit: www.wallstmastermind.com/investment-banking-acceptance-rate/). For context, Harvard accepts about 6% of its applicants. The closest comparison in terms of selectivity is actually the % of NCAA Division 1 athletes who make it into the NBA or NFL. Just like how top athletes need the help of coaches to make it to the pinnacle of their profession, we provide the coaching you need to perform at your highest level, beat out the competition, and reach the top of the finance world.

There are many reasons why so many people want to get into investment banking, in no particular order:

1) High Pay: It’s one of the highest paying jobs you can get right out of school. New college grads average $125k in year 1 (vs. $50k national average), which increases to $150k by year 2 and $170k by year 3. 1st-year MBA grads average $225k. By the time you’re 30, it’s possible to make Managing Director level and be making 7-figures a year. For more details, please visit: https://wallstmastermind.com/investment-bankers-comp/

2) Exit Opportunities: Investment Banking is not only an amazing career path, it opens up doors for the rest of your life. Some common exit opportunities (and average starting compensation post-banking) include Private Equity ($221k-$276k), Hedge Funds ($187k-$279k), and Venture Capital ($130k-$250k). Furthermore, the skillset you acquire as an investment banker also make you very versatile and desirable for roles at Fortune 500 and tech startups in areas such as Corporate Development, Strategic Finance, Business Operations, Strategy, Product Management, Business Development, Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and more. In other words, once you have investment banking on your resume, you’ll never have to worry about job security ever again. Instead of searching for jobs and hoping companies will hire you, you will be getting inbound requests from companies eager to hire you, which allows you to be opportunistic and only make moves when it’s a great opportunity. This is how Sam was able to move into private equity after banking, and then subsequently work at some of the hottest VC-backed startups like Square and GitHub. The stock options Sam received in Square and GitHub both ended up being worth 7-figures each, and he worked at those two places for less than 3 years combined.

3) Learning Opportunity/Impact: You will learn more in 2 years of investment banking than you will learn in any other job. It’s like getting a Master’s degree in business, but better. There is no other job where as a 20-something-year-old, you get to advise CEOs and CFOs of the best companies in the world on industry-defining transactions worth 9 to 10-figures.

4) Prestige: Given only ~1% of the applicants get into the top-tier banks, it’s a great accomplishment that you can be proud of if you are one of the few who are able to break in.

Great question! We don’t do what 99% of your peers are doing to get you into the top 1%. There are five primary differences between us and any other resource you use:

1) We focus on both getting AND acing the interviews, not just the latter. You need both

2) We don’t believe in one-size-fits-all; everything is customized based on your individual needs through 1-on-1 coaching

3) We don’t dictate how much help you can get; you get to decide how you leverage our support which is on demand (whenever you need) and unlimited (however much you need)

4) The foundation of our strategies is based on Sam’s experience serving on Morgan Stanley’s on-campus recruiting team. It’s been proven to work for all types of candidates, and is a repeatable process that can be used by anyone who’s serious about getting into investment banking

5) Since starting Wall Street Mastermind, Sam has also incorporated many new strategies that have been discovered through his work with hundreds of clients. We’ve already done all of the trial and error so that you don’t have to. Learn from other people’s mistakes instead of making your own

To be honest, no. A lot of the strategies and frameworks we teach are proprietary and won’t be found outside of Wall Street Mastermind. We know because we developed these strategies based on Sam’s experience on the on-campus recruiting team at Morgan Stanley, as well as all the trial and error that’s been done with the clients that have come before you. But even if we pretended for a second that all the information IS online – what you need to realize is that information alone is worthless. Even though everyone technically has access to the same information, most people have no idea what to do with it. Plus, too much information is actually overwhelming, causing you to become paralyzed. Instead of information, we give you a step-by-step game plan to follow, answer your questions when you get stuck, and hold you accountable to ensure real progress is being made. As for why you need help – you’re trying to accomplish something that’s extremely difficult. Why wouldn’t you want to maximize your chances of succeeding by following a proven, repeatable process that’s allowed our clients to successfully land an offer over 90% of the time? The more you can stack the odds in your favor, the better offer you’ll get.

It doesn’t matter. We’ve helped plenty of non-target school students get into investment banking. We’ve also helped plenty of students who didn’t major in business/finance/economics get into investment banking. Just scroll up and listen to some of the client interviews if you need proof. When someone on Wall Street Oasis tells you that you have no hope unless you go to Harvard, have a 4.0 GPA, and have done three investment banking internships already, I want you to know that they have no idea what they’re talking about. For all you know, the person saying that is most likely just another college student who also hasn’t gotten into investment banking himself. When it comes to your career – do you want to listen to some unqualified strangers on the internet? Or do you want to listen to someone like us who actually knows how this stuff works?

This is another myth that we hear quite often. Yes, of course the closer your GPA is to a 4.0, the easier it will be for you to get into investment banking. And if your GPA is above a 3.7, you’re pretty much not going to get any questions about your grades. But we’ve helped plenty of clients with GPA’s in the low to mid-3’s get into investment banking, often at top-tier investment banks. As far as we are concerned, you’re fine as long as you have anything above a 3.2 or 3.3. If you have below a 3.0, it’s going to be pretty damn tough unless you 1) have enough time left to pull your grades up before applying, or 2) have a very legitimate excuse for temporarily having poor grades. The lower your GPA, the better you will have to be in everything else – work experience, extracurriculars, networking, behavioral interviews, technical interviews. And no matter what your GPA is, we can teach you how to talk about it when asked.

It’s pretty straightforward, but nowadays you pretty much have to have at least SOME relevant work experience to get into investment banking. Depending on how much time you have left until the recruiting process starts, we may be able to help you find relevant internships to beef up your resume. If you don’t currently have any relevant experience, and are stuck because you don’t know how to get your foot in the door, then we can definitely help you with that. As an example of this, our client Jenn came to us halfway through sophomore year with zero finance work experience. At the time, she was applying to a lot of accounting and finance internships that could barely be considered as “relevant.” Even then, she wasn’t getting any responses from the recruiters. Within a week of working with us, she had secured her first finance internship at a small private equity fund. Not only that, but within a month, she had secured sophomore summer internship offers from two global investment banks. Last but not least, by April of her sophomore year (within 3.5 months of working with us), she secured a junior summer internship offer from PJT Partners, which is one of the toughest investment banks to get an offer from in the world. If Jenn can do this, there’s no reason why you can’t do something similar (assuming you’re ready and willing to work hard).

Most candidates do not start out with a strong network in investment banking. In fact, a lot of our clients are non-target school students, and don’t have many alumni they can reach out to on Wall Street. It doesn’t really matter. The way we teach our clients networking, we expect the vast majority of your investment banking contacts to come from your cold network (i.e. complete strangers). As long as you know the best practices for identifying, contacting, and engaging with these people, you can turn a cold contact into a warm contact, and eventually into an advocate who will serve as your champion within the investment bank you’re targeting. Of course, if you do go to a target school with a lot of alumni, or you have personal contacts within your friends and family, you should definitely leverage that as well. But either way, we will help you massively scale up your networking efforts (our clients reach out to 250-300 bankers on average), turn your contacts into actual interview referrals, and do all of this in the most efficient and effective manner.

What most people don’t understand about behavioral interviews is that it’s actually harder than you think. Most people worry a lot about technical interviews, while feeling like they don’t need to spend much time preparing for behaviorals. After all, it’s just talking about yourself right? How hard can that be? In reality, behavioral interviews are graded on a curve; meaning your answers sounding good to you is not “good enough.” The key is for your answers to be BETTER than your competitors’ answers. And to figure out whether yours are actually better, you need someone who’s actually seen a lot of candidates interview, and has a large sample size of data to compare your answers against, to be able to accurately assess the situation for you. Moreover, chances are that at least some of your behavioral answers could be improved. But in terms of figuring out HOW to improve your answers, you cannot be the person to critique yourself. After all, you came up with the answers in the first place, so you won’t be able to identify the mistakes you’re making. You need a fresh set of eyes from an expert to recommend the improvements you need to make.

Just like anything else you try to learn in life – a foreign language, a new instrument, a sport, etc. – there are two ways to learn any new skill: 1) try to read some books or watch some videos, and teach it to yourself, or 2) find someone who is already a subject matter expert to teach it to you. Most of the time when students try to teach themselves technicals, it doesn’t work because “they don’t know what they don’t know.” Oftentimes, you may read something on a page and feel like you understand it, only to realize when you’re in an actual interview that you have no idea how to answer the question being asked. Memorizing these technical interview guides from front to back is a popular method, but also quite ineffective as interviewers nowadays are smart enough to change up or disguise the questions. To truly master your technicals in the shortest amount of time, you need an expert to personally teach it to you, help you connect all the dots, and most importantly, answer any questions you have as they come up. Just think about it this way – if you could learn from a professor or read a text book on your own, which do you think would help you learn the subject matter faster and better?

It depends. As previously mentioned, we don’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to working with our clients. As every candidate is different, we customize our program based on 1) what you need help with, and 2) how much help you need. In general though, we have options starting as low as several hundred dollars, and then increasing from there depending on the scope. We also have a limited number of scholarships each month for the right people, as well as other ways for you to get reimbursed for any investment you make in our program. For the majority of the students who have truly wanted to work with us, we have typically been able to find a way to help make it happen.

Ultimately, we can’t help every student we talk to. This is due to capacity constraints stemming from the 1-on-1 nature of our approach that also happens to be what makes it so effective. With that said, on your strategy session, we will learn more about your situation to first figure out if we are the best fit to help you. If and only if we mutually feel like it’s a great fit, we will then discuss any potential investment with you. And if it’s not a good fit, at a minimum we’ll still do our best to give you advice on what we would do if we were you in your shoes. Either way, you’ll walk away from the call with additional clarity on what you need to do next.

To determine if something is a good investment, you must compare the price you have to pay against the potential return on the investment. For example, we currently have over a success rate that’s over 90%. That means if we decide to work with you, chances are you will successfully get the job. If you get a summer analyst internship at a top-tier investment bank, you’ll make anywhere between $20k to $30k over a 10-week internship. If you are a summer associate, you could make $35k to $50k.

But it’s not even really about your summer internship pay…

Starting your career as an investment banker will give you a MASSIVE increase in your lifetime earnings trajectory. Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor, Paul Oyer, surveyed 2,598 Stanford MBA students across 38 graduating classes. This survey revealed that on average, investment banking graduates made anywhere from $1.5-$5.5 MILLION MORE in lifetime earnings.

I’ve personally been able to earn over $3 million through salary, bonuses, and stock compensation through just the first 10 years of my career. Many of my friends who started their careers in investment banking have done even better, so I’m not an outlier.

To see more detailed info, including the actual research that was done, visit: https://wallstmastermind.com/lifetime-earnings-impact/

Now ask yourself – how much would you be willing to invest if you had a 90%+ chance of generating the type of returns we’re talking about here? Chances are, whatever number you have in your head is a lot higher than what is actually required to work with us.

We appreciate this question. You should thoroughly vet the people you choose to work with… but ultimately this comes down to a couple of things. First, does what we’re saying “make sense”? Can you see how it would work? That’s the first step… if the information we’ve given you (for free) has made sense, then that’s the first thing you want to consider. Second, have you had a conversation with us? You can tell a LOT by getting on the phone with someone. Follow your gut. Third, listen to what our clients have to say above… and look at all the messages we receive from our clients on a daily basis (you can find it under the testimonials page). The amount of people we’ve helped – genuinely – get results. What do you think we threatened these people’s families into giving us this stuff? No. We’re very good at what we do and we authentically care about our clients. No scams here.

Yeah. I guarantee that if you don’t make a change or get the help needed to change, you’ll grow VERY slowly at best, or likely not move at all. By the time you figure it out (if you ever do), the recruiting process will be over already. With how accelerated the investment banking recruiting timeline is nowadays, the candidates who win are the ones who are able to accomplish more than their competition in the same amount of time. We see it time & time again – there are NO guarantees in life (outside of death and taxes) EXCEPT that if you keep doing what you’ve been doing, nothing will change, and you’ll get no results. Saying you just “gotta try harder” is naive at best, and totally destructive to your career prospects at worst. The “cost” of figuring this out alone is astronomically higher than the “investment” required to work together.