What it means to be an analyst

From working as an analyst, life gets pretty interesting and its a whole new world out there. From my 2 months experience working in CIMB, the top research analyst house in Malaysia, I would like to share my views on what it means to be an analyst.

People may call you an anal-yst.

If you don't like a company, and write a bad report on it, you may get barred as an analyst from ever visiting the company.

By 38 years old, you already have alot of white hair from stress while working. So pay very good attention in taking care of your hair.

Never write in your report, "there are no major surprises." You should say "Although there are no major surprises,..." because there is surely something you are surprised about, even if you are surprised the company had a briefing at all, or surprised that they served food at the briefing, essentially surprised at something. Even though the results were not surprising at all.

Results season is the time when you don't get any sleep. So there are a few things you can do, you can pre-write and pre-sleep for your report.

Analysts always wish that they had more fun in uni, should party harder and everything we learn in uni is rubbish.

Working as an analyst, you start work at 7am, have breakfast at 9am to 9.30am, have lunch from 12-2pm, and finally go home about 7pm.

Researching always has 3 stages, the first stage is gathering data (which doesn't give you white hair), analysing data (which gives you abit of white hair) and thinking (which gives you alot of white hair).

In company briefings, management always tries to talk up their prospects. So whatever numbers they give you, just discount it by 30%. In the case of some companies, *ahem* Green Packet, discount it by 50%.

In company briefings, you always get freebies including a bouncey ball, a mug, a car screen shader, a usb port and a pillow so that you may like management and recommend their stock a buy.

When you are forecasting, it takes alot of consideration, but if you are optimistic about the stock you can put the numbers to make it look high, but if you are pessismistic about the stock, you can put the numbers to make it look low.

So thats all that comes to my head now of being an analyst, but keep you posted on more!