Investment/Fund/Asset management or consultancy? What suits me better?!

i'll offer an example...your one year into your grad training program at an AM firm, you don't know what you don't know and you actually know even less.
your given one week to put together a presentation on a company. you have to present it to the chief investment offer and the investment committee.
these people have been working in the industry for over 20 years, will know when your bull****ting and are most likely partners in the firm i.e its their reputation your playing on (and their money your being given technically) and so they won't show any mercy (even worse if its a smaller company).
whats more your playing with the life savings of your clients, if you make a mistake they will (potentially) lose a lot.
in addition, if you make a particularly bad mistake your either getting fired or sent to sales (the equities in dallas of AM).
if your worried about social pressure its the wrong job because your paid to make firm decisions like buy or sell and you get called out on your decisions every day by your colleagues...altho you also say you don't like number crunching so AM couldn't be more wrong. you wouldn't apply "economic theory" either, only economists do that.

your degree (Physics) should be quite useful moving into finance a lot of skills are easily transferable i.e risk/quant positions. i don't reli know enough about this though but that is a more likely avenue although there a lot of engineering/maths grads in "qualitative" AM jobs...your perception of AM being like that is quite common tho.

Thanks for the insightful response.

I may have exaggerated when I said that I don't like number crunching... I just don't want to solely be looking at numbers I guess.

I am probably struggling to understand what the job really entails.

Am I right in saying that I would be looking at companies performance sheets, acquisitions (and other things???) and evaluating how they would perform over the next few years?
Then making a decision on one/some(?) to either buy or sell on behalf of the investors, who tell us how much they're willing to risk and the magnitude of the risk of return they're willing to put out?
THEN do we go and tell them about our decision, like in your example, through a presentation and they either agree or disagree for you to go through with it?
Then finally we execute the trades or tell traders to go and execute them?

In your example surely we would have been trained sufficiently and slowly been weened into responsibilities? So then surely we should know what we're doing, to some extent otherwise why would they make us do it? Or do they just end up weeding out the weak, like you said?

Are you speaking from first hand experience or things you've heard?

I am a 2nd Year Physicist who intends on taking a graduate diploma in economics after doing a 3 year course at a top university.

At school I have done a range of things: Marketing director of a Young Enterprise company, almost taken Media Studies to AS level (switched it for FM half way through ), was in charge of a Physics and Engineering Society and in for a couple of years was interested in making media (films, adverts, posters, marketing, etc)

So from the list it sounds like I'd be suited to consultancy as I do have an interest in business and solving problems using creative approaches. Not so into number crunching...

However, I have always been a shy person and have only been coming out of that shell over the past couple of years at Uni. This, I feel would hold me back in a consultancy job unless I opened up even more over the course of the next year, but I can imagine giving important presentations to clients and working in teams for extended periods of time becoming very tiring and stressful to me...

So... I like the sound of asset management because I'd be researching businesses, perhaps applying the economic theory I'd gain from the graduate diploma and there's less of a social pressure involved (perhaps)


Any advice or perhaps personal accounts would be ever so useful
Cheers

hmmm a lot of questions...as usual, it depends. i'll try and answer in terms of what your most likely to find in AM firms in the UK that take grads (i.e Schroders, Baillie Gifford).

there are a few different sections. you will either be looking at equities or bonds. you may look at companies within a certain country or, more likely, an industry. this slight difference can end up with massively different outcome/investment processes...but on the whole, most AM firms will say look at an industry, speak to some people (companies, other analysts) and then report back about what is moving the industry i.e fragmentation/consolidation, margins, sales (i've been led to believe that grads make quite a few presentations to make sure they are learning something). however, most AM firms now have things like proprietary screens to pick stocks on their numbers. the end result is usually looking at spreadsheets, visiting the company, speaking to analysts and making forecasts however, everyone can do those things and not everyone can be a good analyst so there is something else there that i don't understand.

most AM firms either run mutual funds or investment trusts...the short story is the investors have already given you the money so there will be a fund manager (who oversees the assets of said mutual fund or investment trust) who decides to buy or sell equities/bonds for the fund. you as an analyst will present to him your ideas. (vast oversimplification). however, in privately-owned firms (i.e Baillie Gifford) there is usually far more pressure on grads (generally) and presenting to partners is common. the instance i was referring to above was paraphrasing what I know happens at Baillie Gifford from people who have worked there. the way i view it is say you pick a stock and it underperforms and you have to talk about why the current price is wrong every morning for the next year, i would say that be a socially uncomfortable situation.

about how well your trained...its a difficult question but there is no point where you can say "i know what i'm doing...this is a buy, this isn't" i.e most things are subjective. most AM firms training programs are usually about 3 years (the learning curve is very steep i've been told) and it usually takes about 5 years before they give grads any money...so make of that what you will. a lot of AM (that I am talking about) is soft skills, some people are good, some aren't and taking the CFA won't help you. I didn't mean it to sound harsh but i think as a grad you can think once i'm in, i'm fine whereas really thats just the start and they can't train you to be something your not. just my opinion tho. i hope that helped and as i say, it would be more typical for someone of your background to work in a more numerate area of finance. look at some vault guides or guides to the city.

I am a 2nd Year Physicist who intends on taking a graduate diploma in economics after doing a 3 year course at a top university.

At school I have done a range of things: Marketing director of a Young Enterprise company, almost taken Media Studies to AS level (switched it for FM half way through ), was in charge of a Physics and Engineering Society and in for a couple of years was interested in making media (films, adverts, posters, marketing, etc)

So from the list it sounds like I'd be suited to consultancy as I do have an interest in business and solving problems using creative approaches. Not so into number crunching...

However, I have always been a shy person and have only been coming out of that shell over the past couple of years at Uni. This, I feel would hold me back in a consultancy job unless I opened up even more over the course of the next year, but I can imagine giving important presentations to clients and working in teams for extended periods of time becoming very tiring and stressful to me...

So... I like the sound of asset management because I'd be researching businesses, perhaps applying the economic theory I'd gain from the graduate diploma and there's less of a social pressure involved (perhaps)


Any advice or perhaps personal accounts would be ever so useful
Cheers

Also, in conclusion:

An ideal consultant has excellent people skills and can build and maintain positive relationships with ease. So they'd be one of those popular people who everyone knows and likes because the job is so people intensive.

This may be a just out of my depth in terms of my social stamina, as I can wear out in social situations a bit faster than my peers.

Bit of a shame because I like the idea of helping businesses run themselves better and finding new and creative ways of improving systems... maybe I'll have to just start my own some day...

Fair conclusion?