The latest “40 under 40” list has come out for the private equity industry, and a most impressive bunch they are too (some of them really quite frighteningly young for the deals they’re leading). There’s a spread of unusual hobbies: rowing from Barcelona to Ibiza, brainwave hacking and extreme cold exposure, ancient and medieval history. But leafing through the profiles, there is a real sort of … sameyness to them. Went to a top university, did an MBA, associate at a consultancy or investment...

One of the things we do know about the investment banking industry is that things move in cycles – one year it’s tech IPOs that are hot, a few years later it’s CDS trading, then it’s Delta One derivatives and then it’s wealth management, and so on. It’s never the greatest of fun when your own specialty is one of the ones that’s experiencing a downturn, but you can usually expect that the wheel will spin round again. Get the latest career advice and insight from eFinancialCareers straight to...

Banks typically try not to say that they are well-capitalised and have no need of state aid, because it tends to invite speculation as to why the reassurance might have been necessary. But when you’re the chairman of Deutsche Bank, giving a year end interview to Frankfurter Allgemeine, the question is bound to be asked and it’s impossible to duck. Paul Achleitner states the case as strongly as possible “Deutsche has a very strong capital base, even compared to its competitors”, and with...

Everyone knows it’s no bed of roses to date a banker. Nor is it the easiest thing in the world to be a banker looking for love. But one way or another, it does seem to happen; singleton analysts who've been complaining about their slave-driver bosses grow up into married vice presidents VPs complaining about their lazy entitled juniors. And it's when you're a married VP that the hard work really begins. In a sense, bankers have a matrimonial head start. Because so many relationships formed...

There is a paradox of cost cutting exercises, which is that they tend to over-deliver on the headcount reductions. If you fire 10% of your staff, then you will typically find that another 10% leave. This would be good news for cost cutting managers, except that the 10% who leave tend to include many of the ones that you wanted to keep. As soon as a headcount reduction is rumoured, sensible bankers will start feeling out the market to see what their options are if the worst comes to the worst....