Your main goal as a capital markets employee is to make the deal go through and make both your client and investors happy. This is much easier said than done. As a capital market analyst you can expect to be involved in multiple tasks around the deal offering. These tasks might include pricing the deal, dealing with investors, organizing road shows, writing pitch books, or producing sales memos.
As we talked before, the deal has to be priced fairly and preferably make both sides happy. For pricing a deal, capital markets have to consider what the company wants to get and what investors are willing to pay. The communication between the two sides goes back and forth until the agreement is reached, or until company decides that it doesn’t want to proceed with the offering because it is unfavorable for them. Remember that the market always has more power than the company since they’re buyers.
You will have to help company present their story to investors. This is done through so called road shows. A road show is nothing more than an organized set of meetings where the company meets with the main potential investors and presents their story to them.  An investment bank serves as a coordinator between the two.
Finally, you will be working together with the fellow investment banking analysts, research, and sales force in creating pitch books and sales memos. Pitch books are created in order to show your client how great your bank is, that you’ve done research regarding their situation, and to present your valuation models. On the other hand, sales memos are created as a supporting document to sales force. So when they speak to the institutional investors and try to convince them to buy a certain security, they can have all the relevant information and arguments at one place.

Since capital markets are kind of a hybrid between investment banking and S&T, your skill set should also be somewhere in between the two skill sets for those jobs. It is always helpful to be detail oriented and very analytical. However, you will also find yourself working against time when trying to get the deal through. You can expect to develop good interpersonal skills because you will be dealing with a lot of clients.
Unlike in banking, you won’t do much modeling in capital markets. Therefore, don’t expect to learn too much about in depth financial stories behind companies. Although you will catch up and start understanding what is going on financially, you won’t be even close to understanding the models as investment bankers.
Finally, you will learn how to keep private information private. It is extremely important for capital markets analysts to be able to know what information they can and cannot share. Remember that you will serve as a bridge between the private and public side. You will have to be extremely careful about not saying private information to the public side.

Again, career path of a capital market analyst is very hard to generalize. People who start in capital markets usually continue their career in the same field and move up the ladder. The skill set that you get as a capital market person is transferrable, but it will serve you the best if you stick with the field.
There are even people who left Capital Markets to receive their MBAs. Although, there is a good chance that these people left Capital Market to pursue another finance related field.

Once again, being a banker is tough work! You will work around 12 – 13 hours on weekdays, and usually have free weekends. This doesn’t mean you won’t work any weekends, but definitely less than investment banking analysts. That is approximately 60 – 70 hours a week, which is not all that bad comparing to the other positions within the bank (excluding S&T). However, there’s a benefit over S&T. You don’t have to get up that early! Capital markets people usually come to the office  between 7:00 and 8:00 am. The hours are much more predictable than in banking, which means you can have life outside of work. All in all, being a capital markets guy/girl can be great. You still get all the benefits of Wall Street and you can have more predictable life.

Just like every other position we talked about so far, the compensation is great. Capital market compensation mirrors investment banking compensation. Year end bonuses might be slightly lower than your fellow bankers, but when you put it all in work – life balance terms, even slightly lower pay seems like more. The numbers are following:

• Signing bonus: ~$10,000
• Base salary: ~$50,000 – $70,000
• Year end bonus: ~$20,000 – $60,000