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Finance: What Does a Financial Analyst Do? 320 Views
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What does a financial analyst do? Financial analysts research the market and recommend investments. There are quite a few licenses required to be a financial analyst, so the beginning period of this job requires a lot of studying. After a few years, ideally the analyst is spending their time making investment recommendations.
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Transcript
- 00:00
what does a financial analyst do? well this and this and this.
- 00:10
so after all that analyzing of financial data what does the analyst actually do?
- 00:15
well she makes recommendations to you know do stuff. generally so that [man frowns at camera]
- 00:20
investors can make money or not lose money. and to be clear financial analysts
- 00:25
come in a few different flavors. pick an analyst who works for a stock brokerage
Full Transcript
- 00:28
for example. well they produce reports which the brokerage then gives to
- 00:32
clients hoping that it will incentivize its clients to trade with the firm and
- 00:37
give the firm its business, which of course generates commission for the
- 00:41
stock brokers in theory. the goal here is to make money for the client. but the
- 00:45
more near-term goal is to you know get the client to pay attention to the firm.
- 00:49
this is a subtle but very important difference from a financial analyst who [one man stands behind another and shouts]
- 00:53
works for an investment company ie one who actually invests money for clients
- 00:58
and is evaluated based on the performance of those investments. a
- 01:02
financial analyst inside of an investment company like fidelity or
- 01:06
Franklin or American Funds cares only about how well the investment does. the
- 01:11
financial analyst does not have to juggle clients or worry about marketing
- 01:15
to non-professional investors or generating commissions for the firm. all
- 01:20
they have to worry about is beating the market or their index or whatever
- 01:23
benchmarks are set out there for them .in addition there are two flavors of [woman hits punching bag]
- 01:26
financial analysts on Wall Street more or less .by side -those are extensions of
- 01:31
hedge funds and private equity funds and venture capital funds and mutual funds-
- 01:35
they're all the people who analyze things from the perspective of a buyer
- 01:39
only like they buy the stuff they don't have to keep clients happy and get
- 01:43
Commission business. then you have the sell side which are largely just [graph showing stocks]
- 01:47
extensions of stockbrokers. stockbrokers hire the analyst to give smart opinions
- 01:52
on buying selling and holding stocks such that well they can go talk to their
- 01:56
clients about it and win Commission business from getting them to trade
- 01:59
through them by recommending Microsoft at forty two dollars and twelve cents
- 02:03
and stuff like that. there are financial analysts who work for the government as
- 02:07
well. these guys are usually housed in hell-like divisions of the government
- 02:11
called the Fed which assesses whether or not the [man in dark glasses behind computer]
- 02:14
economy is heating up cooling down or see-sawing like a spring day in Chicago.
- 02:17
well here a financial analyst might be sampling the prices of a half gallon
- 02:21
carton of GMO milk at 500 grocery stores around the country. they then use that
- 02:26
data to figure out if the country is feeling inflation deflation or just
- 02:30
boredom .financial analysts exist inside of corporations as well.
- 02:34
corporate analysts perform market evaluations to try to help companies [man smiles at camera]
- 02:38
sell more product for more profit which in turn fuels the company's growth and
- 02:42
all that other fun stuff. so yes being a financial analyst might not be the
- 02:46
flashiest job in the world but just think about all that Ben and Jerry's you
- 02:50
can buy once your commission comes through. [people cheer the ice cream truck]
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