M&A For a High School Student?

butcherer
Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:45:43 +0000

Gotta qualify what astonmartinDBS said… no high school student without connections will get one.

M&A requires putting together a lot of financial knowledge: valuations, equity and debt markets, corporate strategy, and just a general familiarity with how markets and investors act. It really depends on where you are right now. Can you comfortably do DCFs? Trading and Transaction Comps? Do you know a lot about equity and debt markets, tradeoffs and access? How about why companies pursue M&A in the first place, and how they decide what to target? And how markets, investors, and targets respond to takeover attempts?

Knowing all these concepts is a minimum requirement for then jumping into the “basic operations” of M&A. See if you can get your hands on an M&A business case (HBS, etc.) or a well-documented deal (preferably not a distressed one like BofA-Merrill or JPM-BSC).

Though I’d have to say, there are probably better things to spend your high school years on…