hey walsea u seem to haf much exp in the industry.
care to enlighten me which banking sector are there?
I onli noe corp banking, IB, wealth management, prtfolio
management.
for sum reasons all my female fren aiming private wealth
management. Dunoe why.
Briefly, an Investment Bank (IB) can be loosely used to refer to
a bank that does all the stuff you mentioned (throw in S&T).
Broadly speaking, some of the main divisions within an IB would be
: Investment Banking (dealing with M&A, Corporate Finance,
Equity/Debt Capital Markets), Sales & Trading (known as
Securities to some IBs, dealing with products like equities, fixed
income, currency, commodities and their respective derivatives),
Investment/Asset Management and Private Wealth Management.
Different banks call them different names and group some of these
operations differently, but the broad picture is there.
In case you're wondering, I'm not a banker - as a matter of
fact, I belong to the group bankers hate 
(if you're familiar with the industry, you
should know what I do now) - although I work at an IB. With
that said and done, I suppose my experience of dealing with bankers
(it's not very fun having too many friends and a
girlfriend in investment banking 
) both
professionally and personally has offered me a glimpse of their
lives upclose. To be fair, even within investment banking, you do
get different hours for different roles (M&A would usually
require longer working hours than DCM/ECM), although the
commensurating difference in remuneration probably reflects
that.
PWM is a thriving industry in not just Singapore, but also Asia
at large (especially the emerging markets). Hence, that could
explain the popularity for it (sorry, I'm not familiar with the
demographic profile of analysts in the various divisions and
neither do I work in PWM, so I can't explain much on why your
female friends are aiming for PWM).
You seem to have quite an interest in banking, don't you? What
positions are you keen on? What course and university are you
attending? You may wish to drop me a pm if you wish to discuss
further.
