Dominic Rosado
Current job title, company: Senior analyst on the Leveraged Lending team at BMO
Location: Chicago
Interests/Hobbies: Reading, playing soccer, watching football, being outdoors, and checking out new restaurants.
What clubs, organizations or events were you a part of in college?
I was involved in Lead@Econ, which focused on mentorship between upper and lower classmen in the economics department, and I was the Finance Director at Slow Food UW. Additionally, I held a variety of jobs on campus including being an assistant in the accounting department at the Wisconsin Historical Society, bartending, and collecting books from all across the campus libraries to be lent out to other universities.
What do you enjoy most about your current role? Can you share a few of your main responsibilities?
My favorite part about my job is learning how different businesses that the bank could potentially lend to work. I have covered everything from billboard operators, insurance brokers, legal payment software providers, commercial waste haulers, military aircraft landing gear manufacturers and everything else between.
On the day to day, I spend most of my time working on credit approval memos for new transactions which consists of synthesizing financials, presentations, and market studies , and creating a financial projection model to understand if it makes sense for the bank to lend to a company.
Do you have any ‘go to’ websites, newsletters, or apps for your industry or resources you check regularly?
I have WSJ, Bloomberg and NYT subscriptions, which I regularly use to keep up with general finance and business news. I also leverage newsletters that are circulated internally at BMO (prior companies I have worked at have similar newsletters) to stay privy to what our research teams and management teams are clued in on.
It sounds terrible to say, but finance meme accounts also help me stay on top of trends in the industry. Meme accounts that I follow will make a joke about something I haven’t heard of before or share a screenshot of an article that looks interesting, and if it piques my interest I’ll look up the concept (I had this happen to me with a meme about liability management exercises) or find the article referenced.
Did you have an internship? If so, how did that experience help guide you in your career?
I interned at Bank of America’s Quantitative Analytics Management Program (or “QMAP”) and I was assigned to the Market Risk team and my primary responsibilities were tracking the banks trading books’ exposure to interest rate and FX risks. Prior to joining the internship program, my workload and interest was pretty evenly divided between more quantitative economics courses (e.g., econometrics, economic forecasting) and finance electives (e.g., applied security analysis, investment banking) and I decided that this internship would give me the opportunity to tease out what direction I wanted to go in while being at a large financial institution.
After the summer, I learned that the job wasn’t the right fit for me. I learned a lot about how the bank manages risk on its balance sheet, how to manage projects from start to finish, and how to be a more professional communicator, but I wanted to have more variety on what I worked on day to day, have my focus be on more company-specific issues versus macro-trends and have more structured deadlines.
I took the QMAP full-time role at the time due to COVID-19 and in my free-time networked with people all across the bank to figure out what I wanted to do. I eventually ended up meeting someone who worked on one of the leveraged credit at Bank of America and began to grow an interest in the space as I realized it checked all of the boxes I was looking for. Unfortunately, there were no opportunities in the leveraged finance space for me at Bank of America at the time , so I landed a role externally at Wells Fargo TMT Corporate Banking team (which housed most of the companies leveraged loan transactions) and pivoted to BMO’s Leveraged Lending team when I moved to Chicago.
What is the main piece of advice you’d like to share with current econ majors?
Enjoy being a student and take advantage of the opportunities that come with being a student. Take the off beaten road class that seems interesting to you , show up to a random seminar or club meeting you saw a flyer for and don’t be afraid to ask the pressing questions you have when trying to sort out your career.
You don’t sense it now, but there is an armor you have while being a student that partially insulates you from the associated risks of being vulnerable that slowly deteriorates after graduating.