Originally Posted by Unregistered

i'm gonna be encouraging and say that it is possible, with some luck.

i graduated from SMU (just a bachelors degree, not masters) and wanted to do risk management because i'm very strong in my quantitative skills and did very well for my risk management module. but i got rejected by most banks. it was however a blessing in disguise. i got into a hedge fund as a research associate (same as analyst) and work directly under 2 portfolio managers.

with a small investment management company, i do everything from market research, to executing trades, to analyzing portfolio, to making presentations to internal committee and current/potential investors. sounds like something you'd want to do.

so do consider buy-side research. we do less rigorous analysis though.
because we trade with the sell-side brokers, we can just request research reports from them. there's no need to do in-depth analysis, just read the reports and pick out the key points.