What do traders at investment banks do

Presentations involve investment pitches rather than advising companies on acquisitions or capital raises. This is also true on the sales side — senior salespeople simply sell more and work with more important clients.

By contrast, the work changes significantly as you move up in investment banking. Analysts and Associates do mostly grunt work, such as Excel, PowerPoint, deal process tracking, and pitch book creation. How good was the bid-ask spread? Just think about how everyone in group activities in university received credit even if one person did all the work and someone else did almost nothing.

Then, Associates move up beyond that level, and mid-level employees such as VPs will earn a total closer to the mid-six-figure range e. As you move up in both fields at large banks, the majority of your bonus will be deferred or paid in stock rather than cash producing one big advantage for elite boutiques, prop trading firms , and hedge funds.

MDs in investment banking face a similar issue, but fees earned from closed deals tend to be more stable than trading commissions because companies execute deals even if the public markets are slumping or problematic. Investment banking exit opportunities are broad and plentiful: private equity , growth equity, venture capital , hedge funds , asset management, corporate finance, corporate development, and more.

Salespeople gain a broader skill set, so they could, theoretically, win sales roles at normal companies , or even go into areas like investor relations or buy-side fundraising. However, deal-based roles such as private equity or corporate development would be nearly impossible without actual deal experience first. For more about some of these opportunities, please see our article on the hedge fund career path.

And the quant hedge fund and quant research routes are still viable, but, again, those are different from traditional trading jobs.

If none of these conditions is true, then I would strongly recommend investment banking instead. In his spare time, he enjoys memorizing obscure Excel functions, editing resumes, obsessing over TV shows, traveling like a drug dealer, and defeating Sauron.

Free Exclusive Report: page guide with the action plan you need to break into investment banking - how to tell your story, network, craft a winning resume, and dominate your interviews. Hi Brian, As an outgoing and social person, enjoy being with fun and chill people, will S? T just be the better fit for me? Or IB can still be an option despite most work will keep the nose to the grindstone as you mentioned?

Industry-Specific Modeling. Real Estate. Finance Interview Prep. Corporate Training. Technical Skills. View all Recent Articles. In This Article What is a trading floor really like?

Ace your Sales and Trading Interview! Email provided. Your Download is Ready. Inline Feedbacks. November 10, pm. I enjoy reading your blog. Jerry Williamson. September 30, am. Thanks for this guide. It would really be helpful for traders. September 14, pm. However, what they tend to have in common is highly developed numeracy skills, the ability to think quickly and a talent for recognising patterns in large amounts of data.

Furthermore, the best traders tend to have a temperament well-suited to the fast-paced and often stressful environments in which they work. Typically, researchers will analyse huge amounts of data, from financial forecasts to analyses of regional political and economic phenomena.

Researcher and analyst roles are the most common grad jobs, and the major tasks include presentations, analysis and administration. Researchers need to be patient and logical thinkers who are adept at making new connections between disparate pieces of data. Managing directors lead investment banks, almost always after years spent in other positions developing the necessary skills, experience and credibility. They take responsibility for the overall performance of their organisations and network to build and maintain vital business relationships.

Managing directors have been around the track a few times, and over their years at the bank developed the necessary skills, experience and credibility to act in a leadership role. As senior members of the bank, managing directors are responsible for the overall performance of the organisation.

The most important and distinct role of a managing director is to bring in new business for the bank. Instead, their role is to act as a consultant, helping to broker different deals, raising capital, or assisting with mergers or acquisitions.

Corporate financiers help companies with various financial situations in a non-sales capacity. To succeed, corporate financiers require an extensive knowledge of stocks, financial products and company valuation procedures. Interest swaps, for example, involve a party which is receiving fixed interest payments swapping those payments with another party which is receiving variable interest payments.

Interest rate swaps are known as vanilla derivatives. There are some far more complex 'structured products' out there, some of which, like collateralised debt obligations CDOs , were roundly blamed for the financial crisis of Sales and trading jobs in investment banks have changed a lot since the financial crisis.

Firstly, all but the most complicated derivative products are increasingly traded electronically without the intervention of human beings. In the past, an asset management firm which wanted to sell some of its holdings would have actually spoken to a bank's traders about the trade.

Now, the asset manager can use a bank's electronic trading system to place that trade directly. And as long as everything runs smoothly, the bank's trader is no longer necessarily. These electronic trading platforms are expensive to build but cheap to run and banks are doing their best to encourage clients to use them.

Deutsche Bank's 'Autobahn' electronic trading platform can, for example, be accessed via an iPad app. The second big change the financial crisis is that traders in investment banks no longer get to trade with a bank's own money. Before the crisis, banks' traders could take so-called 'proprietary risk. Nowadays, this kind of 'proprietary trading' is banned. Traders in investment banks are no longer allowed to make their own bets about the direction of the market you'll have to join a hedge fund for that ; they exist simply to 'make markets' for their clients.

So, what does 'market making' mean?