Sales and trading interview questions

He has extensive experience in wealth management, investments and portfolio management.

If you are interviewing for sales, you need to know the same info that a person interviewing for trading does. Sales gets a bad rap on this site, but I have met a lot of sales guys. A lot of the sales guys I know are ex-traders who for one reason or another quit trading to go into sales - and they love it less stress , they know all about the product, and they do just as well as when they were trading. The difference between these interviews is that they will focus on one area more than the other, but that does not mean you should not have a stock pick ready when going into a fixed income interview. Warning: This guide is not meant to be a cram sheet. This guide is meant to be completed over time and to prepare you for the marathon that is the interviewing process. To prepare for the fit part, I would read the WSO Fit Interview Guide and look hard at your resume for possible questions that could be asked i.

Sales and trading interview questions

Everything you need to know about sales and trading in , put together for the first time. When I interviewed for sales and trading summer analyst positions in — at J. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, respectively — I frankly had no idea what I was doing. I was lucky to get through the recruiting process and get offers at both Goldman and JPM. But ever since my interviews nearly five years ago I believed that someone needed to create a definitive course that walked you through the entire sales and trading recruiting process, explained how to answer top interview questions, and walked through what desks exist and what they do. The result is the Sales and Trading Interview Prep Course, which contains 13 guides and over real-world sales and trading interview questions and answers. The reason for the course being so large is that I believed a truly comprehensive course needed to cover not only the interview questions you need to prepare for in a sales and trading interview and there are a lot of them! That latter point is important. Sales and trading can seem like a complete black box to someone from the outside and what I set out to do is try to shed a little light on sales and trading and help you get your foot in the door. The reality is that sales and trading is really just the name of a division of an investment bank that houses dozens of wildly different desks. Every desk in sales and trading will focus on a different product that is wholly distinct from other products that other desks deal with. No one expects you to understand exactly what a 2s10s steepener is, what convexity involves, or what CLO coverage tests are.

The US dollar would strengthen relative to the Canadian dollar, holding all other things constant. You can say that you think sales and trading provides a great opportunity for someone who is intellectually curious and who has a mix of quantitative and qualitative attributes. Don't worry, no one is expecting you to know everything about how to model out a CLO waterfall although that's a common test for a summer analyst at the end of their time on the CLO desk, sales and trading interview questions.

Sales and trading interview questions can be some of the toughest in all of finance. The reason being is that there is no division within major investment banks that is more diverse in what they do than in sales and trading. Within any given sales and trading division you'll have folks who focus on equity derivatives, mortgage backed securities, interest rate swaps, distressed debt, among dozens of other products. Note: Each "product" or asset class will normally have a dedicated desk that will contain sales people, traders, and potentially others including sales traders , quants, and structurers. The issue with sales and trading is that in a superday for a summer analyst or full-time role, you'll be interviewing with at least three members of the sales and trading division who could come from any desk and obviously they can't help but judge you based on whether you'd be a good fit for their desk. What this means practically is that interviewees need to have a broad understanding of what occurs on a trading floor in order to be successful in an interview. In other words, you need contextual understanding.

If you're new here, please click here to get my FREE page investment banking recruiting guide - plus, get weekly updates so that you can break into investment banking. Thanks for visiting! Being an athlete helps a lot because it demonstrates your drive and risk-taking ability. There are also a few transfers from the middle office and other teams at the bank. There are 1. For sales , you can take a similar approach, but you should focus on developing client relationships rather than learning all the technical details of a product. The main difference is that you need to pick stories that demonstrate the traits that salespeople and traders want to see. For example:. The themes are thinking quickly , mitigating risk , performing well under pressure , and generating profits.

Sales and trading interview questions

When it comes to sales and trading interviews, there's a wide diversity of potential questions you can get. However, you can rest assured that you will almost invariably be asked "Why sales and trading? Many think that this is a bit of a gimme question. The reality is that a large reason why this question is asked in the majority of interviews is that it's a way to suss out whether you actually understand what sales and trading is all about. In a traditional superday setting an interviewer will normally interview around six applicants give or take.

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Market Questions Traders and salespeople live and breathe the market. Click on this link and scroll to the bottom of the page to see a gold mine of information. There are some people out there who might be able to pass these tests without much effort. Being an athlete helps a lot because it demonstrates your drive and risk-taking ability. Please refer to our full privacy policy. Both common and preferred shareholders can receive dividends, but a firm must pay preferred shareholders first before common shareholders can be paid. Does this mean that the Treasury bond has greater price volatility? The reason being is that you want to avoid coming across as being certain that there is one area of the trading floor that is right for you before you have even begun. Options - Options Volatility and Pricing by Natenberg. Then, based on the current market conditions stock market, bond market, commodities market , allocate assets based on how far they deviate away from their fundamental levels. However, having contextual understanding of where those things fit into the broader sales and trading division and what the basics of the major desks are is critically important.

As I wrote about in the rather long sales and trading overview post, FX is one of the more interesting areas of a trading floor to be on. In particular if you like flow trading and like to think in relativistic terms because everything in FX is relative.

What is a long put position in relation to delta, gamma, theta, vega, and rho? Entering into the sales and trading interview process can appear daunting. Thank you very much. The math would be something like what is 39 x 39 or simple expected value. It might make more sense to swap the bond allocation for precious metals, alternative assets, or real estate — anything that might generate cash flow or increase in price when interest rates are extremely low. Member's Area Updated: Jan This is because, as you can imagine, during good times there's almost no risk involved in repo trades since they're often just a day in duration, but can stretch longer. If you are joining a specific desk full-time or are applying for a quant-heavy role, then there will be less value here for you. These tranches will have decreasing levels of priority on the underlying cash flows of the levered loans that make up the CLO to be discussed later. If you are interviewing for a specialized product, it is worthwhile to mention something in the space provided you know what it is about if you are interviewing for commodities, The Prize by Daniel Yergin is good. The Sales and Trading Desk Guides. If this group rejected you before, that strategy does not work and you have to show your hunger in coming back. If you're going to focus on technicals then focus on stuff like bond math, duration, convexity, hedging , options theory, etc. They are used as benchmarks for other fixed income securities for pricing. A lot of the sales guys I know are ex-traders who for one reason or another quit trading to go into sales - and they love it less stress , they know all about the product, and they do just as well as when they were trading.