Sales & Trading Summer Analyst (Fixed Income, Currencies & Commodities)

I entered the interview pool through networking with a Managing Director at the firm. After reaching out to the alumni and speaking with him on the phone, I received a phone interview for Morgan Stanley Sales & Trading (Fixed Income, Currencies, & Commodities).

After speaking with an Executive Director on a FICC trading desk, I received a super day. The phone interview was almost entirely behavioral/experiential, which was the complete opposite of the super day. For the super day, I had four 1-on-1 interviews, with predominantly senior employees. I expressed a preference for trading as opposed to sales or research, and the interviews were largely technical.

At the end of the interviews, all the applicants are invited to "tour" the trading floor. This is really just to give the interviewers time to decide who gets offers, as MS S&T decides immediately on the spot. The applicants are then brought into a conference room, where names are called out as "free to leave." Two rounds of names are given, and if you are not asked to leave, you get an offer immediately on the spot. Out of approximately 30 applicants, 3 were not asked to leave in my pool.

As far as advice, my experience with MS for both Investment Banking and S&T is that is a highly technically based firm. For S&T, make sure you are well versed in probability concepts and have read the book, "Heard on the Street: Quantitative Questions from Wall Street Job Interviews."