S&amp;T Material Advice

ninjiompeipakoa

Orangutan

Most people in their freshmen or sophomore years would prefer Equities over Fixed Income given the hype over equities. FI valuations is more mathematical and quantitative and I'd say satisfy those who love dealing with concepts easily broken down into maths (e.g. duration, convexity, swaps, and many others). I'd say being interested in Fixed Income especially when interviewing with salesperson/traders working in FI desks might give you an edge given most students would prefer Equities. Try to see if FI and all their derivatives might interest you. But Equity derivatives are also fun.

I'd recommend John C. Hull's book on Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives to start. Feel free to PM me.

Prospect in PE - Growth

Anonymous

Thanks man, just sent in a PM!

Junk Bonds Rating

probably_screwed

Baboon

S&T encompasses a large range of products that all have pretty unique fundamental and quantitative qualities. I think your main goal would just be to figure out what kind og desk you want to sit on. The best way to do that is to network with people across different desks and banks, and to try to decide your preferences from there.

For equities, it might be worth your time to learn a bit of statistics and try to the understand the math behind the Black Scholes equation, especially regarding how the partial derivatives of it affect hedging out options (delta, theta, vega). As mentioned earlier, Hull's book to derivatives is probably the best place to start.

For FI, if you're going the corporate credit route, figure out if you like investment grade, distressed or high yield credit. Then, start to piece together a basic intuition of how prices move and learn some bond math if you'd like.

petaq

Senior Monkey

Most Helpful

Definitely read the WSJ every day if you don't do so already. I would recommend the entire front page and then everything from the business section til the end. Knowing about current events and general market trends (how all the major exchanges/commodities/rates have been doing and what their main drivers were) is a massive part of S&T interviews so it is a must imo.

Having your own opinion/thoughts/views on the news and markets can also be a very good way to differentiate yourself from other candidates as you can demonstrate a clear interest in markets, as well as showing that you can actually apply and think about the things you read, not only recite them. I think that this is one thing that differentiated me in my superday, as one of my interviews turned into just a intellectual conversation of a topic I read from the WSJ, and the technicals rushed at the end when we were running out of time haha. And lmao if anything you can just read it when you are bored in a class.

Fabozzi's Handbook of Fixed Income Securities is very thorough on a lot of different topics, but it may be unnecessary bc you can just look up those things on the internet lol. It was also pretty expensive, even an older used edition ran me like $60 on Amazon if I remember correctly, but that's just because it is basically a textbook

Prospect in S&T - Equities

Anonymous

Thanks man, and yes, I get bored in class a lot so having some spare time to do some reading about the financial markets and studying the industry a bit is more appealing 🤣

Pulisic69

King Kong

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