Can I get into Trading with a Business degree?
Does a Business degree help you get a Trading job? Also are Finance degrees what employers want in trading or not? I've heard that your degree should be Economics, Maths, Engineering and the sciences. Although I have heard as well a Finance degree or Business degree can still get you in.
Plenty of people in S&T with business degrees...just look at all the Stern kids. In careers like banking, S&T, and equity research, it doesn't matter what you studied in school.
Talking about europe: Never seen soft science guys in the vol space. Trading cash bods/equities, yeah sure, but even here quant majors outnumber business administration grads. A Trader told me that back in the 90s, you have had bund/bobl/schatz vol market makers with just a highschool degree at say Deutsche (today this space is reserved for Cambridge Math Phd guys [not joking]). Imo the least quanty degree that maximizes your chances at a trading desk would be an econometrics major (aka expert in linear regressions major)...
Would an MBA along side a Business degree help me or would I need to get a masters?
I'd try to network with credit desks. That's where most of the business guys land from my experience. I would say a MFE is better than a MBA, but it's not really statistically significant from my sample size. I think that I've seen more MBA credit traders than MFE ones, but common sense tells me that a prestigeful MFE should me more valued by a trading desk. Stick with MBA, you could also ping for other careers.
had the same questions as you years ago, but the below question asked to yourself basically answers all your "optimize my hiring probability" questions. Basically what you are doing (and what I did) is showing up at a financial firm and saying implicitly something along these lines: "Hi, I am 20-24. I don't know shit about generating alpha, please teach me everything about generating alpha, and while doing so please pay me GBP 55k a year plus a nice year's end bonus for being a good-for-nothing analyst (trading analysts are vba/coffee drones and aren't allowed to quote prices, except maybe for some secondary market stuff). While we at it, also please pay me a fuck ton of money compared to the non-finance world, once you teach me how to generate alpha. I am a fast learner and my IQ percentile is above .95 (35.000.000 people in Europe fall in this category). Here's my CV, thanks goodbye."
Whom would you hire? The business grad who can tell you that firms maximize their profit if price = marginal cost, or the applied math major who wrote a paper on modelling brain waves with support vector machines and implemented an algorithm in Python? A few years ago, soft science guys could easily enter the cash space, because you don't need advanced math for quoting a two way on a government bond. What we are seeing now is that the cash guys are being replaced by algorithms. It started with equities and fx, but it's now moving over to the bazillions of fixed income instruments. This shift is accentuated by various factors I won't go into long details (partiuclar the coming regulation regime), but it will be really hard to survice without quant skils in 2020+
You can enter now and hope to switch later in portfolio manager role tho. Be smart, be hungry and you set
Prop Trading - Business majors (Originally Posted: 06/27/2010)
Is it true that they dont like business majors? if so, what majors do they want?
no they like b majors..........i dunno why anyone would think that they wouldnt. However, I have known a few kids that werent b majors that got into trading/ ibanking. Apart from the major, they look at what other things youve done in ur short lifetime, ie. sports is a big one due to the competitiveness. A lot of times its a big personality match.
Hmm I don't know why anyone would think that, maybe because a lot of prop shops focus on high frequency algorithmic trading so they DO NOT prefer business majors, rather hard math, engineering, physics type of majors. Check out DRW's recruiting schedule, the majority of the Job fairs they attend are engineering fairs.
anything quant based ie: math, CS, physics, engineering, stats, econ
small prop shops from my experience much prefer quantitative backgrounds
I cant say that I agree with you there.....I think an ideal candidate would be some type of b major, with a quant(math, phys, eng) minor or double major. OK on DRW....thats one firm. You cant use one firm to confirm ur position on an entire industry. Maybe if you came up with 100 other shops in NYC, Chi that said the same thing, then i could believe it.
OK... let's add to the list.
Getco, Jump, CTC, Jane Street, Optiver, Chopper, Genesis, Ronin, Wolverine, ... all of these shops are stocked with quant majors. And that's who they want! Use common sense, what skills does a "B-major" provide that would make the candidate more attractive than a physics, math, engineering student. Remember how these shops trade...
Holders of B-majors aren't even the "ideal" candidate for trading positions at Investment Banks, I can't name one trader on my desk who has a business background (partly because my desk is more quantitative than others, but the logic is sound because my desk looks for candidates that prop shops often target as well).
You are pretty much saying in your opinion you think b majors would make for a candidate for a prop firm. Hate to break it to you, but your wrong. Most prop shops focus on heavy quant/algo/high freq trading so your corporate finance classes really are of no use to you there. In your first post, you said "banking/trading", and yes for banking a finance major is probably more ideal but you cannot compare the background of someone who works in M&A to a trader at a prop shop. Its like comparing apples to oranges...
I can honestly say that the person has to be smart and speak in english.
I would say it depends on your trading strategy. How many math majors really understand the markets coming out of undergrad? Unless they specifically know they want to trade when they graduate I would have to say close to zero. Don't get me wrong SmCDO is right, quants can have an advantage over markets markets but I wouldn't say thats all prop shops look for. Probably the most elite ones. Most trading is zero sum, and if you can spot and take advantage of the opportunity you are going to be fine.
My ideal candidate would probably be econ/math with some software development experience.
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