equity sales

Vault guide to S&T probably the best place to read the basics for this.

cant get the vault guide thats y askin the experts here

PMed u

depends what level of equity sales you are talking about. They make a little less than bankers do I think or perhaps the same amount and it depends a lot on the sales you manage to generate. The pay out is tied very much to your performance. If you are good at it, then you will make a good amount of money (Even more than the bankers).

This is very simplistic, but try it on for size:

Its going to be tough to get much underwriting business if you can't effectively (1) price and (2) market, either equities or bonds. Having an institutional sales force helps gauge appetite in the market and place an offering, both of which help the client and beget more business in the future. Need to be able to make a secondary market as well (traders) if you want to be a "one stop shop".

Most books I read and most banter on the street glorifies the traders "the big swinging dicks" as Lewis says, but the best banks & prop firms alike always have outstanding sales desks. I am familiar w/ the prop firm sales desk setup so I'll tell you about that, although the order flow is coming mostly from big banks and other firms.

Take a fairly good sized market making firm (options is what I know). They will have traders making markets and then they will have a sales desk either w/ institutional clients--really just relationships w. the other big firms and banks. The sales desk gets an order from a client and puts it up, obviously his traders pretty much get first dibs. If they really like the order they can take down the whole thing (and often times that happens b.c. the firm's own traders will make deeper and tighter markets thanks to the increased 'edge' from commission revenue); if it's too big they can take down a % and put the rest up for execution, or if they don't want to participate at the customer's price they can look elsewhere for execution.

So let's say John the Sales-trader at Susquehanna or one of the other similar firms gets an order for a 1000 contract spread on CSCO. His traders take down 25%, and he "shows" the rest of the order to the street, by putting a message up on AIM that all the other sales desks will see. Then they communicate to their traders to see if they want to take down any, and they try to get the order done. So what you've got is something like Susquehanna trading for a client/institution for 1) themselves and 2) other firms just like them, to spread out some of the risk.

The sales-trader is really responsible to his clients first and his traders second. What I think is most important about the sales-desk is the information through order flow. A lot of these trades go up at like mid-market, very little edge. But market makers and traders alike gain info by seeing the customer order flow and moving markets accordingly.

So like I said, the sales-trader is a very important task. And they are compensated accordingly.