I'm leaning towards rates but I also find the energy markets interesting.  Tho I don't think the transition is realistic since I'm not in an O&G group so aiming for rates.

TBH in my little free time I'm just reading articles or scrolling through Twitter from some macro analysts, nothing serious.  I think it's a lot tougher to prepare for compared to IB because there's no set questions to prepare for.

 

Best advice to break in as an analyst would be to have exceptional quant skills. Pretty tough to do without that even the discretionary type shops are looking for quant background analysts. It is no doubt counter-intuitive since most of the classically best macro minds are not STEM, but alas they're already "established." If non-quant I would either try to latch on as a trading-assistant/assistant PM and go through that track or go via a macro ish fundamental asset class as an analyst (equity strategy etc.) 

 
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Other people may have different views but I think you're essentially correct. Let me expand:
1.) Like 3 statement analysis for fundamental company related securities quantitative analysis is the bread and butter toolkit in macro for analysis- could be either for forecasting fundamental data (supply/demand dynamics in oil) or for forecasting something more technical like short term balance of payment flows for a currency (guess you could argue that is fundamental)
2.) Data, data, data- with so much of it out there i.e. cheap satellites telling you how full parking lots are etc. it is helpful to have the skillset to analyze

3.) It is the dirty work to validate PM's ideas- on the fundamental side there is a reason fresh IB hires don't immediately start sourcing ideas- bc they don't have the experience so instead they add value via being 3 statement modeling junkies to flesh out PM's ideas; similarly on the macro side fresh hire analysts don't come up with which FX cross is the most attractive but instead validate the PM's ideas through quant analysis

 

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