Can you still day-trade if you work in Investment banking?

Can you still day-trade if you work at an Investment bank? What division/department are you not allowed to day trade-in due to the Chinese wall/conflict of interest or risk of insider trading? Can you still invest?

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Policies vary across banks, but most have a firmwide policy with something along these lines:

1. Minimum hold policy (often 60 days)

2. Need to get compliance approval for each and every trade

3. Some securities restricted; this one varies, at some firms you can really only trade ETFs, at others you may be able to trade single stocks but may occasionally get rejected

All of these add up to you can't really day trade if you work at a bank. Even someone in a random back office job is subject to the firmwide polices; IB might have a tighter list of restricted names. If you are trying to day trade at scale you will spend your whole day filling out the trade approval forms. Most people trade monthly or quarterly and just buy ETFs.

 

Any large bank or financial firms will have these rules, so S&T, M&A (which is investment banking), etc, asset management is also strict, larger PE firms will too. I think smaller MM/LMM PE firms would care less.

Realistically no finance job is going to let you day trade - it's both a compliance issue and it's also a lot of time spent not doing your job. It's fine to buy a few stocks here and there but if you are spending time actively trading during the day (beyond just quickly investing some of your salary) you will get told to stop

 

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