Best Trading Desk at Deutsche Bank
What are the "best" trading desks at Deutsche Bank? Not sure what metrics are used to rank desks but I'm asking in terms of revenue, future outlook of the product, and exit opportunities.
You're asking a very open ended question. You can't rank "exit opportunities" because that really comes down to what you want out of your career. Some people don't care about exit ops - they're already doing what they love and are happy climbing the ranks there. Everything has pros and cons. A more client facing desk will help you make buy-side connections; a more quantitative desk will give you the skills to break into a quant fund or start your own shop. You need to know what you want.
As far as revenue, this depends on the market, but right now two areas that'll be pulling in large P&Ls over the next year (in my opinion) are equities and interest rate derivatives.
In terms of future outlook, there are two huge, correlated, factors to consider: 1. How will technology change this space? Can this job be automated? Are these products going to become less popular with new advances in technology? Take a look at how ETFs are gobbling up mutual funds' market share. This can be attributed to advances in communications that led to algo trading. 2. Relevance; will this product even be relevant in a few years' time? People in finance love falling into the trap of thinking that "this market changes daily, but for whatever reason, this product/job/service will ALWAYS be necessary". Think beyond this.
I think (I've answered this in another thread) that electronic trading has a huge future ahead. It's likely that, even with Trump on the verge of blowing up a ton of regulation, our world will continue to move toward standardization. In the last few years, many products have been standardized on exchanges / clearing houses for regulatory purposes, but this had a huge side effect - people realized that this is useful to have regardless of regulation. I think this trend will continue, regardless of government policy.
Those metrics aren't great to judge a specific bank on. For example, all credit trading desks would have similar exit opps across BBs and would have different exit opps to sales or structuring or research roles.
Same goes for outlook of the product. What's hot now may not be hot tomorrow and vice versa. You should be looking for more bespoke products (i.e securitized products) if you're trying to avoid being replaced by a computer or look for more vanilla (see cash equities or FX spot) if you want to use programming skills on your desk in the future.
At DB, they are strong in credit and FX specifically (each about top 3 across the street), and in Fixed Income broadly. However, part of their overhaul strategy involves putting more money into their equities department so that may grow in the future.
A good way to think of this question would be by market share, volume traded and size of the desk. There are some league tables floating around that try to put some banks' desks in a ranking, but take those with a grain of salt.
What I mean is that these areas are becoming more automated. So yes, the quants will be primarily programming but these groups are looking more and more for their traders to understand this stuff and help design/sell/manage the algos.
Thanks. So even when automation happens, not all traders are just going to lose their jobs?
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