Equity Sales vs. High-Grade Corporates Trading

thats not even close, HG Corporates Trading...

I'd do HG Corporates

they are 2 totally different choices. what would you rather do? dont ask a board full of high school seniors what sounds cooler on your business card when talking to girls who dont know what youre talking about in the first place.

By equity sales I did not mean "sales-trading". I meant equity-sales - they are two very different things. In equity sales you pitch ideas etc to portfolio managers and buy-side analysts, there will always be a demand for this regardless of what happens with technology. However, sales-traders on the other hand may become less needed as trading becomes more automated. To me both equity sales and HG corporate bond trading both sound cool but for different reasons of course. I wanted get other people's thoughts and opinions as well.

HG Corps...IMO a FI background provides a better platform off which to launch a career. Plain vanilla equity sales....it doesn't take too much salesmanship to sell common stock

I appreciate your opinion but I have to disagree that it doesn't take too much salesmanship to sell common stock. Clients are portfolio managers that are being inundated with long/short equity ideas from several different sales guys every day all stressing the urgency of their ideas and why action is necessary. People only buy stocks for one reason, to make money, and the sales guys that have the best money making ideas are going to be the ones that are more successful. This is difficult regardless of what the product is.

As far as launching a career goes, good money making sales guys can work at hedge funds in their respective products, whether that be equities, fixed income, derivatives, or anything else.

PM's get paid 2/20 to generate their own ideas/alpha. By the time a PM makes the decision to go long/short a common stock they have done their own research and may not even talk to a salesperson to execute.

I think if the sales group that you are considering has a heavy tilt towards a research-intensive sales process then it may be rewarding and a good launching pad for a career in finance. However all firms have dedicated research and strategy departments to produce alpha generating ideas. I'm not sure how much research/strategy experience you would get sitting on an institutional equity sales desk. Having a deep research/strategy background will make you a more compelling candidate for buyside opportunities.

If the goal is exiting to the buyside, I still think the experience in FI trading would be more valuable (disclaimer - I am a FI professional and have some bias here)

Again I appreciate the comments, but I'm not sure how familiar you are with what equity sales guys do, again I'm not talking about sales-traders, I'm talking about institutional equity salesmen. I have worked as a junior person on an equity sales desk and the senior sales guys are constantly pitching the banks best ideas all day long to PM's (both from research as well as their own ideas) - most PM's do not generate their own equity ideas - I've made calls on behalf of the desk to all different types of PM's to ask what they want more of and they all say to call with more ideas. They get paid 2/20 to pick the best ideas not necessarily to come up with them on their own. There's no way they can keep track of everything that's going on out there - even with internal research. A sales guy's job is to convince them of why his idea is the best.

When I originally posted this question - what would you rather do, equity sales or hg trading - I wasn't aware that so many people don't even know what equity sales guys do - or even that many of the better ones become PM's of l/s equity funds if they leave the sell side. Thanks anyways for trying to help though.

Let me ask a follow-up question. Are you selling cash equities, equity derivatives or both. In a market like Equities, where things are very transparent and most products trade on exchanges, it's very tough to add value or generate sales credits. If you're structuring exotic equity derivatives, there is a lot of opportunities to add value.

I think Corporates trading is the better of the two options. Just keep in mind it's not what it used to be. TRACE has made the market much more difficult to trade in.