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superday or first round?
First round
FICC floor is louder and more boystrous than the equities floor due to less electronic trading. Lots more OTC stuff.
Apart from that, comp is gonna vary by what you produce. And what you produce depends on the specific product, the year, your skill etc.
Credit floor is where the dogs play
This post on twitter sums up all you need to know about desk placement:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210409031119/https://twitter.com/sukhoiCo…
I'll be in FICC this summer, I'll let you know lol
Looking forward to it! I'll be at a prop shop this summer I can also et you know if you want
Undoubtedly, unequivocally, go FICC all else equal. Ideally you can get into a linear rates or rates/fx vol seat.
Banks cannot compete with market makers (Jane Street, Five Rings, Hudson River Trading, etc.) in the equities game. It is a highly mathematical, software oriented game centered around the exchanges. Flash Boys provides a primitive picture of what this game entails, but the existence of exchanges drives margins down for banks competing in the space where the name of the game in providing equities/equity options/etfs liquidity is low latency.
On the other hand, FICC products are transacted facing counterparties. If you want to trade an interest rate swap you must face GS/MS/JPM directly. If you want to purchase a (payer/reciever/straddle) swaption the same applies. While this market is still competitive, the lack of relative trading activity to equities means that margins still exist for these products, and in the case of swaptions, one must curate market views due to the inventory of risk one takes when trading the product.
The FICC game is similarly mathematical but in a more analytical and macro sense. The game is not on optimizing the routing time to an exchange to eek out an additional one-hundredth of a microsecond, but on identifying what fundamental data may drive rates in one direction or another, or cause rate volatility to over/under realize versus where implieds currently trade.
If you have the skillset, go FICC, and do not think twice.
If you do not know the terms I am using above, would suggest Googling them, or as the cool kids are using these days, using ChatGPT.
I understand your own background is in rates, but do you think rates are really the best desk of all FICC desks that a typical BB has? What would be some similar products if you could not do rates? How does one become competitive in a pool of interns for a rates trading desk (assuming one has a relevant quantitative background)? Sorry for all the questions. Really appreciate your perspective on the site.
I don't think rates are the end-all-be-all by any means, but they are certainly a better choice than equities on the sell side for the reasons alluded to above.
You can trade treasuries, get onto a repo desk, focus on MBS, anything that piques your interest in the FICC world. With that said, if your aspirations are lofty, rates are, in my humble opinion, the purest macro product you can touch on the sell side and trading rates options will provide you with an enviable skillset as you advance in your career.
The biggest traits I look for in junior recruits are curiosity, work ethic, intelligence, reliability, and decisiveness. If you possess these traits you have a significant chance to go far in this business (and many others). If you are interested in the rates side, I'd suggest reading about interest rate swaps, familiarizing yourself with what impacts these products, and even foraying into swaptions if the vol side interests you too. I have recommended materials somewhere in my previous threads, but the traits mentioned before in conjunction with some effort familiarizing yourself with the products and the macro environment will differentiate you from others.
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