HELP!! URGENT!!
I woke up this morning to a voicemail from a friend in fixed income trading at a BB in NYC. Think GS/MS/JPM...anyways he said that he passed my resume around his firm and landed me a phone interview with an executive director in S&T. I am a rising junior with a 3.95 at a target, and my intention was to go into investment banking. The problem is that I know ZERO about trading or fixed income - I could school you for days in IB related material, but I literally know nothing of trading. I am just trying to not make a fool of myself - any recommendations or basic knowledge about trading / fixed income would be appreciated.
Additional information: interviewer is from interest rate/currency group within fixed income, specifically in foreign exchange
Just school him in IB related material.
^^ haha agreed. You're a rising junior, you couldn't school anybody in anything, and they won't expect you to.
Rephrase - I have a beginning competency in IB, ZERO in trading...my IB knowledge is immense relative to trading because I have none
Just talk about Notre Dame's glory years. As you know, everyone loves hearing about Notre Dame football 24/7. He'll be so enthralled by riveting tales of the Gipper and Daniel Eugene Ruettiger that he'll forget all about trading.
Dont panic:
I am an intern on a big euro bank FX desk.
If you are talking to an FX guy you need to focus on these things at the moment:
Basics: Higher interest rates. Means the currency will strengthen on the news of a rate hike by the central bank of a given country. Underlying reason is it will raise bond yeilds and bring in outside investment.
Economic data: rates and how they are tied to infaltion are the most important. Higher inflation leads to centeal banks rasining rates to control inflation--->leads to appreciation of currency
whats going on now: If you want sound really smart bring up EUR/CHF (euro/swiss franc) the price action ahs been incredible lately and it has dropped from 1.18 to 1.0775 over th last couple of weeks. Yesterday the SMB (swiss central bank) intervened and sold the swiss franc to wekan the currency against the euro. The swiss cnertal bankfocused on the fact that they think the CHF is drastically overvalued.
Talk about how the UER/USD has basically been trading solely at the mercy of the news. Say that it seems like whatever news is worse that day is what dictates what happened. You can mention on how the US debt ceiling thing was soo drawn out that when we finally announced that we had raised it is was a no-news kind of event (you can say that it had already been 'priced-in'.
Also talk about how last night the BOJ (bank of Japan) intervened to try and weaken the yen against the dollar (it has moved from as low as 76.4 to 79.87 in the last 3 days. Also, rember yen is formatted in cents (so 100 yen equals parity to one dollar), so 77 yen means they are stringer than the dollar.
Also, one really easy thing that makes you sound like you are huge FX guy is to know the names of the central bank heads.
ECB (european central bank)-- Jean-Claude Trichet (just calle him Trichet)
FED- Ben Bernanke (just call him Bernanke)
Look up some others too.
Also, just get a couple charts of the major currency pairs (eur/usd, usd/jpy, gbp/usd, aud/usd) andsee how the price movements have been recently so you can talk about them.
JUST SO YOU KNWO I AM EXPECTING A SB for this thorough synopsis of FX!!!
hahahaha
Good Luck man, let us know how it goes...
start reading up bro....
what kind of materials??? does seminar help?
oh and hahaa I didnt see you were a domer. i went there and then transferred out.
Lived in knott hall with sam young (the one who recently graduated, the RT) while I was there.
I don't blame you from transferring from Knott. I probably would have too.
I think knowing how FX is going to relate to bonds is important too, especially for a US firm investing in foreign denominated. Understand how you use FX to hedge your currency exposure by selling fwd vs USD and then continually rolling the exposure. Also, just understand currency exposure in general and how you get it, change it via bonds, derivs, and FX. You're probably not going to be expected to have a high level understanding of things as an intern
Just to add, I would make sure to understand how you would calculate currency exposure for the different products too. So if you're selling a JPY/USD Call for 1mm notional with a delta of .75, you should know what the resulting currency exposure is for both JPY and USD, etc.
Good luck!
Not to be a jackass, but Notre Dame is not a target.
Sorry, typo in my OP. 3.95 at a non-target
Umm I'm not sure how you'd be able to brush up on all the above material in a couple days, because there's a lot more depth to every single topic. You don't want to mention something and when asked to explain further, not be able to say anything and just sound like you're parroting the news.
I'd say just stay up-to-date on news and show an interest in what's going on in the world, but don't worry too much on technical details, because you won't get it in a couple days anyway... Show strong personality, willingness to admit to your ignorance but willingness to learn and work hard, be aggressive..
Thank you for the advice - this is the approach I will take since the call is in 50 minutes and I'm more confused than before. I guess I'll cross my fingers
So how did it go?
It went pretty well. I was honest about not knowing a whole lot and the interviewer said that they don't expect you to until you're doing with the intern program. I was asked a few questions related to interest rates / revenue structure of S&T, but a lot of it was focused on my resume.
So now that you had the phone call, can we go back to talking about how knott sucks?
what questions did he ask on interest rates and revenue structure?
browse articles about mock interview. There are lots of this articles here in wallstreetaosis
SoW: I see what you did there.
"If you want to read a lot about hedge funds, go to my site."
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