Hello guys,
First of all, I wish you a Happy New Year. Hope all your wishes come true in 2019.
This is my first post here so please correct me if I happen to break any rule.
I graduated in June 2017 with a Bachelor in Business Administration from a top European business school in Spain. I did my exchange program in a top Canadian university as well and took many financial markets electives during those years. Learnt some basic VBA for Excel in Canada. I did apply for a lot of Summer Internships and all these kind of programs for undergraduates and actually got some phone interviews but only with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan. I didn't manage to make it.
After that, I took a graduate program (not a Msc) in Quantitative Finance even though that did not make me become a quant, obviously. Learnt some basic Matlab here. Needless to say that I have been interested in trading and financial markets since I was 18 and I have read a lot of books about financial markets, trading, investing, hedge funds, etc. Traded for around 3 years with these kind of paper money accounts and started investing with real money in November 2017. Since then, made 175% return in 7 months implementing a short strangle strategy for daily Spanish index options until the European regulator stopped allowing retail investors to trade with those products. However, I am still in the market.
I am 23 and currently working in wealth management in a bank after having worked as a Risk Analyst in a financial lines insurance company (mainly financial statements analysis).
The question is simple, how to break into Sales & Trading (specially Trading) as a graduate? I feel I have missed a huge opportunity to get into the job I truly love as I have the impression it becomes extremely tough to get there as a graduate. I would really appreciate your help.
Best regards and have a nice day,
your best bet now would be the masters in financial engineering at columbia (or an equiv) to get into trading at NYC banks.
Thanks a lot for your advice, sure that would be my best bet. Unfortunately, I cannot afford taking a Master's Degree in the US as they are extremely expensive compared to what we use to pay here in Europe. I was considering taking a Msc in Financial Engineering in Canada at HEC Montreal although I know it's not a top university but that would help me to land in North America (I am Spanish) and get a job at S&T I guess, what are your thoughts about that? I speak French too. In anyce case, my initial objective was to get a job in S&T in London and then have the chance to move to the US through internal rotation.
any good financial engineering education will enable you to break in (if you really learn all the skills that these positions look for...because talent is scarce)
your best bet would then be to target emerging markets desks (Latam desks are always looking for multi-lingual with finance skills)....and to backdoor your way in...by targeting a job in quant IT. So, learn advanced Python, Excel VBA, SQL....then get a job working on emerging markets IT dev...and then network your way onto an EM trading desk.
I cold called my way through. Had coffee with at least 1 or 2 people from the top 20-30 banks over 6-7 months. Someone finally sneaked my resume in for an interview. Clinched it, never look back. It really is about how bad you want it, how hard you're willing to work for it.
All the best