I'll be interning at a BB this summer and have a high chance of rotating on Equity Sales for one of them. I have heard mixed things about this group - some have said it will die soon due to the rise in electronic trading while others say high-touch trading will always exist because people still will desire human communication.
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First off, congrats on the summer analyst gig. I'm a 2nd year analyst at a BB in equity sales and I hear this a lot. Many VPs and EDs who will never make MD, lament the passing of the "golden days." While they are right to a certain extent and S&T certainly isn't a growth business, I don 't think it going to die any time soon. It is definitely changing, especially with MiFID II. I think there will be consolidation in the industry as the regional broker dealers won't be able to keep their trading desks open profitably. But as long as there is a syndicate process and deal pipeline equity salespeople aren't going anywhere. There will probably be fewer of them and the'll get paid less but aren't going anywhere.
As it pertains to you this summer, keep an open mind. Banks are having a very hard time keeping talent. Learn as much as you can this summer, get people to like you and work hard. The rest will fall into place. I've seen analysts on the corporate access desk get an opportunity in M&A and Syndicate because they proved themselves.
Can you give a breakdown of what equity salespeople do? I'm well informed on the trading/structuring side but honestly when I asked a director while interning a while ago she basically told me she chats on BBG, yells a quote to a trader, gets a yes or no, and then relays that to the client. I'm hoping she made it sound a lot more dull than it actually is compared to sales on the private side (i.e corporate derivatives).
I work in Electronic Trading, so my likely biased perspective tells me that equity sales not a good place to be in.
A number of our quant clients send in more order flow by themselves than the entire "high-touch" equity desk combined.
There is some offset in that as we obviously charge much more for high-touch trading, but the thing is that not all high-touch trading business is because the client wants it to be high touch. Sometimes it's out of necessity as the technology doesn't support it yet. I'm sure some clients would love if they could press a button and have some absurd illiquid exotic derivative fill before they can blink. Electronic Trading desks are asked all the time, "When will you support this type of complex order flow on your fastest platform."
The technology is still getting better every day. We've been at the nanosecond level to do something like "Buy 1000 shares of AAPL at NASDAQ" and still well under a milisecond to "Automatically slice my 1000 QTY AAPL order into 10 orders of 100 and get it filled in 10 different dark pools"
Electronic trading will eventually cannibalize itself too when everything trades instantaneously and there's no advantages to using a certain broker or certain platform. Then it just comes down to which bank can run this platform at the lowest infrastructure cost. But that of course is longer off.
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