Is S&T dying?
Do you guys think S&T is a sunset industry due to automation on the trading side? I heard the trend is that the headcount has been decreasing in the past few years, but I still think you need traders (actual human) on the trading floor to do market making, risk management, especially for products without centralised exchange. Want to know your thoughts about this from existing full timers!
Did you try googling this very common topic?
Current AN2 (ignore title). Humans will always be needed, but the number will just be drastically lower. General rule for trading at a bank is the more opaque your product, the safer you'll be in the long-term. Derivatives > vanilla/cash.
New Analysts (including my class) seem to be more afraid of these seats, so there's probably a better chance you get them too.
Seeing the work some flow-sales people do, to me, is a joke. You are a robot for 12 hours a day.
1) Copy client quote from client chat
2) Paste into trader chat
3) Copy paste the price back into the client chat.
Would you say there are enough seats in the more complex FICC products to pursue it as a career? I feel like there are only 0-1 FI vol seats at each BB every year, so seems like as a numbers game harder than IB
There’s fewer seats, but the more vanilla products will trend towards that in the future anyway.
Also, it’s always easier to go from technical product to something vanilla like cash rates, rather than the other way around.
I’ve constantly been told the way to maintain or move your seat is find your niche and excel at it.
I work in FICC sales and this is exactly what I do lol. It’s 12 hours of bullshit every day. You get compensated nicely… i’ll probably be at 200-230k this yr? But its such bullshit.
I tell this to my friends in sales and they look at me like im crazy for wanting more out of my career. We are operations monkeys. You get yelled at by traders, clients, and senior salespeople. And you have no leverage because they also know your job is BS. Its a glorified operations role.
80% of my day consists of:
1. Get client inquiry in bloomberg chat
2. copy and paste into a chat with traders
3. Paste the price back to client
4. Get done on the trade and then send an email confirmation with details, make sure all operations are completed, make sure middle office teams do their jobs correctly, upload trades to a centralized clearing system.
5. rinse, repeat.
Upsides? Less stress, you don’t own the risk so limited downside, client outings.
Anyways, I’m leaving this year and couldn’t be happier with this decision.
Haha I'm sure most of my friends in these seats feel the exact same. GL on next opp.
Left deriv sales for research for this reason, wanted a fundamental and technical experience and sales gets paid very well but you have SUPER narrow ops and other sales pay nowhere near the base and definitely not the all in + it’s downsizing every year. I do not recommend the S in S&T to anyone in finance anymore.
Can you PM me? Would love to discuss more. Would be insightful for my career. I am currently an Analyst on a different desk.
where u going bro and what region are u based in?
That might be the case at your shop, certainly not at mine. Sales drives volume, not the traders.
and yet most of them act as if they were curing cancer or something
Definitely not on the FICC side of things.
probably is yes...but the decline is slow and there is still a ton of money to be made in the meantime.
Yup I’ve been hearing the exact same thing from peoppe for literally 15 years now.
People ask this every year 🥱
Wouldn't say it's a sunset industry but there are definitely less seats needed and more automation. That said, you still need people to manage and improve that automation. Many traders now also function as part time product managers. A lot of time is spent working with quants and tech on system build outs. Depending on your interest it can still be interesting work and you still get paid well for it.
PUNK ISN’T DEAD? 🔥💵🔥
I’d say safer, more interesting areas of S&T to move into are securitization - MBS, CLO, CMO, etc. automation is coming across the board but these products are complex enough that there will always be human touch. Also knowing some coding / Python gives you a big advantage getting analyst roles.
Half of S&T are SWEs. But sales and traders will always have seats. It’s just that S&T is evolving to S&T&E ( Sales & Trading & Engineer ). Just because the game has one more player, doesn’t mean the old players are kicked out.
Bump
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