Learning Python and VBA for S&T Trading Roles: Where to Focus?
Hi everyone,
I've heard that coding has become almost a must to secure a S&T summer internship at banks, even on desks like rates and credit. As a rising sophomore with no coding experience, I plan to cram some Python and VBA courses before applying. I'd really appreciate any advice on how I should approach learning these languages. What do most traders use coding for? Should I focus on creating automated programs, or is a general understanding of the languages sufficient?
Thanks a lot!
Rates is one of the most technical desks lol of course having some coding skills will help. For sales it can be helpful but not necessary but for trading it is extremely useful. There are plenty of intro courses like MITs opencourseware intro to comp sci and python. Besides that understanding quantlib will help if you are interested in using python for more than data analysis.
Thank you so much! That’s really helpful. I know it’s a bit tough to estimate, but do you think six months is enough time to learn coding for the SA 2026 application? Since most banks recruit juniors as generalists or offer rotational programs, if I’m familiar with the basics but not yet proficient, would that put me at a disadvantage compared to other candidates? Also, would you recommend mentioning interest in less technical desks during the interview to increase my chances of getting in?
Thanks again!
Most S&T candidates don’t actually code. And of the ones that say they do, 90% have written two scripts in python using chat GPT. If you have 6 months and watch videos and do practice projects you will be more than prepared enough. Even some compsci kids aren’t actually that great at programming tbh…
Yeah I highly recommend MITs intro to comp sci and Python course. Just did it and it was pretty interesting and gave me a great foundation
I think there are two main areas to use python as a trader on the desk: (1) automate/speed up workflows, (2) data analysis/idea generation. The former is generally a bit more ad-hoc, but for the latter would recommend becoming familiar with pandas and numpy to begin with (e.g. be able to plot some charts when someone wants that done). Then you can get fancier and implement some basic regression (scikit learn, or just code it up yourself) on variables/other basic statistics.
If you can actually get data/timeseries independently and plot some charts of those without having to copy and paste things to excel, it is a good skill to have.
Current S&T intern learning python now. How important is learning time series analysis / regression analysis in Python? For me that seems like the most useful thing you can do for S&T like rates trading for example.
it really depends what desk you’re in though which will decide how much you’ll need to learn a coding language although it’ll always help anyways
vba is probably most useful for the average traders. depending on the product's data avalability python could be useful, but I would stick with vba if you have no idea what product you like to work on.
Would disagree. At my bank most of the derivs desks used Python. Some also used VBA, but from my understanding VBA is on its way out while Python is on its way in. One of my desks even had me build out a front-end for one of the pricing tools
It’s not a requisite per se in S&T, many of times it’ll be helpful though or someone who knows how to code will get looped into something…when I was in undergrad and as to not bomb my GPA I took intro to coding at the community college so I could learn and dive into python, VBA etc without the pressure of risking my GPA
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