Prepering for an Internship on a Prop Interest Rate Desk

Hi everyone.

I'm looking for advice on how to prepare for a BB S&T internship this summer in NY. I'll be on a bit of a weird desk that trades short term interest rates, partially to hedge the bank, but also to generate P&L at discretion (does not deal with client orders). I will have some tasks to do throughout the day (ie doing coffee runs and writing up the occasional report) but the majority of my time I have the discretion to pursue whatever I'm interested in.

The three main traders I'll be with all trade US short term rates through a variety of instruments (swaps, futures, bonds, options etc). I'll have a Bloomberg terminal and if I have good ideas they'll get executed in small volumes.

I'm really excited about this opportunity. I don't know very much about short term interest rate trading other than through following market events and some basic bond and swaps math from class. Any tips on stuff I can do now to make the summer a success?

6 Comments
 

Dude, I think you landed on a liquidity management desk. The only prop they do is probably pounding 100-200 UST's on the screen. And STIR is currently, well, not so sexy... Anyway, I wouldn't try to learn the uncountably infinite number of short-rate models. If you want to add value --> brush your VBA skills. Once you have Bloomberg, check "FFM GO >". It took me around two months to figure out this function.

 

@gavin_volure No, not Deutsche, thanks though.

@Bolz The trader told me there is another desk close by that deals with the traditional liquidity management work and that their desk has higher pnl targets because they take on risk. Regardless though they want me to be coming up with interest rate trade ideas by the end of the summer. I checked out the FFM function on my schools terminal, there's a lot of good stuff there, thank you!

 

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