Sales and Trading at a BB

I have a call next week with a someone in sales at a BB. Been doing some research but still confused on how sales and trading operates as a whole (specially the process of a client placing an order all the way through to execution). Could someone please provide some insight into how a trading floor at a BB operates and how sales and trading work together? Thank you in advance. 

9 Comments
 

client (retail or instit) gets in contact with sales -> talks with trading and structuring on what the client is looking for / what bid/offer they're willing to quote -> prices to see if they can (or want to) win -> if they win, strategize how to hedge.

 

To expand, trading teams will build out risk management and other monitoring tools in python with QR during downtime. For derivs desks, junior traders will spend a lot of time building out these tools before they start actually trading

 

Just to clarify, after the client reaches out to sales, the sales team is the one who talks with trading team and the trading team will give sales team a bid/offer they are willing to quote, which then gets relayed from sales to the client? After that is it simply a matter of if the client accepts or declines the trade? 

 
Most Helpful

Simply put, the primary function of S&T is the offer liquidity. For example, if a pension fund wants to place a massive trade, they can’t do it themselves because open interest is likely too small for it to execute, thats where the S&T division comes in. Trading would take the other side of that trade, if the client wants to buy, they sell. Then they would either partially or fully hedge that position based on their directional view — allowing them to generate a profit on top of the commission the client paid for the transaction. Sales essentially manages the client relationships and seeks to bring in new relationships. Hope this helps, a lot of the answers on this thread don’t really know what they’re talking about — jr. traders are not building out risk management systems, they’re mostly shadowing or trading small books of their own.

 

Can anyone provide some insight into how exactly the sales team makes money and how the traders make money other than through spreads 

 

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