Sales and Trading Hours by Product
Hi Everyone. I’m looking to enter S&T, and I’m curious of the hours by product. I’m most interested in FX options, high yield credit, and equities. I was wondering how daily/weekly hours differed across all three, and between others, such as derivatives and rates.
Sellsideguy123, bummer your thread hasn't had a response yet. Sometimes bots are smarter than humans anyways:
Fingers crossed that one of those helps you.
I trade physical commodities for an ABCD company. Hours are 7:30-5, possible weekend hours if you need to bill cars or trouble with production. If you work in the PNW, you have wake up much earlier, but possible to be on golf course by 4pm.
Equity Derivatives is on average from 8am-6pm (some salespeople leave right after market close to meet clients, but I've also seen some traders stay until 7-8pm when they're managing a risky position).
MBS hours are very rough
Why are they rough?
Thoughts on exit ops from / general career trajectory of MBS? Willing to take shit hours if it means my career optionality / job security is higher.
Also interested
equities will have the shortest hours...FX trade 24 hours so you never get to relax
Typical, traditional S&T is roughly ~60 hours with some generic variation of 6-6 or 7-7 depending on the desk.
S&T that includes structuring tends to be more deal oriented and has the potential to lean closer to traditional banking hours dictated by work or deal flow. Same goes for flow, non-structuring desks that are more focused from a research or investment perspective (distressed credit, investment grade credit).
So you mean structuring desks at markets division would have average more working hours than typical sales and trading desks?
If you don't mind, could you give some examples of the working hours for the structuring team among different desks? I'm curious as I'm incoming SA at cross-asset structuring.
Thanks in advance.
Yeah, some banks structure their markets or traditional S&T franchise platforms to include a structuring or financing component. Obviously it will always depend on the situation but those desks tend to be more akin to banking-like hours / work, more project focused and “financing” driven vs. traditional flow or in the markets. Think desks like ABS where you’re creating the product vs. trading it. Since that’s deal mandate on the private side vs. client activity in the flow market, it tends to be more project focused and on average probably higher on hours.
Agree- also be careful of being a young guy on a US desk that does a lot of Asian flow. Knew a friend who would get woken up like 6x a night his first two years to get yelled at by traders in Tokyo (to be clear, he lived in US).
Yeah I made a connection with someone who trades Asia em fx from ny at a bank and he said it like permanently ruined his sleep schedule. He's been a trader for over 5 years too. He didn't mention any calls from asia traders but he said he wakes up at 3 am all the time to make trades or at least check on his positions. Seems like it might be a valuable and interesting specialty however. He said he went on an interesting trip to Singapore to trade local fx.
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