Showing interest for S&T, without a traditional finance background
Hey monkey's
I was wondering if virtual trading accounts are necessary for S&T to showcase your passion/interest in the industry?
If yes, which platform is usually recommended? If no, what can I do to highlight my interest in the industry as I don't have a finance/econ background?
My background is related to software dev and analytics. What can I do to showcase my interest, any recommendations?
I interned in S&T and I’m a CS major. The main way to show interest is to follow markets, but it doesn’t actually matter if you trade your own account. Personally, I was involved with the investment fund at my school, and just read a lot of news and books about markets. Coming from a software background isn’t necessarily a bad thing either. I interned in software engineering the summer before I did S&T. You can easily spin that experience to say that you learned a lot, but S&T is what you’d rather do (obviously come up with good reasons why S&T). This way your interviewers will know you’re sincere about doing S&T because you have an interest in markets and and you don’t want to go back to software engineering.
Do you have to know how to code for S&T?
It's a pretty useful skill to pick up, but i wouldn't say that it's neccesary for S&T.
VBA is pretty useful though.
VBA was the most I’ve ever used, and I rotated through some of the more “quant” desks at my bank. Knowing programming is certainly not a bad thing, but from what I’ve seen every desk has their own IT/strats team that does all the heavy lifting for the traders.
Intereststing, thanks for the resposne!
I posses full time expereince in software dev, and currently in grad school (target school, but the program is not). And now I want to transition into S&T.
How do you think I can exhibit interest on my resume, even before the interviewing stage? Did you have anything on your resume that highlighted interest in S&T? Any tech centered projects based on trading?
Thanks!
Try to see if you can get involved with any of the undergrad finance clubs at your school, especially the student run investment fund if your school has one. Aside from that, I would echo what the other poster said and follow markets closely (major central banks, emerging markets, equities, commodities, credit, come up with some investment pitches, etc.). If for some reason you can’t join undergrad clubs as a grad student, then definitely try to program some trading strategies in python. I don’t really have much to offer on that, but I heard that Quantopian is a good platform for that kind of stuff. Although you said you want to do S&T, you should also look into hedge funds. Places like Citadel, Two Sigma, D.E. Shaw like to recruit grad students with quant degrees, and it frankly might be a better career move long term if you enjoy trading.
Prior to starting at my bank during my internship I never did any sort of day trading or personal account.
Most of my money in college went straight to the bars and tuition.
However, I was heavily involved in the finance clubs, always had some stock pitches ready, and I had market information I could talk about and had opinions that I could DEFEND - always be following the Fed, politics, industry specific trends, emerging markets, Brexit, ECB, China, commodities etc.
Nobody cares that you have money in a PA. They do care that you’re passionate enough to know what’s going on in the markets though.
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