Trading- MBA or CFA
Just talked with a neighbor who headed up Ameriprise's high yield bond division. Started talking with her and she said in order to be "good" in the trading field you need an MBA or CFA. According to her, she never hired a non MBA or CFA student for trading and if she did it was only for grunt work. Can anyone give a response to if this is typical in this industry. I dont see how an MBA would teach someone how to trade or be a market maker? Any responses would be great.
She has either CFA or MBA or at worst both. Anyone can do a Wall Street job. You just need to have the willingness to learn and be personable. Nothing beat having an analyst training course at an investment bank.
Paul Tudor Jones
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Based on my interactions, the sense I have is you need some kind of qualification, both for the paper credential, and to an extent for the baseline knowledge it implies. A lot of the guys who head up top trading shops graduated undergrad in the late 70s/early 80s and got MBAs; they were the first cohort in their shoes with advanced degrees. Now, having spoken to some of those guys, they recognize that the MBA has a lot which is useless to most traders. So, now that the MSF has started to become more prevalent, they are paying attention. I imagine the CFA is great from a finance fluency perspective, but it is such a different value proposition compared to the MBA I have a hard time figuring out how she would bunch them together. But again.. I was talking to the former head of trading at a BB firm, and he pretty much said to me that the MBA was useless from his perspective. "Traders don't need to learn marketing."
An MBA is has very little value in trading. BB S&T desks used to hire a lot of MBAs (even then mostly for sales and some structuring), but now they're hiring Phd quants and undergrad recruits.
A CFA is great for equity research and portfolio management. Not sure how it's that relevant to trading although i know a good amount of traders who have it. A lot of the top prop shops pay for their traders' CFA exams and materials.
Agree with this for the most part. The CFA actually has a bunch of chapters that talk about market microstructure and the mechanics of trading.
Market Experience trumps everything. An MBA or CFA does not tell you how prices will move, where to take profit and where to place your stop losses when the Non-Farm Payroll comes out.
I would say get a graduate degree from a top 20 business school if you went to a non-target undergrad and can't find a job. I don't think grad school is not important, MBA's teach leadership skills that can help you advance in your career.
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