What do I need to know?

Hello all,

I am going to be a Sales & Trading SA in a BB in Hong Kong this summer. I would like to get recommendations for books and courses for must-have knowledge for the internship. I have 6 months to prepare, so I would like to land there very sharply. 

Thanks in advance.

10 Comments
 
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Can honestly say S&T at a BB requires almost no prior knowledge. Expectations on the desk are usually pretty low and you'll probs only be getting coffee and breakfast for people, nothing much more. Some prior knowledge helps stand out in training and to show your desk you're at least interested.

Getting a return offer will be 30% the bank's needs, 60% whether your desk liked you (as a person) and 10% whether you're dumb as shit or not.

 

perhaps it works differently bank by bank, and idk if your comment was said in jest, but as a sa I got a meal only once and had multiple pitches as well as presentations.  @op ymmv

 

Didnt say it in jest. Ik one other guy said he had to do a vba project and you're saying you had to do presentations... but basically that's not that bad and the summer over all for an S&T intern is usually pretty chill with lots of getting drunk with the other interns.

Realistically whether you know what a bond is or not, from the desk's perspective you still know absolutely nothing so either way they're basically teaching you from scratch.

 

Tbh I think there are still some expectations for interns depending on the desk. During my internship most interns do at least one VBA project, so I had to spent entire weekend getting myself familiar with it. Also I was asked multiple times about whether I can do some data analysis using Python. (Sadly no) If you will be joining some more technical desks, exotic equity derivatives for example, learning the fundamentals would be helpful, product structure, basic pricing, Greeks etc. Especially when there are multiple interns on the desk, you probably wouldn’t want the team to explain from scratch because of you…

 

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