Advice for breaking into Trading with a low GPA?

Any advice on how to break into a career in trading with a low GPA? Should I focus on developing a strategy and track record to market myself to firms? I know it can go both ways with some firms prioritizing inexperienced candidates to train them in their own style and some firms looking for traders who already have proven established strategies and a consistent record who just need capital.

 
 

You need to find a hook.  This could be showing returns of managing your own money, some internships, unique experiences, things like that.  If it's just a generic "I'm a finance major and did finance club" you're probably not going to get the look.

The hardest part will be getting the first interview, since at most lot of places, HR is sifting through hundreds if not thousands of applications, and GPA is one of the easiest cutoffs. I would just not include the GPA on your resume, and bring it up later if they ask about it.  No news is far better news than confirming a bad GPA in that regard.  

 

Thank you for the advice! I think I found something that might help in the future. My GPA is low in some of these courses that are completely unrelated to finance, courses such as Organic Chemistry, Cell Molecular Biology etc. I've founded a club here at my school and have great relationships with some of our faculty on campus that are all in Finance courses - as I've scored 97+ in all of these courses and was a top participant and student in their courses. I think that they would be willing to help me out and write favorable recommendations considering the relationship I've formed with some of them. Considering I had some hardship throughout 2018 with my family, I've been advised to leverage my connections on campus with faculty, write a solid cover letter outlining my lower undergrad GPA and apply for my school's Master's in QCF. I've always been pretty good at standardized testing so I think this is an opportunity to restart myself if I end up getting accepted to my school's program. What do you think of that idea?

 
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I apologize if this is really blunt, but I spent a lot of time as an analyst and associate at my bank doing the non/semi-target recruiting (the pipe was an initial phone interview instead of an on-campus one, with a superday with the target kids as the second round), so I feel like I have a decent experience with this.  

To answer your direct question, I think going back for a Master's is probably the best course of action assuming you don't have an in at that bank.  One thing I would be mindful of is to understand the recruiting pipeline for the Master's.  In some schools, you might get preference for OCR, and in others you might be behind the seniors.  This is really important, and is probably the best way to avoid the 300->20 lottery.  

For those of you who are interested in other aspects of this (or if you plan on applying for FT positions as a senior just to try to get more optionality):

Nobody is going to spend like 5 minutes reading every line on your (and everyone else's) resume and think "ah he was bad at orgo but the finance classes were good."  You need to put yourself in an HR person's or overworked analyst's shoes.  They certainly aren't going to read a long letter of recommendation and they aren't combing through every resume with extreme attention to detail.  In an ideal and totally egalitarian world they would, but a lot of the time, these guys have about 5-10 seconds to glance at a resume, put it in a yes/no/maybe pile, and run those iterations until they get to a population to phone interview.  

Realistically, they are going to have a stack of 300 resumes and need to pick like 20 to give a call to.  Generally, they are going to do a rough sort by school, major, GPA, and relevant past work experience, and then go from there.  As someone who has been part of this process, I can tell you SATs don't matter, and in fact generally it's a slight ding to put it on because it seems like you're the type of person who's only good at studying for tests and doing what's told of them rather than someone who can think for themselves.  IME, there were so many 4.0/1600/2400/36 type kids that looked good on paper but were absolute potatoes if you asked them a question they hadn't memorized.  For example, we once asked a question about the EV on a roll of a d10 and I swear half the kids said 3.5 or were too flustered by this additional variable to come up with something.  Note these interviews were for quants/derivs traders so these kids are all like Stanford/Caltech/MIT engineering or CS.  Obviously there are lots of smart people with good SATs that get a little fucked on this process, but these general heuristics have worked pretty well in the past, and serve as a good tool to cut down the number of resumes.  The fact that they aren't perfect doesn't matter.   

There is literally no upside to putting your GPA on a resume if it's bad.  Being good at finance classes is good, but it doesn't really matter in trading.  GPA is only slightly positively correlated to skill in trading, but you need some sort of numerical cutoff, and it's more positively correlated than something like SAT scores.  

If you can get a senior guy (MD+ preferably, or maybe an ED) to vouch for you, you can sidestep that 300->20 filter, so that's your best bet.  Anonymous letters of rec aren't going to help though unless you have a direct convo with someone from HR or a young alumni at your school or something.

 

Thank you so much for the detailed response and the help with the recruiting process. I apologize for not being too clear, and you were not blunt at all. My comments about recommendations, detailed letters about my situation, explanation of courses, and skill taking standardized tests was referring to my application process for the Master's Program where applications are much more holistic.

I completely agree with everything you said and don't show up to interviews with a long drawn-out letter of excuses for why my organic chemistry grades are terrible and my finance courses are better, I just show up with a resume that doesn't have a GPA. Knowing that, do you think with proper explanation, great teacher recs, good campus involvement and relationships with faculty, would make me a competitive applicant for my Master's in Quantitative Finance? I'm attending undergraduate at the same school I'd be applying to for the Master's and I believe my positive relationships with some of the faculty might carry weight in my admissions, especially if I can perform well on the standardized tests. I've kind of written off any high level prestigious internships as of now and am focusing on trying to look competitive for my Master's from here on out.

 

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