Best Trading Internships in US
Hey everyone, I'm a junior at a target school hoping to get into a top prop firm like Getco or Jane Street when I graduate. I'd like to try and find a good trading internship this summer and was interested in a compiled list of top internships at prop firms. I'll list the few I've heard are great places to intern at w/ no particular order, but I hope others can help list any I may have missed. Again, this list is only for places w/ INTERNSHIP opportunities that would be most helpful for transitioning into a top tier place like Getco after graduation. I hope others will find this thread useful as well.
Jane Street
SIG
DRW
Jump
Others I'm not sure about:
Wolverine?
Transmarket?
Goldman Sach S&T?
JP Morgan S&T?
Other BB S&T?
Umm, don't forget Citadel.
I take it you have a CS background?
You kinda seem to be all over the place in terms of listing just every trading firm you can think of (ie Wolverine and GETCO are hugely different in their business models even though both are best of the best), many of which have completely different activities from each other. With that said, virtually all trading internships I've heard of and seen involve large amounts of bitch of bitch work. You're going to have the same work as the TAs and clerks, as well as do lunches, grab coffee, etc. You will learn a lot at most firms if they respect you and a more senior trader takes you under their wing, but they each of their own unique focus and you'll learn very different things that don't necessarily translate over one-to-one. I would not necessarily get hung up on Getco either unless you planned to focus on HFT and are looking to be a CS developer for life, in which case Jump Trading is also up there if not equal to or better than Getco in terms of what you will learn and your potential.
WIth all that said, any internship will help you. A friend of mine is a CS guy on one of the top HFT/MM desks and he had 0 relevant internships and, in fact, only had one internship at all (think Facebook/Google/Youtube type stuff).
If you want to do high-frequency trading, derivatives, or anything that is sophisticated, Chicago is the place to be. With over the counter derivatives getting regulated, Chicago will become the best city in the world for trading. And GETCO and Jump offer SICK compensations. You can live like a king in Chicago.
They both offer sick salaries. Their bonuses relative to PnL are substantially lower than a lot of other firms out there. That is at least for more junior people.
Thanks for the responses. To be honest, I don't have a very good idea of what kind of trading I want to be doing, seeing as I have no experience yet. I suppose I'm really just looking for a list of trading internships known to be reputable and educationally enriching. I plan to apply to as many as I can, but I'd also like to make sure I haven't missed any important ones. I have finance and CS background, and I've been focusing a lot on math/brainteasers recently. I'll update the list as people contribute:
Jane Street SIG DRW Jump Wolverine Citadel
Others I'm not sure about:
DE Shaw? Transmarket? Goldman Sach S&T? JP Morgan S&T? Other BB S&T?
Honestly, get whatever you can. I don't think you should be limiting yourself when you don't have any idea what kind of trading you even want to do or even what angle you want to take (ie CS algorithmic development or more actual trading). There was a thread with a list of dozens of props. If I were you I would:
-Apply to any BB S&T you can. GS and JP are not the only ones with trading operations and, for many products, don't even have close to the biggest or most prestigious ones. BarCap owns the former Lehman Bros which has a massive operation on the CBOE, DB/CS/UBS all have big FX operations, etc.. -Apply to all the props and HFs listed above -Apply to probably 2 dozen other props.
Off the top of my head (no order at all), you could apply to Jump, Group One, CTC, Belvedere, Optiver, IMC, Consolidated, Chopper, Geneva, FNY, XR, and many others. Those are just ones that I know offer internships.
Regardless of which one you choose, more well known name =/= better compensation or learning more. You'll find out pretty quickly that at virtually all of these firms there is high turnover relative to most other forms of employment and that prestige is the last thing most care about versus being able to make as much money with as little restriction/overhead as possible. Plenty of smaller props have founders that were extremely senior level people at either a BB/HF or some larger props. With the advent of firms that are 100% upstairs and not even using brokers for large blocks, many people don't even realize how involved some firms are in the markets day-to-day since they are essentially anonymous.
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