Can I get into Trading with a Business degree?

I'd try to network with credit desks. That's where most of the business guys land from my experience. I would say a MFE is better than a MBA, but it's not really statistically significant from my sample size. I think that I've seen more MBA credit traders than MFE ones, but common sense tells me that a prestigeful MFE should me more valued by a trading desk. Stick with MBA, you could also ping for other careers.

had the same questions as you years ago, but the below question asked to yourself basically answers all your "optimize my hiring probability" questions. Basically what you are doing (and what I did) is showing up at a financial firm and saying implicitly something along these lines: "Hi, I am 20-24. I don't know shit about generating alpha, please teach me everything about generating alpha, and while doing so please pay me GBP 55k a year plus a nice year's end bonus for being a good-for-nothing analyst (trading analysts are vba/coffee drones and aren't allowed to quote prices, except maybe for some secondary market stuff). While we at it, also please pay me a fuck ton of money compared to the non-finance world, once you teach me how to generate alpha. I am a fast learner and my IQ percentile is above .95 (35.000.000 people in Europe fall in this category). Here's my CV, thanks goodbye."

Whom would you hire? The business grad who can tell you that firms maximize their profit if price = marginal cost, or the applied math major who wrote a paper on modelling brain waves with support vector machines and implemented an algorithm in Python? A few years ago, soft science guys could easily enter the cash space, because you don't need advanced math for quoting a two way on a government bond. What we are seeing now is that the cash guys are being replaced by algorithms. It started with equities and fx, but it's now moving over to the bazillions of fixed income instruments. This shift is accentuated by various factors I won't go into long details (partiuclar the coming regulation regime), but it will be really hard to survice without quant skils in 2020+

You can enter now and hope to switch later in portfolio manager role tho. Be smart, be hungry and you set

mfoste1:

no they like b majors..........i dunno why anyone would think that they wouldnt. However, I have known a few kids that werent b majors that got into trading/ ibanking. Apart from the major, they look at what other things youve done in ur short lifetime, ie. sports is a big one due to the competitiveness. A lot of times its a big personality match.

Hmm I don't know why anyone would think that, maybe because a lot of prop shops focus on high frequency algorithmic trading so they DO NOT prefer business majors, rather hard math, engineering, physics type of majors. Check out DRW's recruiting schedule, the majority of the Job fairs they attend are engineering fairs.

mfoste1:

I cant say that I agree with you there.....I think an ideal candidate would be some type of b major, with a quant(math, phys, eng) minor or double major. OK on DRW....thats one firm. You cant use one firm to confirm ur position on an entire industry. Maybe if you came up with 100 other shops in NYC, Chi that said the same thing, then i could believe it.

You are pretty much saying in your opinion you think b majors would make for a candidate for a prop firm. Hate to break it to you, but your wrong. Most prop shops focus on heavy quant/algo/high freq trading so your corporate finance classes really are of no use to you there. In your first post, you said "banking/trading", and yes for banking a finance major is probably more ideal but you cannot compare the background of someone who works in M&A to a trader at a prop shop. Its like comparing apples to oranges...