Entry & Qualities to Investment Banking

The product you trade matters a lot. Flow products aren't particularly mathematical. You won't be doing any trading as an intern. You legally can't unless they give you a prop book, which they won't. Mostly, you'll be getting the other traders coffee, tea, breakfast and lunch. Your job is to get them to talk to you about their job. They don't really have any incentive to train you. You need to provide that incentive. You do that through showing up earlier than the rest of the desk, and sticking around until the last guy leaves, since that's the guy who is likely doing the P&L reporting. He's also probably an analyst, and wouldn't mind the company after the markets close.

It takes a little while for the guys in risk to do whatever it is they do before coming back to the desk to let you know if there are any discrepancies. This is your chance to learn something from the analyst or associate who is there with you, since the desk won't trust you to handle that job on your own. If they're an analyst, they almost surely don't own a book yet, so they are largely in the same boat as you. Even most associates don't have their own books. It takes a while before the bank really trusts you to take risk and manage it on behalf of the firm, so asking them about the markets and about how they'd be positioned is like porn for them. No one asks their opinions on the desk on a regular basis, so getting to talk about their ideas for the book they're going to get one day is a great way to engage them in a conversation they want to have.

You can ask questions during the day, but people have other shit to do during the day (their jobs, for instance). Since you're not terribly mathematical, I would try to focus on more liquid/flow products. Cash equities, spot FX, FX forwards and corporate bonds are all very simplistic. Options desks are obviously more complicated mathematically. The thing is, you really just have to be able to understand the risk and position management software your firm uses. Even on an options desk, the traders aren't coding their own options pricing tool. I bet most options traders at major banks can't do that anymore. That's not their job. That's the job of the quants and structurers. As a trader, your job is to manage risk in a way that makes money for the bank.

Given that you like writing market commentaries anyway and are more artistically inclined, you might enjoy sales more than trading. I used to disdain the idea of working on a sales desk because I thought it was for morons, and I wanted to be seen as clever. That's stupid. Salesmen on trading floors can make as much money as traders, they have far less career risk, and probably better exit opportunities from the markets (since they have a network and traders do not). They get off work earlier, they get to take clients out (which gets old, but when you're 22 or 23, drinking on your corporate card is fucking great), and they get to talk about the market all day without ever really being held to account for being wrong. In short, being a salesman is far less stressful. Moreover, the work you do as an analyst is never quantitative in nature on a sales desk. On a trading desk, there is some risk that you might be asked to code a macro for a spreadsheet a specific trader wants to use. If you can't do that, but you want to be a trader, I strongly suggest you learn. On a sales desk, however, that's never going to happen.

That said, if you really want to be a trader, don't let anyone dissuade you. But it's smarter to focus on your strengths and exploit those as opposed to struggling to overcome your weaknesses for some perceived bounty that might not be as great as you imagine.