Hi all,
I was wondering what advice you'd give your senior-year self knowing what you know now. I've signed with a STIR desk so I'm taking a few macro economics courses in addition to my finance courses. I want to prepare myself for a career in trading.
Should I add on some programming, math, or stats? Focus on increasing my network? Or double down on the partying and travel before I grind through my analyst years?
Any thoughts are appreciated.
Mod Note (Andy): this was originally posted on 11/20/15.
Here's my two cents:
Excel is always #1. Become a Jedi (and I'm not talking about bragging about how index-and-match is superior to vlookups) and learn VB to write macros. I dont think many places actually hire VB coders, but it's a great skill to have to, at a minimum, impress an employer.
After that, realize that technology and finance are converging at an exponential growth rate. Whether it's trading, Asset Management, or even back office, having technical skills will help you stand out. For me, I started learning VB, then went Python, SQL, and now have a job that uses those, as well as SAS heavily and R. Knowing how to wrangle and scrub data, as well as automate things is super important.
Happy to pass along resources. The other stuff should be more obvious, like networking. I feel strongly that the most valuable assets within an investment-related firm will be those who have deep understanding of Finance (disclose: I'm a CFA Level III Candidate, so add that to your list IF you DONT want to pursue trading, but asset management or equity research) + Technical Abilities + Sales.
Do you have any recommendations on courses/materials to use to help improve Excel skills or learn to write macros?
https://openeducation.blackboard.com/mooc-catalog/courseDetails/view?co…
The link above is to a free introduction to Excel VBA programming. It was developed by a professor in engineering from Cal Poly Pomona. Its a great course for being free! Self paced as well and run through blackboard's open education platform.
Do you know any cheap places where i can buy SAS and R? I'm also trying to learn these programs for forecasting purposes.
R is free open source software, try googling "R statistics"
You might be able to get SAS from your school for free. I know we had free student licenses.
SAS is not free, but as da chief said, maybe your school will have it. SQL is very similar, and there are many classes online for free. SQLLite is free.
Use the Force, and by the Force I mean Index MAtch.
But totally agreed, coding is the #1 most valuable skill that no one has.
knowing VBA/Excel on a desk is a great way to make yourself useful as a junior and further on makes you more self sufficient when you get more senior
But tbh most things you learn as you go along. I have found repeatedly VBA/Excel is best learnt via necessity. You get handed an assignment ot price a strucutred product and need to work out over a weekend how to build a solid monte carlo, that type of thing. Remember, you can do almost anything finance related in excel, you just need to figure out how. It might not be pretty and might be slow, but it can be done.
In terms of my advice, the best thing you can do imo is work at being well read, both in terms of finance and overall. This is one thing that really does seperate people. Its not something you can cram for interviews, its something you have to work at everyday in some small capacity. For example, I make sure to read hte physical FT everyday. I will read maybe 50% of the articles, but will at least read/skim the first paragraph of 90% of it. its not something that has a direct benefit, but over time you get a very good grasp of everythin that is going on, at least on a surface basis. And then on top of that I make sure that during my commute I always have some sort of book, whether its on the history of the Euro and how it came to be, or a book on the history of oil in the last 100 years. Just stuff that might not be applicable to your day to day but over time you become very knowledgeable about a huge range of topics, which from experience is a key characteristic of what makes really good traders.
Couldn't agree with this more. I trade a very structured/complicated product and while we have third party and in house software for the specific purpose of pricing/modeling cash flows / modeling spreads we still do the vast majority of our day-to-day stuff in Excel (including evaluating our risk, making PnL adjustments, pricing bids, etc.). And you don't need to buy a book to learn VBA, just start thinking about finance related things you think would be interesting and then figure out how to build them. Before my internship I built a custom function that given a series of inputs would use monte carlo simulation to price a vanilla option. It was great because I learned a lot about the coding but also a lot about the finance and math.
I also agree with reading as much as possible. As a junior employee you really get inundated with work that is often not directly related to what's going on in the market at all. It's easy to become so enveloped in the nitty gritty stuff you have to do for the desk that you lose sight of the big picture. I try to read weekly in house research every week as well as read a market summary every single day. Even just 15 minutes a day can keep you informed once you start to understand the major stories.
I'm chiming in a bit late here but I appreciate the advice about Excel/Coding languages being of foremost importance.
Could I ask where you source your market summaries from, that aren't in-house? I've been listening to podcasts frequently on my commute (namely the investors podcast, planet money, freakonomics, Tim Ferriss, even Joe Rogan), but would also like to add to my repertoire something a lot more relevant to the trading side of things. If you had a recommendation that would be great!
Excel is #1, as mentioned consistently above... In my opinion, thinking through personal skills is a close second. There's a fair amount of politics and being in close-quarters with people for 15h / day doesn't exactly bring out the best in people... take a look at "How do Win Friends and Influence People" and just generally try to become very situationally aware so you don't stick your foot in your month
I'm going to take a different approach to the advice given here and say that you reach out to the others in your class who will be joining you (in NYC I assume) and set up some drinking / networking events. It's a lot easier to maintain these relationships if you form them before you all start work. Obviously learning some coding basics will help you as well but you can do that on the fly too. You'd be surprised at how helpful having a solid network can become after a few tough months in the industry and VBA won't save you.
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