What are the different career areas of wallstreet?

Thank you so much. You have just given me an unbelievable amount of help.

impressed you actually took the time to write this when OP could easily find this with a search. kudos.

kerny:

Wall Street can generally be cut in two dimensions: business area, and job function.

Business areas: There are too many to list but these are the main ones.

• Sales and Trading (selling and buying financial instruments on behalf of clients, like stocks and bonds, and more customized products) - this is what you might see in a Wall Street-themed movie - hectic noisy trading floor, with salesmen and traders running around.
• Investment Banking - IBD (advising companies on mergers and acquisitions, raising capital, etc)
• Wealth Management (managing affluent / high net worth / ultra high net worth individuals' money, and also provides tax planning, estate planning, and services oriented towards individuals and families)
• Asset Management (similar to wealth management, but more geared towards investing for institutions, government entities - hedge funds are special types of asset managers)
• Private Equity (funds that invest directly in private companies)
• Commercial Banking (this is what you're dealing with when you go to a bank to deposit a check)
• Corporate Banking (similar to retail / commercial banking, but deals with corporate clients, not individuals)

Functional areas: Function can broadly be broken up into three parts: front office, middle office, and back office.

• Front Office: The part of the firm that deals directly with clients and generates revenue. Includes investment bankers, financial advisors, traders, salespeople, some quants, research analysts.

• Middle Office: The part of the firm that deals directly with the front office, and is an important part of the firm for keeping the business going, but does not directly talk to clients and does not directly generate revenue. Includes trading assistants, some quants, some risk management people, some IT teams.

• Back Office: The part of the firm that deals mainly in administrative work, record keeping, data entry and processing. Includes IT support, Operations teams.

As you might imagine, the front office gets paid the most, followed by the middle office and back office. The difference can be huge, up to 5-10x or more depending on the exact positions.

The best schools for front office recruiting are the top private/public schools in the nation. Companies will also recruit at lower-tier schools but typically only for middle/back office jobs.

It is highly competitive to get a front office job out of undergrad. Top private schools like the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Duke, Notre Dame, NYU, Chicago, elite liberal arts schools (Williams, Middlebury, Swarthmore etc), and top public schools like UC Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, UT Austin make up the vast majority of hires into front office positions. In many cases, top firms will fill their full time entry hires completely with former interns, and do not even recruit for full-time positions. This means it is crucial to have secured an internship after your junior year.

If you go to a lower level school there might be a person or two per year that gets a front-office job but financial firms will probably not even recruit on your campus, whether for internships or full time.

The top schools which make up the bulk of front-office recruiting at big investment banks (called bulge brackets) are called target schools. These schools are also a proxy for schools which place into jobs in other types of firms, hedge funds, trading firms, asset managers, private equity. Here is a thread about target schools: https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/comprehensive-list-of-target-sch…

As you might imagine it includes the Ivy League, top US private / public schools and top foreign universities.

I would broadly divide entry-level jobs into technical (more math/programming oriented) and less technical (more sales/relationship oriented).

More technical roles include trading and quantitative analysis. For these roles it helps to have majored in CS, Math, Physics, or Engineering but it isn't a deal breaker (though you'd really have to be a good programmer / good at math to get a quant job with a liberal arts degree)

For less-technical roles, including investment banking, sales, and wealth management, popular majors include anything from Math to English. You will find that there are many smart people who studied everything from music history to chemical engineering working on Wall Street in these roles.

Of course, those are just general guidelines; I know quants who have music degrees and bankers with hard science degrees.

Note that in some roles, you are almost expected to go to business school and get an MBA. The classic example of this is investment banking. You can read all about it in this forum.

Great overall post, but bankers no longer need to go to business school, neither do hedge funders (ever), neither do private equity professionals (as of a few years ago it changed). Nowadays, some PE funds will prefer it but many are accepting of laterals