What is S&T?

What is S&T?

What does S&T division mean?

S&T or sales and trading is a division of a bank or financial firm that helps institutions buy and sell financial securities. They are liquidity providers and market makers. They help buyers and sellers find each other especially when moving large amounts of stocks, bonds etcetera.

Financial securities include equities, fixed income products, commodities, crypto currency, interest rates, derivatives, swaps, mortgages, and municipal bonds among other things.

What does the Sales and Trading Division Do?

The jobs of sales and trading is traditional divided among sales people and traders (although some employees do both jobs).

Sales people typically are on the phone with clients understanding their strategies, bringing them trade ideas and market updates, and working with them to transact on what they want to do in the markets. They are responsible for maintaining a relationship with the client so that the trader at the hedge fund or asset manager will choose to call XYZ Bank over ABC Bank when they need to make a trade.

Traders are typically responsible for knowing the product that they trade to an intense level of depth. When a client decides to transact on 1 million shares of Apple stock - the trader will find a way to move the security while having as minimal of a price impact as possible.

Who are the Clients of the S&T Group?

The clients of the sales and trading division are all different types of asset managers such as hedge funds, pension funds, endowment funds, prop trading firms, and even corporations. They do not work for high net worth individual clients.

Preparing for an S&T Interview - check out a popular WSO post about Sales and Trading interviews.

Read more about this topic on WSO:

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It's too bad this forum has been reduced to answering questions like what is sales and trading.

Especially bad when the question comes from someone with 207 bananas

 

Maintaining client relationships and getting clients to book their trades through your traders. Since all market makers(traders at BBs) offer essentially the same service, the sales team basically markets their bank an tries to sell clients on using a specific banks services. The sales guys are the frontmen put in front of clients, for which the traders book trades and make markets. There's more to it than that I'm sure, but that's a general overview.

 
Batrick Pateman:
dealing with clients casuse your autistic traders can barely hold a conversation

Haha I'd just rather not have to speak to them casuse I can't be bothered.

Jack: They’re all former investment bankers who were laid off from that economic crisis that Nancy Pelosi caused. They have zero real world skills, but God they work hard. -30 Rock
 
Batrick Pateman:
dealing with clients casuse your autistic traders can barely hold a conversation

hahaha +1

You have to remember that IB S&T are designed to service clients, even though the traders may do a lot of prop. You need a client interface for these clients who handle relationships, pitch stuff, act as a liaison to traders etc. It may not be as simple sales as if you worked at a retail store, but you are still a salesman.

 

The sell side offers research and trading services. The sales guys are selling both and attempt to be the main point of contact for buy side analysts, PMs and traders.

They will also be the point of contact for IPOs, secondary equity offerings, etc. that originate out of the bank. Whenever there is a secondary equity offering announced, I immediately get about 6 calls from the sales guys whose banks are on the books.

In the end, it's just sales. Sales is effectively the same thing wherever you are working, whether that's a car dealer, an insurance company, or a bank.

 

Besides research and market making, they also sell structured products, or the service of tailoring a structured product to the clients needs. I think the name is pretty self-explanatory. The sales of the S&T departments sells the services/products of the trading groups. Basically market making, research and structured products.

 
Bugs:
I know the trading arm investment banks seeks to generate capital by dabbling into the capital markets.
Classic. It would be a little easier to define what salespeople do if you had a better idea what traders do as well. Most traders trade "flow," that is they and sell securities/derivatives for their clients and maintain an inventory or book to hedge themselves. The salespeople interact with institutional money managers and encourage them to do trades through their bank by suggesting trades and packaging deals, some of which the traders are trying to unload from their inventory.
 

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