Say goodbye to the dream

[Roadstar]

Congrats on the job opportunities. Since your majors weren't in finance, I suggest you talk to others in the industry.

You may already know this but an investment bank basically has 3 broad pillars:

1) Sales/Trading
2) Research
3) Investment Banking (or sometimes called Corporate Finance)

Make sure you understand how an i-bank works and what your career path would look like.

What type of trading will you be doing/want to be doing mostly? agency trading (trading for a client) or pro trading (pro = proprietary, i.e. trading with the firm's money)?

I'm in research but from what I see here are the pro's and con's of trading

pro's

1) great hours - when you said 6:30-6-8pm was serious hours i lol'ed! Go ask a guy in investment banking how much he/she works a week

2) less work "burden" - when markets are closed, there isn't that much you can do. Hence you don't end up worrying too much or have to catch up too much work afterhours. This is unlike research/i-banking.

3) environment of meritocracy - your performance/compensation is pretty much direct drive

con's

1) sometimes mechanical - esp with agency trading, you're executing orders. So a lot of the times you're reacting to news/trade flow. Some ppl find this not very intellectual stimulating

2) slightly narrower skill set - the traders' skill set is marginally less transferable than the other ibanking departments. You rarely do in depth analysis into securities.

3) career path - an ibank (i.e. morgan stanley) is generally known as "sell-side" work which means more hours and smoozing - can become a grind. Many eventually go to the buy side (hedge fund, mutual fund etc) or industry (corp exec). While buy-side firms have traders, its marginally harder to transfer into these fields compared to say research and investment banking.

PM if you have questions. Hope this helps