Sales and trading interview questions

Sales and trading interview questions can be some of the toughest in all of finance. The reason being is that there boldmedya no division within major investment banks that is more diverse in what they do sales and trading interview questions in sales and trading. Within any given sales and trading division you'll have folks who focus on equity derivatives, mortgage backed securities, interest rate swaps, distressed debt, among dozens of other products.

If you're new here, please click here to get my FREE page investment banking recruiting guide - plus, get weekly updates so that you can break into investment banking. Thanks for visiting! Being an athlete helps a lot because it demonstrates your drive and risk-taking ability. There are also a few transfers from the middle office and other teams at the bank. There are 1.

Sales and trading interview questions

If you are interviewing for sales, you need to know the same info that a person interviewing for trading does. Sales gets a bad rap on this site, but I have met a lot of sales guys. A lot of the sales guys I know are ex-traders who for one reason or another quit trading to go into sales - and they love it less stress , they know all about the product, and they do just as well as when they were trading. The difference between these interviews is that they will focus on one area more than the other, but that does not mean you should not have a stock pick ready when going into a fixed income interview. Warning: This guide is not meant to be a cram sheet. This guide is meant to be completed over time and to prepare you for the marathon that is the interviewing process. To prepare for the fit part, I would read the WSO Fit Interview Guide and look hard at your resume for possible questions that could be asked i. What did you think? Now some of you might be asking, if fit is so important, why bother with technicals? Technicals are there to differentiate candidates. If you have two candidates who are about equal in the fit category, you are going to take the one that either A has a skill set you want i. Technicals also help show that passion I talked about in Part 1. But it's less about proving you're a workhorse and more about proving you're a quick thinker and can act like a trader. I provided the link, but a quick Google search reveals several other links should this one go down.

Multiplying a 2- or 3-digit number by a 1-digit number is straightforward because you just separate them into smaller groupings:.

He has extensive experience in wealth management, investments and portfolio management. As a result, traders and sellers frequently work together and interact with clients to address their needs. For instance, they check if orders are processed and identify the best investment approaches for higher return and profitability. Salespeople usually directly communicate with their clients to understand their objectives. Then, they devise plausible and fitting trade ideas, market updates, and investment approaches, which the trader executes while minimizing price impact. Moreover, sales and trading require excellent communication and social skills.

This is especially true of the superday interviews where your three interviewers could come from any desk within Goldman's global markets division and ask wildly different interview questions. Part of the reason why I created the Sales and Trading Interview series of guides is because there is so little information out there on not only the interview questions to expect, but what all the desks that are housed within the sales and trading division actually do. What Goldman really wants to do - and I speak from personal experience having got a sales and trading summer analyst offer there - is make sure that you really know what you're getting into. That means you need to demonstrate in an interview that you have contextual understanding of what various desks in the sales and trading division - or as Goldman calls it, the Global Markets division - practically do so you aren't flying blind when you begin. First, the Goldman Sachs sales and trading summer analyst program is rotational in nature. You will rotate on three desks and you will need to rank what desks you'd like to be on then desks will choose among those that ranked them highly. Because of this, it's important that you have some preliminary interests. No one expects or wants you to say you're only interested in high yield trading, for example, as that would show quite a bit of hubris given that you haven't been on the trading floor yet! However, they want you to demonstrate that you have a few different areas of the trading floor you'd like to rotate through and have good rationales for why.

Sales and trading interview questions

When it comes to sales and trading interviews, there's a wide diversity of potential questions you can get. However, you can rest assured that you will almost invariably be asked "Why sales and trading? Many think that this is a bit of a gimme question. The reality is that a large reason why this question is asked in the majority of interviews is that it's a way to suss out whether you actually understand what sales and trading is all about. In a traditional superday setting an interviewer will normally interview around six applicants give or take. At least a few of them will give such poor answers to this question that it'll raise serious red flags if not ding them entirely. With this question, there are some things that you should absolutely include in your answer and some things you absolutely should not include.

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Brainteasers are especially common at the undergraduate level, where recruiters have little else than a GPA and school pedigree to separate one candidate for another. Put option gives the option holder the right but not the obligation to sell the underlying asset at the strike price before its expiration. Honestly, you should make time to do both. There is a common misperception that traders enjoy taking wild amounts of risk. The credit trading guide contains 35 questions and answers on the basics of corporate bonds, credit spreads, and credit default swaps that you need to know prior to joining an investment grade, high yield, or distressed desk. Then, they devise plausible and fitting trade ideas, market updates, and investment approaches, which the trader executes while minimizing price impact. Your primary focus should be the money and investing section. If the yield decreases, then prices increase, and if prices increase then yields decrease. There is a retarded amount of posts on here that you can find this info Just check the related content or use the search bar. In other words, you need contextual understanding. Ultimately, I decided the project would need to: 1. King Kong. What are some important economic indicators to watch out for? This could also lead to a bit of a bond market tantrum in the future where rising yields leads to selling as when yields rise, bond prices fall , while the treasury is pumping out new securities to fund ballooning deficits, and banks are unable to absorb as many treasuries as they otherwise would without the SLR exemption. There is a common misperception that traders enjoy taking wild amounts of risk.

The key to acing a sales and trading interview is preparation—and beginning your preparation as soon as possible. To help you further prepare, below are some of the most common and important interview questions you'll face in sales and trading interviews. It's essential that you know how to answer these questions, and that you answer them well.

That's impractical in most asset classes. A basis point is one one hundredth of a percent, it is usually used within the context of fixed income. If you have an example where you were speculating based on a short-term market condition, this might be more appropriate than a buy-and-hold investment that you once made. Are you doing interest rate swaps in your spare time? As a zero coupon bond has no coupon payments, the duration of a zero coupon bond is simply equal to its maturity. But if you feel you were not judged fairly or that the interview was conducted under poor conditions, you could go back and argue for another chance. A call option is a bet on the price of a stock to rise, writing the option is taking the other side of that bet, where the profit is the option premium. Since the amount and timing of this cash flow occurs independent of interest rates, the duration of a zero coupon bond is simply equal to its maturity. This is a test of your familiarity with expected value. This reflects the fact that investors want more compensation higher yield for buying the debt of a company that won't be paid back for many years. Rates traders can skew their books - partly by using treasury futures - in order to both service anticipated future client demand maybe lots of clients are anticipated coming to get year bonds and to profit from anticipated movements of the yield curve. Typically, duration is related to maturity in that longer maturing bonds have higher duration. The reality is that every desk will have a diversity of clients who often come to the bank in search of practical solutions to their problems.