Sales and trading interview questions

The key to acing an interview is preparation—and beginning your preparation as soon as possible. Sales and trading interviewers, while not overly technical, tend to want to talk about the stock market.

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. Therefore, in the interviews, many behavioral questions will test your interpersonal skills, consistency, and reliability as an employee.

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 is no division within major investment banks that is more diverse in what they do than 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. Note: Each "product" or asset class will normally have a dedicated desk that will contain sales people, traders, and potentially others including sales traders , quants, and structurers. The issue with sales and trading is that in a superday for a summer analyst or full-time role, you'll be interviewing with at least three members of the sales and trading division who could come from any desk and obviously they can't help but judge you based on whether you'd be a good fit for their desk. What this means practically is that interviewees need to have a broad understanding of what occurs on a trading floor in order to be successful in an interview. In other words, you need contextual understanding. No one expects you in an interview to understand how exactly to think about gamma in the context of a complex equity derivatives trade or how to think about how an out-of-court restructuring impacting distressed bonds. However, having contextual understanding of where those things fit into the broader sales and trading division and what the basics of the major desks are is critically important. Because of just how little information is out there on sales and trading interviews, I created Sales and Trading Interviews , which contains over sales and trading interview questions and guides including breakdowns of all the major desks.

Then, based on the current market conditions stock market, bond market, commodities marketallocate assets based on how far they deviate away from their fundamental levels.

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. For sales , you can take a similar approach, but you should focus on developing client relationships rather than learning all the technical details of a product.

Discover interview questions you might encounter when interviewing for a sales position and how to prepare for an upcoming interview. An upcoming sales interview is an exciting opportunity to explore career opportunities, land a job you love, and create meaningful relationships with customers. According to HubSpot's Sales Trends Report, sales professionals are looking to make sales processes more efficient, collaborate more effectively with marketing teams, and make more use of software to automate sales processes [ 1 ]. With these trends in mind, it's important to be mindful of how sales interviews work, how to prepare, and what questions you may encounter, whether your interview is for an entry-level sales position or an advanced role requiring sales experience. An interview for a sales position may be different from other types of interviews in the following ways:.

Sales and trading interview questions

Sales and trading summer analyst internships are among the best to have during your undergraduate career. Not only will they open up the world of sales and trading to you - showing you how a trading floor really operates - they will also carry enough "prestige" to help you pivot to other roles should you want to try something new like investment banking or equity research. Part of the reason why this site was created is that much of the information out there on sales and trading is terribly outdated or non-existent. Some seem to think that you can walk into an interview - not knowing what something like rates trading refers to - and walk out with an offer. In reality, the way that sales and trading has evolved over the past five years is that almost everyone who starts full-time will come through the sales and trading summer analyst program of the bank. Further, unlike in investment banking where everyone is a bit of a cog in the pitch book machine, in sales and trading individual talent, personality traits, and preferences plays a large role in success and failure. This is part of the reason why this site has harped so much on making sure you understand what the major desks within a bank are and decide early on which ones most interest you. Because the reality is some will excel in rates trading while failing in FX sales, for example. You need to be self-reliant and figure out the best place on the trading floor to land.

Tajima uchiha

With regards to " Come into my Trading Room ", how would you compare it to Elder's best-seller "Trading for a Living"? Gekko21, what's your opinion on that? To learn more about the technical details of specific products, as well as math and brainteaser questions, check out:. Defense Contractors. I find it to be really helpful. You should also bring up whether or not you are more interested in the sales-side or the trading-side. Are you in the industry already, or are you looking to break in? Insider trading is the buying and selling of securities with material non-public information. An important contextual note - that is always good to try to convey in an interview - is that market making does not mean that you hold no risk. This is because, as you can imagine, during good times there's almost no risk involved in repo trades since they're often just a day in duration, but can stretch longer.

As I wrote about in the rather long sales and trading overview post, FX is one of the more interesting areas of a trading floor to be on. In particular if you like flow trading and like to think in relativistic terms because everything in FX is relative. Much like rates trading, FX trading is also a good place to be if you enjoy following macro themes.

South America. One trades above the yield curve, the other trades under the yield curve. Gekko would you recommend any books that cover Economic Indicators and their effect on markets from a traders perspective? One of the most important attribute to a trader is being able to manage risk — taking on just the right amount of risk to balance profit and loss. It would take far too much room to go over all the greeks in this post, but in the sales and trading prep course I go over all of them in detail including examples of how the greeks change for basic option positions. Much like behavioral-based interview questions - need to be approached cautiously as well. Thank you for these inputs, they have definitely given me a bit of a road map of things to do over the next couple of months. Try to justify your initial portfolio recommendation succinctly and articulately. Print as PDF. You need to think carefully about what in your personality and past work experience makes you more suited to sales and trading versus investment banking. For brainteasers , I have found Heard on the Street to be very comprehensive. Both bonds and stocks are negotiable securities.