Sales and trading interview questions

Sales and trading interview contona 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.

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.

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. Fit questions are normally the first screen to moving on to the next round of interviews. These questions are pretty typical investment banking fare, but you should be prepared to talk about why you want to trade or sell. Make your answer as concrete as possible by offering examples in your past that support your belief that you will make a great trader or salesperson. This question is not so relevant for someone with industry experience, but especially important for career switchers. Consultants who go back to school to get an MBA or a degree in quantitative mathematics to become traders need to have a reason for the career switch. For salespeople, the important thing is that you love to sell. Be sure to mention that in your mind, greed is good said in a more delicate way of course. Some people talk about wanting to learn from the experience—they are not surprisingly not invited for second-round interviews.

Investment-based questions are another key type of question that can come up.

Everything you need to know about sales and trading in , put together for the first time. When I interviewed for sales and trading summer analyst positions in — at J. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, respectively — I frankly had no idea what I was doing. I was lucky to get through the recruiting process and get offers at both Goldman and JPM. But ever since my interviews nearly five years ago I believed that someone needed to create a definitive course that walked you through the entire sales and trading recruiting process, explained how to answer top interview questions, and walked through what desks exist and what they do. The result is the Sales and Trading Interview Prep Course, which contains 13 guides and over real-world sales and trading interview questions and answers. The reason for the course being so large is that I believed a truly comprehensive course needed to cover not only the interview questions you need to prepare for in a sales and trading interview and there are a lot of them!

One of the largest trading desks within any bank's sales and trading division will be the rates desk, which focuses on government bonds, interest rate swaps, swaptions, inflation-protected securities, etc.. How exactly the rates desk is structured will vary slightly depending on what bank you are looking at. However, what you will generally find are silos of traders who focus on distinct areas of the rates universe. Then you will have sales people who are generally a bit less siloed than the traders meaning they will interact with various trading silos, for instance dealing with clients transacting in numerous kinds of rates products like treasuries and swaps. Occasionally you will see money markets and mortgage-backed securities trading be put under the "rates trading" umbrella. Normally, however, these areas are considered to be distinct desks on their own and we will cover each of these areas in future posts since they have substantially different dynamics than rates. One thing to keep in mind about rates trading - if you are planning to rotate there or join full-time - is that it is quite a distinct environment relative to the rest of the floor.

Sales and trading interview questions

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.

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Investors are willing to pay more for a putable bond embedded with a put option as it protects their downside if interest rates rise. Reviewed By: Himanshu Singh. Moving on, here are some good answers to the question:. If inflation rates in the UK rise relative to inflation rates in Canada, what will happen to the Pound and the Canadian dollar? 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. You need to show that you can take the best parts of a stock story and articulate a convincing case quickly. By maintaining the dividend, the company can attract shareholders and funds that prefer dividend stocks, thus boosting its stock price. Now let's dive in to ten common sales and trading interview questions. You want to articulate the stories clearly and show interviewers your character, work experience, and fit with the company. To learn more about the technical details of specific products, as well as math and brainteaser questions, check out:. A forward contract is an agreement between two parties, where one party agrees to deliver an asset to the other at an agreed upon price and date. Assuming the price of the security is equally likely to go up or go down, the delta is 0. You can then tie this all up by saying you wonder if the Fed will start engaging in more targeted yield curve control to try to suppress down any steepening if it does begin to happen.

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.

View Profile. Dividends are periodic cash payments distributed to shareholders. I mean, saying the alphabet in your sleep kind of know. Default premium is the difference between the yield of a bond and the yield of an identical risk-free bond. In the answer I mentioned the Fed could be put into a bind and be forced to raise rates much faster than the market was anticipating in early due to persistently high inflation -- which is what has actually occurred! Generally, bubbles occur when investor confidence pushes the price of the securities significantly above its fundamental value. Sales and trading interview questions can be some of the toughest in all of finance. Which bond has a greater duration? Much like behavioral-based interview questions - need to be approached cautiously as well. In addition to practicing your basic arithmetic, the WSO Prop Trading Guide has everything you need to know for prop trading interviews, including a myriad of questions with thoroughly explained answers. If you have a view about where the five-year treasury is going or a specific type of rates trade, like a curve trade to pitch then that is far more impressive than saying that Tesla is overvalued. The top tranche, which makes up the majority of the notes issued by the CLO, will often be structured to ensure that it gets a AAA rating from credit agencies thus making investors feel it is safe. Unlike investment banking which tends to be more regional, markets and products are global and never sleep. Remember: greed is good at least in this industry. It seems to be some combination of what you have listed, but I'm curious if there's a bible of fixed-income securities out there that's worth snagging.