So what jobs can you aspire to get when you join an investment bank? The most common are trader, salesperson, corporate financier. There are others that are just as important, like structurer, lawyer and business manager. And then if you are serious about your career, you might want to become desk manager, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Risk Officer, Chief Executive Officer or even Chairman….but I’ll focus on the basic jobs for the purpose of this guide.

Trader

Every person I’ve interviewed, who was very confident about his maths skills, wanted to be a trader. There are lots of pre-conceived ideas of what traders are, or what they do. Basically, people watch too much TV and read too many books. True, trading is stressful, but so is sales, and structuring, and legal, and all the rest. Let’s face it, a bank will always tend to create a stressful environment, because it is packed with ambitious, forceful and smart people. The more entrepreneur the bank’s culture, the more stressful it can be.

So what does a trader do?

Buys, Sells and makes lots of money? If you work at a hedge fund, maybe; in bank, a trader is basically a risk manager. You have to make prices for the bank’s clients, you have to manage the risk of the book you are taking care of, and you have to ensure that you make money in the process. There is a certain type of trader called a proprietary trader: “Prop” traders usually have a lot of latitude in what they can trade and how they can trade it - they don’t engage in clients business. Their book is usually smaller than the rest, because banks have been reluctant to rely on prop trading revenues for their bottom lines. These revenues are more volatile in nature than the conventional client flow business. If you want to be a trader, make sure you test different asset classes first: trading foreign exchange is totally different to trading asset-backed securities. And the level of stress is not necessarily correlated with the level of revenues or profits traders make.

Of course, every recruitment brochure and bank website will tell you that trading is “fast-paced” activity suited for “sharp, good-with-numbers, creative-thinking-ability-equipped people”, and it is a beautiful job; but beauty is in the eye of the beholder… Once a top trader told me “Traders are no different from the cashiers of a large supermarket, taking care of the till...”