Sales and trading interview questions

The key to acing an interview is preparation—and beginning your preparation as soon as possible.

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

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. The main difference is that you need to pick stories that demonstrate the traits that salespeople and traders want to see. For example:. The themes are thinking quickly , mitigating risk , performing well under pressure , and generating profits. Tell me about a recent news story related to the financial markets and your opinion of it. How has it trended over the past year? What about oil and gold prices? But there are a few additional points to note in the context of sales and trading interview questions:.

It's rare to find someone who is actually working in trading that has time to post so much advice on WSO.

The sales and trading interview is meant to test for finance knowledge, market interest and ability to handle stress. For sales, interpersonal skills and the ability to communicate why a trade makes sense to a client is important. For trading, being calm and remaining rational is key. Integrity is also increasingly important due to rogue trader blow ups and reputational risk stemming from non-finance related activities that have become Hollywood cliches. Sales, trading and structuring demand different personalities. Everyone has to be smart with sales leaning more towards EQ, but sales teams stress getting a CFA as a means of bolstering credibility , but salespeople have to be good communicators with an understanding of markets while traders will need to convey they have well-reasoned views and are calm under stressful situations. Structurers are expected to be more cerebral.

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. This question is not so relevant for someone with industry experience but is especially important for career switchers. For example, if you went back to school to get an MBA or a degree in quantitative mathematics, you need to have a good reason for the career switch. For salespeople, the important thing is that you love to sell. This question deserves some thought.

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.

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The decreased earnings are a result of a non-recurring expense, and revenues beat expectations 4. For salespeople, the important thing is that you love to sell. These questions should show your deeper knowledge of what actually occurs on a trading floor and not be generic questions like, "What area of the trading floor would you recommend to someone like me? It's generally a good idea to know if the yield curve has been steepening or flattening over the past few months prior to your interview. 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. But if you could not answer certain questions or discuss your trade ideas effectively, this strategy is not a great idea. Collars are used by fixed income investors to lock in a range of interest rates, which allows for them to be protected from rising rates while giving up the potential benefits of lower interest rates remember for bonds, lower interest rates means a higher present value of cash flows and vice versa. Traders and salespeople live and breathe the market. Also, Margin of Safety. 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. 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. Sales and trading interview questions can be some of the toughest in all of finance.

When it comes to sales and trading interviews, there's a wide diversity of potential questions you can get.

Futures allow market participants to take views on future rate movements in an off-balance sheet capacity. Anyone that bitches and moans because WSO is 'just a bunch of college kids' needs to shut their fucking mouths. Nest Egg Estate Sales. 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. After that, I would also recommend either the first two Market Wizards books or The invisible hands. It was written by a Barcap derivatives trader and explains general options trading in very simple language. Equity Market Holidays Were you following global macro trends as a teen? In other words, the name of the game is to do a trade in which you can entirely hedge out your exposure making no money from the trade working or not for the client while still making money at time zero. As you can see from the above list, things directly related to equity markets make up a pretty small sample of what you're really concerned about on the vast majority of trading desks. This is one of those sales and trading interview questions you'll inevitably get probably multiple times during a superday. Mental math questions , however, will come up in any of these roles. At worst, you lose that small initial sum; at best, you might be able to earn a huge amount if the stock moves far beyond that strike price.