I started on Wall Street in the summer of 1984, working in the mailroom at Alliance Capital while in college. A career in finance was not my goal; my undergrad degree is in Near Eastern Archaeology. But hieroglyphics textbooks don’t buy themselves, and the job was easy and paid well.
Every professional role I have had since stemmed directly from that experience. My interest in an academic life waned my senior year, so I joined Alliance full time. The professionals there were mostly Chicago MBAs, so that’s where I went to B-school. That got me a position as a senior auto analyst at First Boston (now Credit Suisse). From there I went to SAC to learn trading from Steve Cohen. Fast forward another 15 years, and now I write for you.
This serendipitous path to a successful finance career is largely gone now. Consider that Goldman Sachs opens up their application process for 2019 summer internships in 23 days. And their window closes before the end of the year. Morgan Stanley’s college recruiting website is slicker than Amazon’s, and funnels you into suggested roles. For a summer internship!
All this leaves thousands of young people – college/B School students and recent grads – with the daunting challenge of finding their way in our profession. I have mentored dozens of people over my +30 year career and have developed a toolbox of skills to help them on their way. Here are the important ones:
#1. Finance is your profession even before you get your first “real” job in the business.
I had a B-school professor who gave my class a pop quiz on the first day of school. The questions were all simple: where did the S&P close the prior day, what’s the price of a barrel of oil and an ounce of gold, the dollar/yen exchange rate, etc.
Every single student failed miserably. The professor was not impressed. “Do yourself and this school a favor: never walk into an interview without knowing what’s happening in global capital markets. If you can’t do that, please quit this program because you’re wasting your time and, more importantly, mine.”
The lesson: it has never been easier to keep up on capital markets, so know what’s going on. Read the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, CNBC, Bloomberg, etc. every day. Business news is like a soap opera; as you learn about the characters it gets a lot more interesting. If all this is unpalatable, you should strongly consider taking the advice my B-school professor offered.
#2. Know what sort of job you want
The skills required to be a productive analyst, salesperson, trader, or investment banker are different. Yes, all require you to follow point #1. But after that, they diverge....
- Analysts love piecing together intellectual puzzles and getting to an answer before anyone else.
- Traders are students of the market,