The Practical Guide to Wall Street: Equities and Derivatives

Preface

What makes a good Wall Street trader or salesperson?

There is no magic formula. Successful Wall Street professionals possess a mixture of intelligence, common sense, attention to detail, business savvy, wit, presence, energy, enthusiasm, interpersonal skills, self-confidence, as well as other attributes that are not only difficult to quantify, but that vary from one person to the next. Market conditions and client demands are constantly changing and success speaks as much to the person’s ability to do a job well today as to the ability to adapt quickly and effectively to the ever-changing markets and the evolving requirements of the job.

In particular, success on “the Street” is not the result of a specific academic training. The men and women who work on the trading floor come from enormously varied backgrounds. In addition to the many MBAs and economics, finance, and business administration majors that one would expect to find, I have also worked with traders and salespeople who held degrees in English literature, art history, astrophysics, and everything in between, including a few (all senior to me, I should add) with no university education whatsoever.

Because the skills required for success on Wall Street are not easily defined, or correlated to strength in a particular academic area, trading floors have always operated on an apprenticeship model. Inexperienced hires (typically recent university graduates or newly-minted MBAs) are admitted to analyst and associate ...