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Banking Investment / March 17, 2022

It was awesome. Two of the best years of my life. I went to Morgan Stanley in NY right after I graduated from Stanford. I found myself on a great desk with some of the best and nicest people you will ever meet in the industry. The culture was flat, everyone was humble and unassuming. I'm not going to say that's true everywhere, in fact I observed some pretty crappy stuff happening to traders on other desks. Timing-wise it was also great: coming out of the crisis in 2009, the particular asset class that I was trading rallied pretty robustly and we made record profits for a couple of years in a row. It was like that for several years. We gained mad market share and basically everyone was pretty happy.

Functionally yea you work pretty closely with middle office and back office, as well as quants. The devil is always in the details, and you had to figure out mon-end marks, for instance, or trade settlement, trade amendments, etc. But it's just part of the job. That relationship was super-healthy and everyone is very nice to each other regardless of function (at least as far as my desk was concerned. I'm sure there were some traders on other desks who treated back office like second class citizens).

One of the best things about the job is how stimulating and how busy you are all. the. time. There were days when I'd be too busy to get up for a bathroom break or lunch. I had 6 computer screens and two machines. And honestly it wasn't enough. 2 guys on my desk had 8. Interest rates products by nature are generally liquid, fast moving, and the market is deep (at least for the "flow" products I was trading), so you had to really be in front of the markets all the time. That necessitates all of this investment technologically. I will also tell you that there is no better feeling than winning a trade and beating out your competitors at another bank by a thousandth of a basis point on the price of a bond. And I started trading pretty huge volumes pretty quickly (if I told you how much, you wouldn't believe me).

I'm making it sound really awesome, but honestly it's hard not to get a little cynical after a while. I can go on for hours about this but once you have P&L to protect, your relationships with clients and even your own salespeople can and do become adversarial in nature. You have to manage that accordingly.

Last thing I'll mention is that rates trading is a great place to start off your career. You get a really great foundation for any type of investing or trading after that. You'll have a general understanding of macro as well as a great mastery of the technicals of trading fixed income products. One of the things that banks are really good at nowadays is risk management. And trust me, you will be a beast at managing your delta, gamma, vega, and thetas in no time. I don't invest in interest rate products at the moment but the foundation I built in terms of fixed income math and financial theory is definitely helpful to me to this day.

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