Is electronic trading a springboard to sales? Ask the Expert
A: Your firm is right that electronic trading in its various guises is a hotshot area and that cash equities are in decline. People are expensive, and computers are faster, more agile and more reliable than human beings, so banks are replacing them with technology wherever they can.
Cash equities have been hard hit by this, because they are relatively stable and easy to trade electronically. But many houses are starting to trade fixed income products electronically and as the technology improves more complicated products, like derivatives, are bound to follow.
As far as job prospects are concerned, therefore, you're going to be in a happening place: there's a lot of demand for electronic traders with a couple of years' experience, whereas the market for traditional equities traders is not good.
However, the technology has made trading into a different job and, especially to start with, it can be a bit dull. Initially, you will be monitoring trades that have been executed by the computer and getting to know the system. This is a bit middle-officey but should only be a staging post.
If your passion is sales, you want to be what's called an execution trader or sales trader. With electronic trading this means selling to clients a method to trade more cheaply. That runs from selling the technology in the first place to then helping clients use it effectively. The latter can still involve a lot of client contact as you advise the client on a trading strategy and then get the computer to execute it.
To give you a very simple example...a client may want to buy 50,000 IBM shares. As a traditional sales trader you would be ringing around to buy up those stocks wherever you can. As an electronic sales trader you could instruct the computer to buy only at certain prices, to trawl and trade with several exchanges simultaneously, to buy in blocs of 1000 shares every two seconds etc. etc. It means you can act faster, more cheaply and more anonymously. But there is still a sales skill in devising and selling the strategy in the first place.
"These are not buy/sell, buy/sell jobs. What you are selling is technical solutions," says Andrew Barber a specialist in electronic trading at recruitment firm McGregor Boyall. The only potential downside of this development, he adds, is that your bread and butter relies on the technical advancements made by your employer. "If your bank's product costs or reliability are not as good as their competitiors, you will lose out."
Next week's question: I recently got my fingers burnt signing up for an employer facing serious difficulties. By the time I joined most of my interviewers had left, including the head of the department, my job description had changed and training was withdrawn. I thought I had been very careful, asking HR to write into my contract the nature of my role and asking for a job description (which they later argued was just generic). I will be starting work for another company very soon and would be grateful for your advice about how to make sure an employer is not mis-representing themselves.
What would you advise? Send your answer to: expertadmin@efinancialcareers.com
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