I have been fighting for the trading positions for 4 weeks......busy to death...but actually the personal attacks, dirty words, jargons, politics, tricky back-and-forth discussions...all these stuffs torture me more than long hours and competitions...

Altogether I have talked to more than 80 traders...each one of them interviewed me carefully. I have rotated to:

Emerging Market Structured Credit, Stat Arb, Equity Derivative Structured Trading, FX Option Trading, Equity Derivative Quantitative Analytics, Non Agency Mortgage Trading, CMBS Trading, FI Relative Value Trading, Risk Treasury, Interest Rate Long Volatility and Short-term Vol, Muni Structured Trading, Rate Structuring and Exotic Trading, FI Derivative Hybrid Trading, Equity Cash Trading and Equity Sales AsiaPac.

Actually I have almost decided to join Interest Rate Structuring and Exotic Vol Trading desk...there are lots of things to learn about the interest rate model on top of the traditional Black-Scholes model, and there are various products like range accrual, bermudan option, binary option, leveraged steepener etc. All these financial instruments are customerized and sale-oriented. Secondary trading has relatively smaller size, but we have quite good flows. In terms of learning hedging, pricing, and managing P&L, the exposure is very good. Other than that, there are lots of opportunities to interact with lont-term/short-term vol desks and deal with sales force and clients.

I feel like I am more aware of my weakness after all the judgments made by traders. I did have a very tough time because my background is in research, 5 publications, 2 patents, 3-year in college and 1-year in graduate school, pretty much in every step I am top one in my class. But the thing is, trader is looking at totally different prospective. Whether you are aggressive, outgoing and social enough to interact with people, how smart and how sharp you are...

Let's take a simple example...traders can ask you something like: if you do a 2-yr swap and receive the fixed rate, are you long the market or short the market? You have to answer this in 1 sec. It's long the market. Because when bond market rallies, swap rate is down, together with the yield curve decrease...so you are receiving a higher-than-market rate, and that's an advantage you want to take. Then they will ask you, how to use this to hedge? Well...this is easy right? This is to hedge the market exposure to interest rate risk...you can use interest rate swaps and do delta hedging when buy the mortgages, and use credit default swap to strip out the credit risk exposure.

All these questions are not like deriving B-S partial differential equation on paper, given certain boundary conditions...it's more like your first-time reaction when market moves...on the buy side, they may care more about how you really take long-term prospective...think about the portfolio managers in those funds...you got the idea~

Anyway, when it is all settle down, a brand-new chapter is open, and again I will throw my full attention to extending my knowledge and strengthening my skill sets.

Future is in my hand, and the confidence I have in myself can drive me further to achieve my goals. Given all the difficulties and disadvantages, I need to push myself harder, and embrace the truth...will figure it out......

Lawrence

这一段旅途, 没有结束, 不能重复......