Hello everyone, welcome back to MyFIntelligence! Today I am here with Wynette and we will be talking to her today about her time doing FX Trading, I believe. Wynette, can you please give us a super brief intro and tell us what position you had last summer.
Yes, my name is Wynette, I’m a third year commerce student at McMaster University. After my second year, I interned at a Big 5 bank in Foreign Exchange Trading.
Okay and in layman’s terms, maybe someone in first-year to understand, can you tell us what is FX trading? What does the team tend to do and yeah, just explain it a little.
Yeah, so the good thing is that foreign exchange is a very simple process. Essentially, we convert domestic currency to another. We especially deal with corporations or institutional investors like pensions. So let’s just say a corporation wants to convert their 20 million of Canadian dollars into American dollars, you have to contact us on the trading floor to be able to do that.
Okay and can you tell us a bit about your day to day tasks as an intern?
Yeah so, I woke up pretty early, 7am. Go on Bloomberg for about an hour and read up on the news and just kind of talk to the traders, listen to the morning calls and hear what they’re thinking for the day. Especially, hearing what London and Asia has saw over their work-day and trying to forecast it for North America. And then, at 11:30 I did a USD lending report where essentially we determined how much money our guests would lend to the Treasury which is the department that manages all the funds for the bank. Then from 12-3, I basically did just shadowing, also “macro-land” as Kat I know you like to say, building those macros out to make those reports a lot faster and it was fun, cause “’m not a great coder but it was a nice challenge. Then from 3-4, I did a Latin American report where I reported all the trades that we did that had to deal with Latin American currencies. Whether we won that trade, whether we lost it, and then finally from 4-5 end-of-day closing bell, I did a bunch of profit and loss reports for FX spot, FX options and then just globally, how much money FX trading made during that day in Asia, Europe and North America.
Wow, that’s so cool! Especially, that you handle it across the whole globe. What would you say is one skill that you picked up in the summer?
Oh my gosh, probably so many but I think the number one thing is patience because my managing director was super awesome and he gave me a $2 million book to trade. So, I could just trade as I want and those trades don’t trades don’t always work out! A good trader makes good trades around 60% of the time and a bad trade 40% of the time. So you got to know that maybe you have conviction and it;s not going the right way right away. You have to have patience to let that work itself through. And just be patient with yourself. Trading is difficult. You get paid because it’s a difficult job so making sure that you keep yourself in check, you have patience throughout it and just trust that you will get better day after day.
FX trading was definitely one of the coolest roles to have because I remember that not many interns actually get to trade and it was such a cool opportunity. Having worked with you, I can tell a lot of us were super jealous so that’s so awesome. Okay, so the very last question for you today is what would somebody starting this role need to prepare in advance in order to have a leg up from other candidates?
I think the number one thing is to be in check with your macroeconomics. So that macroeconomics 101 course that you took in your first year will come back. So, talking monetary policy, fiscal policy, inflation, gold, oil, commodities, so all that stuff is going to be applicable in your role in Foreign Exchange because it is so macro. So, if you got that job and you have an interview come up, make sure that you brush up on all those points and know kind of where we are in our current state right now.
That is great advice and I think that stands not just for FX trading but for all Sales and Trading positions. Economics and macro things you learn in school actually do come up a lot, I was really shocked to learn that as well, so that’s a great tip.
Okay, that brings us to the end of this interview! Wynette, thank you so much for being here!
Yeah, no problem!
Thank you all so much for watching! If you’re interested in actually seeing Wynette’s interview with Goldman Sachs for Sales and TRading make sure to check out that video as well! Thank you so much, see you soon!
Bye!
