Internship 1

Now, with some months between my first internship and now I wanted to share some impressions:

And so it started, the long awaited internship experience. We all met on the first day for the usual brainwashing of how great the bank is – and later headed out to Lama island for some team building activities. First impression – wow, everyone is so young! Especially the Asian analysts!

The activities on the island were nice – just the sun and humidity made for an exhausting experience. The final dinner at the beach on Lantau island however created a very chilled out atmosphere to meet people.

The rest of the week was spent on training which was delivered by an external training company and was very good. We even had to do an exam at the end of the week. The training was rounded up by 2 hours of intensive Bloomberg training which was very very good.

Second week Monday morning we finally started. Me and two analysts were picked up by the desk head of the Equity Derivatives Trading desk. He introduced us to everyone – I got to sit with the Hong Kong Equities Options desk first. I felt quite comfortable – hey, I have a Eurex Trader Licence and use to teach options 10 years ago. I quickly realized however that I know absolutely nothing about options – not on the level these guys trade at. So I sat, watched and filled page after page with things I picked up – and more with questions. The guys were very helpful and supportive – but also asked little quizzes (Black-Scholes by heart anyone? Does correlation increase or decrease in falling markets? Why?). I managed to also sit with a lot of other desks, e.g. Derivative Sales, Complex Equity, Exotics, Warrants, Cash Equity, Program Trading, Delta 1, Synthetic Equity and so on. In parallel the training company started a FX simulation and in teams of 2 we had to manage a portfolio of $10mn. We could change the allocation into EUR, YEN, CAD and AUD – but obviously had to back up our choices (and should make money). My partner and me spent a lot of time in the beginning agreeing on an approach and which type of research we would be reading (there is a ton of available research – and we were both very busy at our desks).

My desk had given me a few small projects – so I quickly taught myself Visual Basic for Excel (especially automating Bloomberg tasks out of Excel) and created several tools for the guys to save them some time.

Tip:

-          make sure the guys on your desk are happy. Bringing them coffee/lunch/whatever is an easy way to make them happy. One guy complained that he felt like a secretary doing that – unsurprisingly he did not get an offer. It is not about getting lunch – but about the attitude. What are you willing to do to get this job? At Accenture I was a manager and had 25 people working for me – here I was getting lunch. But I wanted to get this job – and compared to calculating the non-linear shift of the volatility surface and the impact on the vega P/L (my project), getting lunch was easy.

-          Create tools to make life easy for the people who decide your fate.

-          Connect to the people, and connect to all.

-          Identify the MDs and make sure you spoke to all of them before you leave.

-          Handing over business cards leaves a professional impression.

Finally we had to say good-bye to the 56^th floor and the view and head over to Singapore. My 4^th time there but my first time working. Being in Singapore somehow always feels like a vacation – on the weekend you never wear more than shorts and T-Shirt.

A word about the accommodation: serviced apartment in Hong Kong. Not big but very nice and sufficient – I did not spend much time there anyhow. The view however was fantastic – the skyline of Hong Kong is very unique sight.

The view was not as good in Singapore – but the apartment mind-blowing. Two entry doors leading to a square-layout designer flat in Zen style. Elements of stone, wood, glass and steel were used as walls and the floor. Two Loewe flat screens and two Bose sound-systems, to a huge relaxing bed and a shower and bathtub only separated by glass from the bed (“the idea is to watch”) made for a extremely relaxing time (when we had time to be in the apartment!). The second desk had a very different type of work – I worked on multiple presentations at the same time, listened in to client calls and did write-ups of research calls. I got exposure not only to Debt but also FX as well as commodities. At the same time we were running, in teams of two, an FX portfolio which we needed to do our final presentation on. So the last days were crazy with finishing up on desk projects, continuing to meet people and putting together a presentation on why we traded the way we did and what we learned.

After the internship I went for a nice sunny relaxing vacation in Indonesia – scuba diving of the coast of Manado. It was there, on the balcony of our bungalow, that the bank called to tell me that I had an offer! What fantastic news after a day of diving and seeing sharks! Especially so as the conversion rates were significantly lower than last year – something that was confirmed when I returned to London.

Yours,

Don