About
Fixed income guidance thins out exactly at the desk.
Plenty is written about breaking into sales and trading in general. Almost nothing free goes deep on any single desk. The specialist material that does exists sits behind a paid bundle, so we built the free version: one guide per desk, with the arithmetic shown, for people applying and people who just want to understand how the floor actually works.
Why by desk, and not by bank
The general career guides do a reasonable job of the parts every candidate shares: the resume, the fit round, how a superday runs. They then reach the technical section, cover eight or nine desks in a page each, and move on. A candidate walks away knowing that repo exists and almost nothing about how a repo book actually rolls.
The desk-level material that fills that gap is real, but it is sold as a bundle, so a student deciding between rates and structured products has to pay before finding out which one fits. We publish that layer free, one desk at a time: what it trades and for whom, how it makes money, a worked example with the numbers, and what a junior actually does once they have the seat.
What this site is and is not
Rates, repo, credit trading, high yield, distressed debt, CLOs, securitized products and emerging markets credit, each written for the desk itself rather than for the bank that happens to run it, covering the US, the UK and Europe, and Asia, since the desks and the hiring calendars differ by region and a guide that only knows one region is not global.
Organized by desk, not by bank
A trading floor is not one job. Rates, repo, credit, high yield, distressed, CLOs, securitized products and emerging markets credit each price differently, hire differently and get asked different questions, so each one gets its own guide instead of a shared paragraph inside a firm profile.
Not affiliated with any bank
Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and every other dealer named in these guides has not reviewed, commissioned or endorsed a single page here. A bank's name appears because a guide about a rates desk has to say whose rates desk it is describing, and for no other reason.
Not investment advice
These guides describe what a desk does and what a strong interview answer contains. None of it is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything, and nothing here should be read as one.
Written under the pen name Tobias Wren. What stands behind the name is a process, not a résumé, set out in the editorial standards. The operating company is named in the Impressum.
Where to begin.
The desks themselves, how the interview actually runs, and what the seat pays once you have it.