Sales and Trading: Listen to Michael (2020) talk about his internships in Sales and Trading at JP Morgan.

Transcript: Stephanie: You're listening to Gear Up, the Duke Career Center's student produced podcasts showcasing real students summer internship experiences. My name's Stephanie Mayle and today we're talking to Michael about his internship in sale and trading at JP Morgan.

Michael: I'm Michael Nicholson. I'm originally from Nashville, Tennessee. I'm a senior. I'm double majoring in economics and computer science and minoring in statistics.

Stephanie: And where did you work this past summer?

Michael: I was at JP Morgan in their markets division. It was actually my second summer there. I was there for my sophomore year, too.

Stephanie: So how did you first find out about that position in your sophomore year?

Michael: Yeah. So I think I kind of knew coming in freshman year, I knew I wanted to do something like somewhat sort of related to finance. So I just went to a bunch of info sessions, like I went info sessions of everything like consulting to like sales and trading which is why I end up doing banking, just for like every bank, every firm that would come here. Just kind of get an idea of what I was interested in. I kind of decided at the end of the day, like I didn't want to work in a bank, be one of those people. Cause I just found it really interesting thinking about like economics, but also like putting it to use like doing something with it. So I applied to pretty much every bank and like lots of different divisions, as a sophomore and for some reason I gotten really lucky and got an internship with JP Morgan in their markets division. So I did that that summer. And at the end there were like, hey, do you want to come back? And I was like, yeah, I know I can do that.

Stephanie: All right. So let's focus on your first summer, just as it was kind of like your first experience working there. So what were you doing day to day for your work?

Michael: Yeah. So I was on the macro floor, so I was working with foreign exchange and emerging markets products. So I was doing a lot of research, doing a lot of reading on like what's happening with the presidential election in Brazil; Mexico it was actually really interesting. So there was a presidential super cycle in emerging markets. There were 18 major elections in emerging market countries. So part of my job was just to figure out what the world is going on in these countries, like who are the different candidates like who we think is going to win. How is that going to impact how a cotton is trading in Brazil? I don't think that actually produced cotton in Brazil. Just figuring out like what's happening. How does that impact both us, our clients as well? And then a lot of excel as well. Just like pulling in prices, like where are the bonds trading, where are the stocks trading pretty much all like the financial assets. And just kind of doing like pretty simple modeling, especially as a sophomore. They don't expect you to know anything. Definitely got a little more hardcore junior year of actually having to know something. Getting a lot more into Excel. A lot of markets position doing a little bit of coding, too. So basically anything you can do to make the analyst job easy. That's pretty much your job. Whether it's literally like reading newspapers about what's happening in an election, whether it's building a macro, like basically an automated excel sheet. It's like it's pretty much however you can help in this kind of.

Stephanie: And how did that differ from this past summer?

Michael: Yeah. So I think especially when you first joined like it when you're younger as a sophomore especially, they don't they literally do not expect to do anything like that. Really doesn't matter like what field you're in. They know like you just finished your sophomore year of college. Like, realistically, you don't know that much about what's going on. And they're pretty like