The skills you need for a career in sales and trading
Working in sales & trading isn’t for everyone. It’s a career than can be fantastically compensated, but it’s also one that requires a certain skillset and temperament. But what exactly is that skillset and temperament?
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For one, you generally need to be a morning person. Sophia Mastrell, a Goldman Sachs equities derivatives trader we spoke in 2022, said she wasn't one - but was still in the office at 08:15 sharp, breakfast in hand.
Markets open early every day, and you need to be in the office even earlier. Summer or winter, rain or shine, the market is open and you need to be prepared.
Sales and trading jobs don’t tend to require the punishingly long hours that are associated with investment banking, but they can still be very intense. “It’s the kind of job that many people imagine they’d enjoy, but the reality might not suit everyone”, a Deutsche Bank VP warned us.
Sales is a particularly noisy, people-focused job which is more suitable for extroverts than introverts. Even when markets are dominated by computers, the people making the decisions are human beings. Successful salespeople need to be able to form relationships with them on a human level, and that doesn’t necessarily just mean dinner and drinks and meeting the clients’ families, but it does mean that you need to be able to talk to people and listen to them to understand what they want.
A sales junior at a European bank told us her working day was relatively reasonable – there weren’t particularly long evenings – but she also noted that her office time, especially while markets were open, was extremely hectic and demanding. Being based in London, it was particularly brutal when European and American markets were open at the same time.
Sales and trading jobs require concentration and attention to detail - in all products and markets, it’s vital to get things right. Some structured products and algorithmic roles also need advanced quantitative skills. Much depends on the product you specialise in and the speed with which it's traded.
If you're trading products that depend on the macro economy (eg. interest rate derivatives or FX), it will help to have a view of geopolitics. For example, Robin Brooks, a former Goldman Sachs quant working with FX traders, has well publicised opinions about the implications of war in the Middle East for the global economy and the oi price.
Mastrell noted that she and her team "build" valuation screeners themselves for not-publicly-available bonds. Her team "work collectively to create supporting models for the credit and volatility components of convertible bonds." This requires an understanding of pricing models and how convertible bonds (complicated corporate bonds that can be exchanged for shares under certain conditions), and how they will respond under different market conditions.
Trading well requires a deep understanding of the products you're trading, and of what influences their demand and their price. “Trading and research are very intertwined,” a Citadel Securities event-driven trader told us in 2024. “Once a week… we have a forum where junior traders discuss research or interesting things we’ve read. Other days, we’ll have research meetings where we’ll talk to quant researchers, developers and traders.”
Days can be unpredictable because salespeople and traders interface with markets which themselves are innately changeable. “Sometimes you have to rip up your daily schedule and reprioritize depending on what’s taking place,” a Citadel equities analyst told us back in 2022. “It can be very exciting to interpret implications from news of the day or macro themes.”
In the age of AI, trading is increasingly about interfacing with tools that can make your life easier. For example, AI agents such as Claude can build financial models, which means that it can provide quickly produce quotes for client demands. And Bloomberg reported that JPMorgan ran back-testing systems that could portfolios "realistically". It had even managed to beat traditional 60:40 portfolios using AI agents such as Claude Opus and GPT5.5
However, sales & trading is also a human business. “It's a very people-facing business,” a Citadel options trader told us just last week. Speed and reliability are valued by some clients, while a detailed analysis might be valued by others. Her team “continuously strive to make the client experience as seamless as possible.”
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