Courses geared towards trading ?

Fremen

The UK situation is much more competetive than here, thousands apply to Goldmans etc, they have to apply filters so yes you are talking 1:1, Oxbridge etc for starters. I'd say you'd need a lot more besides to get in. I seem to remember hearing about someone doing 14 or so interviews to get hired.

Rubbish... I interviewed for goldman's strategies department with a plain old 2.1 from UCD

damnyanks

The big banks that come to Ireland to recruit graduates only look at certain universities

The big banks that come to Ireland have lots of HR and Marketing drones that feed you lots of information to make it seem like only people with nice degree scores and blah blah blah will do well.

The fact of the matter is these jobs were done by people without any real educational background recently. These guys are still around (Now the managers) they were forced to get degree's and silly things like that.

Markets are simply about managing your risk. THese arent risks that are predicted by the various models and what not employed by banks through consultancies and their internal teams filled with phd's.

to work in one of the large banks you need a strong academic bacgkround and show you're balanced. These people have as much opportunity to succeed as others.

The best traders dont work in investment banks. Most of the guys there are just manageing positions and have very little risk profile.

I'm sure AIB have plenty of positions and do have a sell side as well as a buy side (Like most banks). Write downs in credit markets is not in anyway a valid way to bench mark banks.

How much did bear sterns lose and they're tiny.

DJDC

The fact of the matter is these jobs were done by people without any real educational background recently. These guys are still around (Now the managers) they were forced to get degree's and silly things like that.

This is a common misconception. The fact of the matter is that these banks have always hired from top schools, especially in the US where the ivy league dominates. Look at where the CEO's did their undergrads: ML (MIT), GS (Harvard), Citigroup (Columbia), MS (Duke), JPM (Harvard). Up to the late
80's, it is true that many traders did not have formal qualifications but now 100% of the new 22- 25 year olds traders are college graduates. The one thing that will strike you if you walk onto any of the large investment banks trading floors is how young the people are. The majority of heads of desks are under 40 with very few much older. This means the older generation of traders with little formal education has been phased out quite quickly. Note I am not advocating this recruitment practice as the best way of developing/obtaining talent its just the way the hire process works now.

The big banks that come to Ireland have lots of HR and Marketing drones that feed you lots of information to make it seem like only people with nice degree scores and blah blah blah will do well.

These big banks you seem to have a grudge against, are still the best start an Irish graduate can get. The training you get as a grad in global markets in GS,UBS etc far outrivals the capital markets grads in BOI, AIB. This is shown by the superior starting monetary benefits and must steeper salary progression.

daveirl

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