Career Paths after CA – Trading in Financial Markets

CA students often feel that the most testing time for them is before the Final exams. Although, in reality, it is after they clear Final exams and think about career opportunities ahead. There is generally a fair bit of confusion among many graduating students regarding some of the popular and more conventional career paths followed by most graduates. They often want to understand what the actual work entails or what the potential growth paths would be.  We attempt to share our two cents on some of the more aspired career options available to CA graduates and also explore some of the lesser known opportunities.

Equity/Fixed Income Trading

Popular Companies

Domestic and Foreign Banks like ICICI, HDFC, IndusInd, Standard Chartered, Citi etc. and few specific trading firms like Futures First

Recruitment

Typically unstructured for CAs. CAs with prior work experience in large corporate treasuries (Eg – ITC, Reliance etc.) get a preference and for freshers, networking and reaching out to the trading desk members is an important lever to interview for open positions.

Typical Work

Broadly divided into three roles – Structuring, Trading & Sales.

• Sales involves working closely with corporate and inter-bank clients to serve their financial product needs. Like other Sales job, it involves maintaining a close relationship with client by calling them on a daily basis and suggesting good trades (after discussing with traders). Their main KRA is to maximize dealings with the clients allotted to them
• Structuring involves pricing fixed income and currency derivatives (call, put, swaps etc.) by taking input variables from traders and providing them to Sales team. They act as a liaison between the Sales team and the traders and usually sit next to the traders on the trading desk. Their main KRA is to provide the best price for the product to the Sales team (compared to other banks) so that trades can be executed
• Trading involves taking active positions in different asset classes like equity, currency, bonds etc. to make profits. All firms typically have a separate trading desk for each asset class and traders specialize in their respective asset class. All traders have position and loss limits assigned to them based on seniority and their main KRA is to earn profits for the firm based on their views.

Growth and Mobility

Generally vertical within the trading desk. Some folks also join corporate treasuries after working at trading desks of large banks.