A day in the life of a Sales & Trading Intern:
(municipal bond underwriting)
My alarm clock would ring at 5:15am each morning. After a quick shower and shave, I would depart from my NYU dorm and pick up the WSJ on my way out the door. After hopping on the 5:45am express train and grabbing a coffee from the stand right outside the office, I arrive at work around 6:04am.
Once at work, I’ll print out a report on the various fixed income benchmarks and where they closed the previous day. After printing out 33 copies, I’ll make sure that one is in front of everyone’s computer before they arrive to work. Next, I’ll look for some municipal bond articles/news stories that came out yesterday or last night and send them around to the desk so that they can read them first thing when they get to the office. If I see an interesting article in the Bond Buyer newspaper, I will summarize the article and send it around to the desk.
The desk has a morning meeting at 7:30am where we go over the various transactions of the day. After this meeting, I usually will grab breakfast for the 6 people that are in my team (Underwriters). After the quick breakfast run, I’ll begin to follow the deals that are being priced on that day. This requires a number of tasks that include updating the pricing spreads, answering phone calls, listening to the issuer conference calls, meeting with clients and providing any assistance needed. This takes of the bulk of my day as there are many deals that come to the market. What was most time consuming was the fact that I would not only track the deals that JPM would price, but I also kept tabs and updated the spreads on EVERY other deal that came to market.
Towards the end of the day, I complete a daily update that summarizes each of the deals that I tracked for that day. In addition, I include a stock update, treasury report and general market commentary. I then send this daily update around to the entire desk for them to read before they head home.
Throughout the day, I am given a wide variety of projects/tasks to complete by people on the desk and these take up the majority of my week nights/ weekends. I usually am at the office until around 10pm and then I head home to go right to bed and start it all over the next day!