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Lessons for keeping your job: You do NOT want to be working for a bank’s hobby business
Piyush Gupta, chief executive officer of Singaporean bank DBS coined the phrase. Thanks to a lot of ill-thought out expansion under his predecessors, DBS had ended up with a lot of, “hobby businesses,” he explained when the bank announced its results this week. At DBS, these were especially in the UK, the US and the Middle [...]
ELI LEDERMAN: It’s not sufficient simply to be a perfect robot if you want to make money in finance now
Back in the big banks’ glory years, clever professionals progressed up the ranks almost mechanically, like perfect robots programmed to achieve their appointed tasks. In that environment – now a forlorn memory – just pulling levers on established businesses was enough to post higher numbers every year, and if one wasn’t richly rewarded for it, [...]
GUEST COMMENT: The first 48 hours of redundancy are critical
Have you ever had a sporting injury? If so, you’ll know that taking some key actions in the first 48 hours plays a key part in minimizing damage and speeding your recovery. Whether you’ve strained a muscle, damaged some ligaments or incurred something more serious, it will help if you rest, apply ice or compression, [...]
GUEST COMMENT: There are lots of benefits to working in Luxembourg – it’s a mystery why more people don’t give it a shot.
Months before finishing my Masters degree in Investments at the University of Birmingham, I applied for jobs in all the usual places – the big investment banks and the major financial cities, London,New York and Hong Kong. During this process, I came across an advertisement for a role in Luxembourg and decided to give the [...]
Does BarCap need to make a lot of redundancies too?
BarCap and RBS have a few things in common. They are both British banks. encumbered by the UK’s banking levy and Vickers legislation. They both have investment banking arms. And they have both engaged in building up those investment banking arms very considerably in recent years. Global banking and markets (GBM) headcount at RBS went [...]
ELI LEDERMAN: The end of rewarding careers in finance? Not so fast
For a generation now, jobs in finance have topped the wish lists of young people at universities around the world. When word spread that financial firms would visit campus on recruiting missions, eager applicants jostled to secure coveted interview slots. Perceived as wealth-creation machines that stamped tickets to some lavish lifestyle, the global investment banks, [...]
GUEST COMMENT: The best bond traders don’t always accept what they’re given
Bond traders are overwhelmed with data, as anyone having access to a Bloomberg terminal knows. The challenge is to identify the numbers that are useful to make a buy, hold, or sell decision. I define information to be the subset of data that has utility in decision-making. The task then is to distinguish between what [...]
GUEST COMMENT: The only way to succeed in finance is by playing nasty office politics
If there is ever an important piece of advice that university lecturers and textbooks fail to impart to students entering the workforce, it is the fundamentals of office politics. It’s the, “who you know, not what you know,” ticket that guarantees movement up the corporate ladder. I’ve watched in amusement as co-workers, managers, and MDs [...]
GUEST COMMENT: Every 10 enquiries are 1 meeting; every 1,000 contacts are 1 job offer
It’s 11am and I have already received three rejection emails. I want to crawl back in bed. But I go for a cup of coffee instead to provide some comfort. Coffee is safer than a cookie. Sleeping in this morning would only waste a few valuable hours in which I can get hold of people [...]
GUEST COMMENT: I left banking because it was like working on a high end supermarket checkout; now am I am unsure what to do
“C.B.R EMERGENCY RATE HIKE 300BPS.” The big red letters flashed over my Reuters screen as I pondered the consequences for my book. Wasn’t I long in both the 1mth and 3mth buckets? A quick check of my risk confirmed that not only was I long the 1mth and 3mth buckets, but that I was long [...]
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