Sales and trading

You spend a summer sitting with the salespeople and sales-traders who look after Jane Street's institutional clients, learning how they handle those clients' trading needs. Institutional clients are funds, pension schemes and other large investors, as distinct from individuals. Sales and trading is the part of a markets business that takes orders from such investors and buys and sells for them. Salespeople own the relationship with each client and bring their orders in. Sales-traders sit between the client and the trading desk, taking the order and getting it done in the market.

The firm covers several asset classes, meaning kinds of thing that trade, such as shares, bonds or currencies, and you learn how clients are served across them. You also see how the firm deals with issuers, the firms that create the securities being traded, and with prospective clients it would like to win.