Working in IB: What Should I Focus On?

[bleedblue1234]

So I want to work in IB in a few years (currently APPLYING to undergrad schools this year). I was wondering if I should focus on econ, math, finance, physics, or what? It seems to me that WS is strictly moving towards quantitative trading approaches and although IB doesn't deal with that side of things I hope one day to move to trading so I was wondering if anyone had advice as to what route I should go?

I really don't want to be stuck at a desk programming the rest of my life to shave a few pennies of the top end of a stock. Dang that sounds boring.

 

[twofish-quant]

So I want to work in IB in a few years (currently APPLYING to undergrad schools this year). I was wondering if I should focus on econ, math, finance, physics, or what?

Depends on what you want to do. If you want to go into the CS parts of investment banking, then go out for a CS degree. If you want to go into sales, then take econ and finance courses. If your primary goal is to work in an investment bank, you may be in the wrong group. The situation is that IB's have a lot of jobs which just fit people that happen to like to do physics. Now, if you *don't* particularly like to do physics, there are other ways of getting into investment banking.

It seems to me that WS is strictly moving towards quantitative trading approaches and although IB doesn't deal with that side of things I hope one day to move to trading so I was wondering if anyone had advice as to what route I should go?

It's actually not. There is a a lot quantitative trading on Wall Street. There is a lot of non-quantitative trading. There's probably a lot more non-quantitative trading than quantitative trading, but people that are interested in non-quantitative trading are just not reading this group.

I really don't want to be stuck at a desk programming the rest of my life to shave a few pennies of the top end of a stock. Dang that sounds boring.

If you are dealing with $50 million in stock, it can get exciting. Also I'm a bit confused here. You said you wanted to do trading, but what pretty much all traders do nowadays is to spend their lives staring at computer screens trying to shave some pennies off stock.