The Practical Guide to Wall Street is an indispensable resource for anyone who aspires to a front-office sales or trading position on Wall Street and an essential desk reference for market practitioners and those who interact with this exciting but widely misunderstood industry. Written by an experienced trader in a clear, conversational style and assuming no previous background in finance, The Practical Guide to Wall Street provides a thorough schooling in the core curriculum of the equity and equity derivatives sales and trading business – exactly what you would learn from sitting beside the traders at a tier-one Wall Street investment bank.
Author’s Note:
This book provides an overview of the front office sales and trading business of a typical Wall Street investment bank or broker-dealer. In selecting and structuring the material to include, and the level of detail to present, the primary criterion has been the probability that the reader would find the information useful in practice, either in a front-office environment or as a buy-side client. Anything I would not expect of the trader or sales-person sitting next to me on the trading desk, or that would not significantly benefit his or her job performance, has been omitted to ensure the reader is not distracted from the relevant material. The presentation and pace of the book are based on my own experience explaining this material to both junior and more senior professionals over many years.
Throughout the book I have made an effort to introduce, wherever possible, the language and terminology used by traders and salespeople in practice. Not only is there a great deal of vocabulary that is unique to the trading floor, but the correct use of that language, down to the trading-specific interpretations of the prepositions “for” and “at” is essential for such a fast-paced environment where it can easily mean the difference between a successful trade and an expensive error.
So that the book is accessible and useful to the broadest possible audience, the prerequisites have been kept to a minimum. The reader is assumed to have no particular familiarity with finance or economics beyond what could be considered the commonsense understanding of the dynamics of supply and demand. (Specifically, that an increase in demand, or scarcity of supply, for any good, tends to drive the price of that good up, while a decrease in demand, or excess supply, leads to lower prices.) However, because modern finance is inherently mathematical, it is necessary that the reader understand some of the basic concepts from calculus, probability, and statistics. Fortunately, our interest is only at the conceptual level: The reader must understand, to use one example, that the mathematical definition of the derivative measures a rate of change and can be interpreted as the slope of a line. It will not, however, be necessary that the reader be able to actually calculate the derivative. An appendix is included with a brief overview of the relevant mathematical concepts for those readers in need of a refresher.
A final observation is that, while the book is written from a U.S.-centric perspective, the structure of the equity sales and trading business globally is quite consistent and the concepts presented here can be easily extended to international markets, making the book relevant for both U.S. and international readers.
Contents:
- Equity Fundamentals (Part 1): Introduction to Financial Statements
- Equity Fundamentals (Part 2): Financial Ratios, Valuation, and Corporate Actions
- Cash Market
- Equity Indices
- Program Trading
- Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs)
- Forwards and Futures
- Swaps
- Options
- The Trading Floor
- Macroeconomics for Trading and Sales
- Economic Data Releases
The Practical Guide to Wall Street: Equities and Derivatives By Matthew Tagliani pdf