What is sales & trading and what do salespeople & traders do?

• Sales and trading jobs involve making markets (buying and selling) in different securities products.
• Securities products include equities and fixed income products like stocks and bonds, respectively. Fixed income products like bonds pay small fees to whoever owns them.
• Sales and trading jobs also include making markets in physical products like commodities, or derivative products such as options, which give you the right to buy securities in the future at fixed prices, regardless of the prices they end up being in the future.
• When bank are making markets and facilitating trades, they make money on the spread, which is the small difference between buying and selling prices.
• Banks also make money through hedging - selling "protective" securities, usually derivatives, that act as insurance for a client's purchase. Banks also make money by taking small commissions on products bought or sold on behalf of clients.
• Performance is measured in terms of profit and loss (PnL) and is easily visible.
• To succeed, you’ll need energy, concentration, and coding and mathematics skills.
• Sales and trading jobs pay well but job security can be limited. A single bad year and you could be replaced.
• Entry to the best trading desks is super competitive. Investment banks tend to hire a lot of juniors and promote the ones who perform best.
• The best salespeople and traders go on to work for hedge funds or family offices. 

This is the part of an investment bank that connects buyers with sellers, and that stands in the middle to take a piece of the action for itself. The sales and trading division is also often referred to as global markets.

What will you buy and sell in a sales and trading job? More or less any kind of financial product (known as “securities”). Banks often have physical commodities operations where actual metals, hydrocarbons and shipping services are traded as if they were stocks and bonds. The three main categories of tradeable securities are equities (shares, which represent part ownership of companies), fixed income (any sort of tradeable debt, like bonds), and derivatives (securities where nobody literally owns anything but the two sides agree a contract to make payments to one another based on a predetermined formula).

Fixed income is called fixed income because it is a financial instrument that provides a fixed payment every year to whoever owns it. For example - let's say a government issues a $100 bond. Someone on the capital marketplace buys it. The issuing government will return the $100 at the end of the period, but will also provide regular (usually twice-annual), small income to the person who owns the bond. This small income is called a coupon, and it is a fixed number. Hence, fixed income.

Sales and trading jobs are iconic. They’re where you’d (used to) see people shouting on trading floors during market meltdowns. A vice president (VP) at Deutsche Bank says that “when people think of investment banking, they tend to imagine the trading floor. Although sales, trading, and structuring is just one part of a bank’s work, it is where a lot of its commercial activities take place.” 

Before the financial crisis of 2008, banks traded a lot on their own accounts and tried to earn profits for themselves in the process. These days, they mostly just trade on behalf of their clients. Clients tend to be big investors, such as pension funds, specialized investment companies, and organizations representing very wealthy individuals. These are known as “market making” roles.

The clients may want to invest cash in securities, raise cash by selling securities, or alter the risk profile of their investment portfolio. In order to do this, they need to find someone to buy what they’re selling or to sell what they want to buy. Investors don’t usually have the scale or resources to have their own seat on the stock exchange. Nor do they want to take the time and trouble to search the world for the best deal, so they use middlemen. The salespeople and traders in banks are these middlemen.

What’s the difference between sales jobs, trading jobs, and sales trading jobs?

The way that sales and trading jobs work has changed over the years. They've evolved a lot since the famous screaming-phones days of the 1980s. They're evolving still, but this is how things have worked "historically".

Sales & trading and market making is, at its core, about price discovery. The price of traded goods reflects the prices agreed upon by both buyers and sellers. This is the still the core function of a sales & trading desk.

The process of buying and selling has two parts to it. First, the salesperson communicates with the client, tells them what deals are available, and takes the order. Then there’s the person who goes out into the market and executes the transaction at the best price possible (the trader). 

Generally, sales jobs in investment banks are slightly more strategic than trading jobs. In sales, you have to understand the big picture and maintain relationships with your clients. The better you understand the big economic drivers and market trends, the more likely you are to be able to anticipate the investors’ needs and to give them useful advice.

Colin Hector, a former equities salesperson for UBS, Deutsche Bank, and Credit Suisse, told us that in sales & trading, you need to be a “trained psychologist”. Hector said that “everyone needs constant advice and affirmation as well as investment knowledge.”

Trading jobs are intense. To be a trader, you’ll need to understand the structure of supply and demand at any given moment in time; some of the best traders actively avoid information about longer timeframes as a distraction from what they can see happening on the screen in front of them.  

Some people fuse both roles and are 'sales traders'. Sales traders are generally salespeople who deal with very active clients, often making dozens of phone calls a day while also keeping a similar number of chat windows open. Sales traders usually operate in liquid markets, meaning those where there is a high constant level of order flow. Examples of this kind of market might be in US treasury bonds, blue-chip equities or options on the biggest stock market indices, but more on flow and electronic trading later.

What’s the difference between trading equities, fixed income products, and derivatives?

The broad categories of equities, fixed income, and derivatives cover a wide and ever-growing variety of financial markets, each with its own specialist jobs. Derivatives sales and trading will often be divided up between the equities and fixed income divisions, with derivatives traders and salespeople working alongside colleagues who deal in the actual markets that the derivatives contracts are linked to (the “cash” markets).  

It’s easiest to illustrate with an example.  

Some investors might just want to buy and sell shares. Simple shares are known as cash equities. But sometimes, a hedge fund might want to buy a contract that gives them positive exposure if the whole stock market goes up, but which also pays a premium for insurance against the market falling. Because it has payouts linked to another event, this is an equity derivative - specifically, an index option.  

Products like that would usually be the responsibility of a specific equity derivatives desk with its own salespeople and traders (and its own sales traders). But in most banks, the derivatives desk is physically located next to the cash equities sales and traders because although it’s a separate market, it’s not a completely separate market – there’s value in making it easy for people from the two trading desks to talk to each other and people sometimes switch jobs from one to the other. 

On the fixed income side, the variety of products is much greater, but the same principles apply. Government bond trading is about anticipating movements in interest rates, so government bond traders tend to work together with economists and with people who trade interest rate derivatives (known as swaps). The interest rate derivatives salespeople and traders will often be expected to cover more than one currency, so they will be located near to the foreign exchange sales and traders. Commodities and commodity derivatives are more of their own little world, so they are often managed separately. Fixed income trading, currency trading, and commodities trading are often lumped together as a single category - FICC.

The selling and trading of corporate debt – that issued by companies – is very different to government debt. Unlike equities and government bonds, corporate debt tends to be less liquid. This means that it doesn’t trade as frequently, and this also makes it harder to automate or electronify the market. High-grade corporate debt (from companies with strong credit ratings) tends to be more liquid, while high-yield corporate debt (from companies with low credit ratings) tends to be more illiquid, and is generally a more human-run business in comparison to other products.

There’s a similar distinction in the world of derivatives trading between flow products, where things are pretty standardized and orders can generally be matched quickly, and structured products where the bank designs a contract specifically for one client’s needs. “Structuring teams provide products that are tailored to clients’ specialized needs. They might help an institutional investor achieve a required risk profile, or a corporate looking to acquire new equipment through financing,” the Deutsche Bank VP says.

What’s electronic trading? And how is it changing sales and trading jobs?

Trading is now carried out electronically in a lot of financial products – in particular cash equities, short-dated government bonds, and certain kinds of derivatives. The more liquid a product is, the more likely it will be traded electronically (using computer systems).

This means that rather than having a human being looking at a screen and matching orders, the investors are able to send a message from their computer system directly to the bank, which then uses its own system to query the stock exchange or other investors and buys or sells the product automatically within a few milliseconds. These electronic trading platforms are very, very expensive to build but cheap to run, and banks are doing their best to encourage clients to use them. Deutsche Bank’s “Autobahn” electronic trading platform can, for example, be accessed via the app store on both Android and iOS. 

Electronic trading systems work on algorithms. The algorithms built into electronic trading systems are usually meant to break up a large order into a lot of smaller ones, and to then use advanced statistical analyses to determine the best way to place those orders to complete the overall transaction at the best possible price. 

This doesn’t mean that the role of human beings in trading is completely disappearing. Even in very high-volume flow products, clients often want to speak to someone who can give them market color and advice on how to manage their orders to get the best price.

However, the rise of electronic trading platforms does mean there are fewer opportunities for humans than there used to be. Most famously, Goldman Sachs’ cash equities trading desk used to employ around 600 people in New York in 2000 but was down to less than five by 2017 after electronic systems took over. It also accounts for the fact that many traders these days have taken on sales responsibilities.

Nonetheless, electronification is not a one-way street – and its entrenchment is complicated. It relies on one factor above all – liquidity. Liquidity is the amount of money currently circulating around an asset and represents both buying and selling intent. Think of it as a pool of money. More money = more liquidity. The more liquidity, the more you can anticipate what happens when you jump into the pool.

Liquidity is influenced by a number of factors, including volatility. When volatility is high, market participants are spooked and stop buying. This makes people stop selling. The cycle is vicious, and electronic systems can break down in those situations. 

When markets get really really volatile, as they did in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, clients still want to get on the phone and talk to a human being. During that period of market volatility, human traders seemed to do much better than automated systems in dealing with market conditions that had never been experienced before.

The rise of electronic trading platforms driven by algorithms has affected the kinds of jobs that are on offer in sales and trading. Traders are now being encouraged by banks to learn how to code in languages like Python, in order to be able to specify the details of complicated derivatives products and the steps needed in order to trade them. This in turn is being disrupted by artificial intelligence.

If you work in trading now, you might therefore want to work in algorithmic trading. Algorithmic traders are technology specialists and quantitative finance professionals with trading knowledge who write algorithms that can get orders executed at the best prices, and who develop better statistical models to choose the most efficient way to place orders.

The traditional role held by banks as market makers has begun to shrink over time. This is related to electronification (although regulation is also a factor) and, in turn, the rise of entirely separate firms known as electronic market makers. This includes firms like Jane Street, Citadel Securities, and Optiver. They provide many of the same services that banks do (or did), but better. They charge smaller spreads, they execute trades quicker, and they can provide more liquidity.

These electronic market makers or electronic trading firms have some of the best trading systems and are hyperefficient. A report from consulting group BCG from October last year noted that 20% of global trading revenue was generated by these sorts of “non-bank liquidity providers”. BCG expected this to reach 30% by 2030. Already, Jane Street accounted for 10% of all US cash equities trading. 

Electronic market makers don't employ many people compared to banks, but are some of the best-paying and desirable employers in the world. For example, Jane Street paid an average compensation of $2.7m in 2025 globally. Citadel Securities paid $2m on average that same year. Both paid their interns some $25k per month ($300k annualized) for their summer 2026 internships. We have a full article about working for electronic market makers here.

Electronic trading is more prevalent in some markets than others. Market intelligence provider BCG Expand notes that the cash equities market, as well as the G10 FX market (foreign exchange for the world's ten biggest currencies) are in a "mature" state of electronification, with credit trading close behind.

It’s very important to note however that electronic trading is not an inevitability. US treasury electronic trading, an extremely liquid market, became less electronic in 2025, according to data from Coalition Greenwich. It was executed 59% electronically in 2024, and 55% electronically in 2025. Coalition Greenwich attributed the decline to an increase in package trades, which involve swaps and futures and other complicated tailoring.

Additionally, foreign exchange trading was polled by the bank of international settlements in April 2025 as being 59% 'electronified.'That is the exact same percentage that it was in 2022. 

The chart below from Standard Chartered depicts the evolution of "digitisation" or electronic trading since 2019. Some opportunities developed because of market access (such as the Korean FX market opening in 2023), but the majority developed out of technology & product development.

Credit: Standard Chartered

Which skills will you need for a career in sales and trading?

Read More: The skills you need for a career in sales and trading

People skills are vital because you are constantly interacting with clients. Clients are sometimes patient, and sometimes impatient. It depends on the client, and it depends on their situation. Some clients want depth. Some clients appreciate speed of delivery. Every Bloomberg terminal ping or phone call means a dynamic situation to navigate. Being a “trained psychologist” as Hector said above is crucial to being a good salesperson or trader for this reason.

Technical skills are easier to understand. You must be a subject matter expert. Clients will come to you with unpredictable questions, especially when markets are turbulent and new events are happening. You won’t have the time to build a new model that considers things. You must be able to provide ballpark estimates, if not quotes and strategies, immediately. That requires being very well-read, informed, and connected in the industry that you write about. You are also often dealing with complicated products – some clients might have complicated demands in terms of hedging, exposure, and risk profiles. That requires a deep understanding on not just your field, but also how debt is structured, how different industries are interlinked, and the likes.

How is AI changing jobs in sales & trading?

Read More: What impact is AI having on sales & trading careers?

In a nutshell, AI is absorbing the administrative core of sales & trading; client onboarding, report compiling, news collation, and other things that support desks and, historically, trained juniors. A veteran sales trader told the bubble, our community forum, that half the roles done by humans can be automated, and consulting firm BCG estimated that 70% to 80% of traders' manual workflows could be automated. The savings are very real, and Norges Bank (the Norwegian central bank) credited AI with cutting its trading costs by roughly $500m between 2023 and 2025.

Automation tracks electronification, so liquid, standardised markets like currencies and equities are furthest along. But AI is now reaching into messier corners such as high yield credit, where it can generate prices from patchy data, a shift that JPMorgan's credit trading head, Sanjay Jhamna, told Bloomberg will "reset" who can compete. JPMorgan backtesting also found AI agents often beat classic 60:40 portfolios across two decades of historical data.

What will survive is the human layer of trading. Big, bespoke trades shaped by individual risk appetites, and clients who still make time for salespeople with deep coverage knowledge. Anything that doesn't involve talking to a client might be at risk.

What qualifications do you need for a career in sales & trading?

Although you can hypothetically get a job in sales and trading with any degree, it’s likely best to show some analytic aptitude by studying finance or a STEM subject. Recent sales and trading junior recruits at JPMorgan, for example, graduated in economics and sciences, particularly mathematics. At Bank of America they graduated in similar roles, with STEM subjects slightly more prevalent, we found. 

If you’re looking for something else to boost your profile, the Bloomberg Market Concepts (BMC) course could help. This is a self-paced e-learning course that lasts around 8 hours and teaches the very basics of high finance, as well as how to use the Bloomberg Terminal. Finance and economics students will likely be quite bored in the process, however, with the concepts already staples of their courses. 

It’s increasingly important that traders understand coding. There are number of options available for this, mostly online: coding is one of the few places where self-taught people are held in as high regard (if not higher) than academically qualified people. The most popular way to self-learn, and get a certificate in the process, is Codecademy, which offers courses on Python, Java, and C++, among others. 

There's also the ICMA Fixed Income Certificate, issued in the UK, which is very expensive and lasts four weeks' worth of webinars. Alternatively, you could pay more and have classroom teaching (for one week) in Amsterdam. It's not mandatory anywhere, but it's well-known enough to potentially make a difference to your internship application.

Masters in finance qualifications can also be relevant to sales and trading. If you want to work in quantitative and electronic trading, however, you should also consider a masters in financial engineering, which focuses on not just financial topics, but also how statistics and adjacent topics, such as machine engineering, integrate.

In the US it’s mandatory for salespeople and traders to study for the Series 7 exam, as mandated by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). The exam makes sure that salespeople understand what they’re selling. You’ll need to be sponsored by an approved firm to do the exams, so don’t overthink this one – the bank you work for will guide you through the process when it comes up.

Salaries and bonuses in sales and trading jobs

Read More: Traders enjoyed big bonus increases after a strong 2025

Sales & trading jobs can be spectacularly well-paid. If you’re good and you generate a good level of profit (known as pnl) for the bank, you’ll get paid a lot of money within a comparatively short period of time.

According to our 2026 Compensation & Lifestyle Report, sales & trading professionals were paid an average of around $100k fresh out of undergrad as analysts, around $200k after a few years as associates, and around $460k a few years later as VPs. At the very highest end, when a professional reaches the coveted managing director title, average pay reaches around $840k.

The chart below shows figures from our report for people working in sales and trading jobs. Promotions in sales and trading can happen more quickly than in other areas, but it’s usually safe to assume that it takes around eight or so years to reach director level.

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