Strategic solutions, local currency trading and credit correlation and trading: Merrill Lynch and Company, New York

Abstract

My summer was with Merrill Lynch in their New York office. Merrill Lynch is a top tier investment bank. I was in the Markets division. Based on a combination of my preferences and the requirements of the various desks, my was split across 3 desks Strategic Solutions, Local Currency Trading and Credit Correlation and Trading. My rotations were in the credit division. I chose the credit side over the equities as I thought that the equities market in the developed markets was not as exciting as the debt market. Moreover, looking to the long-term future, the Indian debt market is still in its infancy and having had experience in the debt markets in a major financial centre like New York, I would be ideally placed to return back and work in the Indian financial sector. An eight week split over 2 desks doesn't give you a lot of leeway in which you can do something constructive. Hence the emphasis is on learning how the desks work, figuring out what kind of work you would do if you joined Merrill as a permanent employee. That said, I did try to build small excel tools that would automate some of the tasks the traders were doing manually. Tasks like lookups, data collation and formatting that they used to make trading/sales decisions. I also spent significant time and effort interacting with some of the senior managers at Merrill in order to increase awareness about the IIMs.