First Two Weeks at UBS

Tomorrow (Friday 18 June) will officially mark the end of my first two weeks as an intern at UBS. As a sales and trading intern, I'm based out of Stamford, Connecticut.

Having decided to spend my summer living in Stamford rather than commuting from NYC ( a close 45 min train ride away), I've started to get a real feel for the city. It's in a lot of ways a classic New England town with old architecture and a certain sense of coziness and homely charm, but at the same time sophisticated in its targeted development towards becoming a thriving hub of corporate activity. The city is home to corporate bigwigs such as General Electric, Thomson Reuters, UBS, RBS and World Wrestling Entertainment. The corporates, with their shiny and modern offices, stand against the backdrop of smaller brick buildings housing local businesses, restaurants and small offices - an eclectic mix of the old and the new, of progress and old world charm.

Now, to work proper. The first week was spent in orientation and training, with standard 9-5 hours. Nothing too unusual here, just the standard networking events, icebreakers and lectures covering basic finance/econ classes. The second week saw interns start working on trading desks; Matched Principal Trading for me. For those unfamiliar with the term or the often confusing nomenclature of finance, matched prinicpal trading is in the business of pairing buyers and sellers of securities (corporate bonds mostly, in this case). As this is a new desk, I get to be involved in a lot of business development work. For instance, in the first three days I performed an analysis of customer order flow throughout the trading day to get a gauge of the available liquidity (or the number of buyers and sellers and the amount they want to transact in) offered on our platform.

My program consists of three rotations across three different desks, and I have two more weeks left with MPT. The nature of the work is similar to that of a startup and thus has a clearly defined purpose, which gives me the opportunity to make myself useful to some degree - more than an intern can ask for.