Sales and trading: the other half of the investment bank

At the top M&A adviser, trading is more than three times the size^1,2

Goldman Sachs was the leading M&A adviser in 2025 for the 23rd year running, by its own account, and its advisory revenue was $4.73bn. Its FICC and Equities businesses made $31.06bn between them, against $9.34bn for advisory and underwriting combined. The trading floor is not the back room of an investment bank; at the largest banks it is most of it.

More of it is financing, less is betting²

Over a third of Goldman's 2025 FICC and Equities revenue - 37%, a record $11.4bn - came from financing clients' positions rather than from trading with them, up at a 17% compound annual rate since 2021. The picture of a trader taking big positions is an increasingly small part of the business.

London is the world's largest FX market^3,4

Foreign exchange trading averaged $9.6 trillion a day in April 2025, up 28% in three years, and OTC interest rate derivatives $7.9 trillion. Sales desks in the UK, the US, Singapore and Hong Kong handled 75% of FX trading. For a European candidate, the trading jobs are overwhelmingly in London.

Sales owns the client⁵

Salespeople are the investors' main contact: most requests for a price come through them. They are split by product and by client type - hedge funds, corporates, or "real money" investors such as asset managers, pension funds and insurers.

Traders make the market^5,6

A trader quotes a price, takes the other side of the client's trade and charges the bid-offer spread, holding a book of positions and the profit and loss that comes with it. A credit flow trader, for example, hedges out interest rate risk with government bonds and trades the spread risk that is left. Quick mental maths and a feel for mispricing are the job.

Structurers, researchers and strats^5,7

Structurers design complex products and are brought in by salespeople to pitch them; research writes the ideas that sales, traders and investors use; quants, or strats, build and maintain the electronic and algorithmic trading systems. Exotics desks, which create custom products, suit people with advanced maths, including PhDs.

Flow trading, in one worked example⁸

The German guide's example: a salesperson wants to sell a client 100,000 carbon certificates. The trader can cover them now at €13.25; sales adds a margin and the client buys at €13.40 - fifteen cents a certificate to sales. Expecting prices to slip, the trader leaves the position open for an hour and covers at €12.95, another thirty cents to the trader's own P&L. The bank earns forty-five cents a certificate, €45,000 in all. A flow trader's room to wait is tightly limited, and never overnight.

Direct and indirect sales⁸

Direct sales covers the large institutions from the trading floor. Indirect sales supports the bank's own relationship managers for smaller corporate and institutional clients who are not covered from the floor: it explains and prices products for those colleagues, and sometimes joins their client meetings, without owning the client itself.

Proprietary trading has largely left the banks^8,9

Older guides describe prop traders who took positions with the bank's own money. In the US the Volcker rule, under section 619 of the Dodd-Frank Act, generally prohibits banking entities from proprietary trading and from investing in or sponsoring hedge funds and private equity funds. What remains is client business, with the risk hedged - which fits the shift towards financing on this page.

Research serves the floor, and must stay independent of it^8,10

Sell-side research writes the house view that salespeople take to clients each morning, and covers companies after the bank has taken them public. Its value depends on not being bent - neither by bankers wanting a mandate nor by sales wanting turnover - which is why it sits behind its own wall. The divisions page has the history of that wall.

Earlier starts, fewer hours^6,7

In New York expect to be up around 5am to be at the desk by 6, and in the office or on call about 12 hours a weekday; sales tends to be shorter, trading and structuring longer. That is well under a banking analyst's 80-plus, but the hours in the office have little downtime, and you follow the market when you leave.

Lower pay, tied to the desk's year⁶

Pay is generally lower than in investment banking at every level, with junior bonuses nearer 50 to 75% of base than 100%. It is also more volatile: bonuses follow individual and desk performance, and senior traders tend to earn a small share of their own profit and loss.

The internship rotates across desks^5,7

Summer analysts usually do two or three rotations of a few weeks each across equities and fixed income, and the full-time offer is for a desk. Some banks run a generalist programme that rotates across asset classes and roles.

Markets, not accounting^5,6

The interview has no questions on accounting, valuation or deals. It asks about markets, trade ideas and one product you should know well, with maths and brainteasers likely and coding possible; sales candidates get more on client situations and pitching an idea. Online interviews and games are common for the first round.

Market awareness is the whole preparation⁶

Because the questions are about what the market is doing, the market-awareness notes on this site - rates, their direction and the date of the last move - are the core preparation here rather than a side topic.

Automation is reshaping the floor⁶

Many products now trade electronically, and the expectation is that all but the most complex and customised ones eventually will. That makes maths and programming more valuable on the floor, and it is the main reason investment banking, a relationship business, is described as harder to automate.

The exits are narrower⁶

From sales and trading the natural moves are execution trading at a hedge fund or asset manager, sometimes an investment role at a macro fund, or a specialist fund matching the desk - distressed debt to a distressed credit fund, say. Deal-based exits such as private equity or corporate development are close to impossible without deal experience.

Choose it for the product, not as a fallback⁶

The case for trading is a real interest in markets over deals, a maths or technology bent, or a specific product that is complex, illiquid or hard to automate. Without one of those, banking gives the broader skill set and more exits.