The Ultimate Guide on How to Get into Sales and Trading

Sales and trading (S&T) is the markets-facing arm of every bulge bracket bank, and it hires undergrad analysts on a parallel track to investment banking with materially different recruiting mechanics, prep work, and career arcs. Roughly 200-400 S&T summer analyst seats open per cycle across Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citi, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, and the smaller foreign banks. The seats are competitive but the prep work is materially different from IB technicals.

This guide walks through what S&T actually is, how the recruiting cycle works in 2026, what separates winners, and which exit options open up after the analyst stint. Built from the experience of watching WSG candidates land seats at Goldman, JPM, Citi, and BofA over the last three cycles.

As a Harvard alum, former McKinsey consultant, and founder of WSG, I watch undergrads cross-recruit between IB and S&T every cycle. S&T is the path I send candidates to when they care more about markets than deal-mechanics, and the prep work is materially different from the IB technical universe most candidates default to.

If you're specifically focused on landing the S&T summer internship, the tactical application + summer-conversion playbook lives in [reference: How to Land a Sales & Trading Internship: The Ultimate Guide]. This article is the broader career context (sales vs trading, top firms, exits, full-time analyst arc); that one is the internship-specific playbook.

What's the difference between sales and trading and investment banking?

S&T is the markets-facing arm of the bank. Traders make markets in stocks, bonds, FX, commodities, derivatives, and structured products. Salespeople (often called sales coverage or sales-traders) work with institutional clients (hedge funds, asset managers, pension funds) to execute trades and provide market color. The work is fast, intraday, and P&L-driven. There is no client pitchbook, no DCF, no two-month live deal cycle. The cycle time is minutes to hours.

IB is the advisory and capital-raising arm. M&A, ECM, DCM, restructuring. The work is project-based, runs over weeks to months, and the analyst output is models and presentations, not P&L.

What does an S&T analyst actually do?

The first-year S&T analyst rotates through 3-4 desks during the summer (and often the full-time year as well). On each desk:

• Trading desks put you on a senior trader's right hand. You help with quote requests, build pricing tools, run analysis on positions, and learn to read order flow.

• Sales desks put you on a senior salesperson's coverage book. You sit on client calls, prep market updates, and learn how the firm's institutional client relationships work.

• Structuring desks (the most technical) put you on structured product design. You build models for complex derivative products and learn how the bank prices them.

The work is intraday. You're at your desk at 6:30am, the market opens at 9:30am ET (or earlier for FX and futures), and you're in motion until close. There is no down week.

Sales and trading recruiting timeline for 2026

S&T recruiting at the bulge brackets runs on a similar accelerated cycle to IB, but with some distinct features.

For Summer 2027 internships (Class of 2028 sophomores applying):

• Applications open: Late summer 2026 through January 2027 depending on firm. Some firms (Goldman, JPM) start in August 2026.

• HireVues / first-rounds: September 2026 through March 2027.

• Superdays: Concentrated in fall 2026 and early 2027.

• Offers: Rolling, with the bulk landing November 2026 through April 2027.

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The S&T cycle has compressed alongside the IB cycle but tends to run 4-8 weeks behind IB at most firms. Candidates who get cut from IB superdays in October sometimes pivot to S&T applications and land seats in January.

For Summer 2028 internships (Class of 2029 sophomores applying):

• Applications open: Late 2027 through early 2028.

• Targets: sophomores graduating Spring 2030.

  
  

For the application-by-application playbook (resume, cover letter, HireVue prep, superday structure, return-offer conversion), see [reference: How to Land a Sales & Trading Internship: The Ultimate Guide].

Which firms run the strongest S&T programs?

• Goldman Sachs (Securities Division. The gold standard. FICC and Equities both deep. The strongest macro trading desk on the street.)

• JPMorgan (Markets, large and comprehensive, particularly strong in rates, FX, and credit.)

• Morgan Stanley (Institutional Securities, strongest equities franchise; FICC has rebuilt over the last 5 years.)

• Bank of America (Global Markets, a large platform, particularly strong in credit and rates.)

• Citi (Markets and Securities Services, global FX and EM leadership.)

• Barclays (Markets, strong in rates, FX, and structured products. Particularly strong international footprint.)

• Deutsche Bank (Investment Bank, rebuilt the markets business; rates and FX desks competitive.)

  
  

The smaller firms (UBS, Credit Suisse/UBS, BNP Paribas, Nomura, Mizuho, MUFG) all hire S&T analysts but at smaller scale. Candidates with strong quantitative backgrounds should also consider Jane Street, Citadel Securities, Optiver, IMC, and SIG, which are market makers and prop trading firms rather than bank S&T desks.

What separates strong S&T candidates?

Three factors in approximate priority order:

1. Markets fluency

Can you walk into an interview and discuss yesterday's bond market move? Today's FX move? The S&T interview filter rewards candidates who read the WSJ markets section daily and can talk about price action. Candidates who can only discuss macro headlines without naming specific instruments get cut.

What "markets fluency" actually means: you know what the 10-year Treasury yield closed at yesterday, you can explain why the dollar moved 0.4% against the euro, and you have an opinion on whether the Fed will hike or hold at the next meeting.

2. Quantitative reasoning under pressure

S&T interviews lean heavily on mental math, probability, and quick estimation. Classic brainteasers (how many gas stations in the US, what's the probability of rolling X with three dice) are real and they matter. The candidates who land Goldman Securities offers can do two-digit multiplication in under 5 seconds and probability problems in under 30.

Drill mental math separately from your finance prep. The S&T quant filter is one of the highest in finance recruiting.

3. Personality fit

Trading floors are loud, fast, and judgment-heavy. The interview process screens for candidates who can hold their own under pressure without melting down. The classic question "tell me a time you were under pressure" is a real test of whether you'll function on a trading desk.

The wrong personality profile for S&T: introverted, conflict-averse, slow to commit. The right profile: opinionated, quick, calm under pressure, doesn't take pushback personally.

How to prepare for S&T interviews

The structured 8-week prep plan below is the general S&T-interview foundation. For the internship-specific HireVue and superday playbook (with the 4-round breakdown and return-offer-conversion behaviors), see [reference: How to Land a Sales & Trading Internship: The Ultimate Guide].

A structured 8-week prep plan for sophomores targeting Summer 2027 S&T:

Weeks 1-2: markets fluency

Read the WSJ markets section daily. Subscribe to one macro newsletter (Bloomberg, Reuters Breakingviews, or The Daily Shot). Pick one asset class (rates, FX, equities, credit) and go deep on it. By the end of week 2, you should be able to give a 90-second market update on your chosen asset class without notes.

Weeks 3-4: technical knowledge

Read Mark Hirschey's "Investments" or Hull's "Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives." Cover the basics: bond pricing, yield, duration, convexity, the yield curve, basis points, the FX market mechanics, equity beta. You don't need quant-PhD-level mastery. You need fluent vocabulary.

Weeks 5-6: brainteasers and mental math

Drill the standard probability brainteasers. "Heard on the Street" by Timothy Crack is a classic. Mental math drills 20 minutes daily. Aim for 1-2 second response time on basic multiplication and percentage calculation.

Weeks 7-8: mock interviews

Live mocks with friends who have S&T offers or are in the application process. Run through behavioral, brainteaser, and markets-fluency rounds. The single biggest delta between candidates who land offers and candidates who don't is the number of live mock interviews completed.

Sales-track vs trading-track: which should you target?

The summer is a rotational program, so you don't have to choose at the application stage. But the prep for each track is slightly different.

Trading-track: You're a market maker or a prop trader. The work is P&L-driven. Personality fit: quick, decisive, doesn't get attached to positions. Quant skills matter more.

Sales-track: You're a relationship coverage role to institutional clients. The work is communication-driven. Personality fit: articulate, client-facing, able to read what a client needs and translate that to the trading desk. Markets fluency matters more than pure quant.

Structuring-track: Subset of trading. Quant-heavy. You design derivative products and run pricing models. Highest technical bar of the three. Strong fit for engineering or applied math majors.

If you're genuinely undecided, target the trading-track. Sales is easier to lateral to from trading than the reverse.

Exit options after an S&T analyst stint

The post-S&T career menu is narrower than the post-IB menu but the destinations that exist are deeper.

• Hedge fund analyst seats: the most common exit. Multi-strategy funds (Citadel, Millennium, Point72), macro funds (Bridgewater, Brevan Howard), and credit funds all hire from S&T analyst classes. The path is real and well-trodden.

• Asset management: PIMCO, BlackRock, Wellington, Capital Group all hire from S&T for portfolio-management and credit-analyst seats.

• Senior banker track: stay at the bank. Trader-to-managing-director and salesperson-to-managing-director paths are real and well-paid.

• Tech / fintech: product roles at trading platforms, market-data firms, and crypto exchanges hire former S&T analysts. Less common but a real path.

• PE: rare. S&T-to-PE happens but the modeling skill gap (PE wants LBO-fluency, S&T doesn't build LBOs) means most candidates need 6-12 months of self-directed modeling prep to make the jump.

  
  

What S&T pays in 2026

S&T analyst comp is at parity with IB analyst comp for the base salary. The bonus structure diverges materially over the analyst stint.

• Year 1 S&T base: ~$110-120K at the bulge brackets, same as IB.

• Year 1 bonus: $40-80K depending on desk performance, P&L attribution, and firm. The bonus variance is wider in S&T than IB because individual desk P&L drives a larger share of the comp pool.

• Year 2 and 3: Comp can grow faster in S&T if you're on a strong desk producing real P&L. A second-year analyst on a good rates desk can outearn a second-year IB analyst materially. The downside risk is also higher. A second-year on a poor desk underearns the IB equivalent.

  
  

The pattern that emerges by year 3: the top-quartile S&T analysts make more than the top-quartile IB analysts, and the bottom-quartile S&T analysts make less. The variance is wider, the comp is more directly tied to your individual performance, and the path to a senior trader or salesperson seat can pay materially more than the equivalent IB MD seat at the right firm.

Common reasons candidates get cut from S&T recruiting

After watching three cycles of WSG candidates go through S&T recruiting, four failure patterns repeat:

Failure 1: Treating the interview like an IB interview. Candidates who walk into a Goldman S&T superday and start talking about DCF mechanics and accretion-dilution math get cut. S&T interviewers don't care about IB technicals. They care about markets fluency, mental math, and personality fit. Calibrate prep accordingly.

Failure 2: Vague "I love markets" framing without specificity. "I'm interested in trading because I love the markets" is the kind of answer 9 out of 10 candidates give. The candidate who lands the offer says "I followed the Fed's 50bp cut last December, and the way the front end of the curve repriced was the most interesting market dynamic I've seen this year. I want to learn to trade that kind of move."

Failure 3: No opinion on price action. When a senior trader asks "what do you think the market is going to do?", the wrong answer is "I'm not sure." The right answer is a defensible view with a specific instrument and a specific catalyst. The trading floor culture rewards opinions backed by reasoning, not hedged non-answers.

Failure 4: Underestimating the brainteaser bar. S&T brainteasers are harder than IB brainteasers because they test estimation under speed, not just logic. Candidates who drill IB-style behavioral and skip the quant prep fail at the brainteaser round.

The honest read

S&T is a real career, the analyst seats are competitive, and the exits are strong. The single biggest reason candidates fail S&T recruiting is they prep for IB technicals instead of for markets fluency, mental math, and personality fit. Those three things are what get tested.

If you want a markets-facing seat where the cycle time is intraday, the P&L is on you, and the conversation with the senior partner is about today's price action and not next quarter's deal flow, S&T is the path. The prep work is real but it's different from IB. Start the markets-fluency build in sophomore fall and you'll be ahead of 90% of the applicants by the time recruiting opens.

Stephen Turban is the co-founder of Wall Street Guide and Lumiere Education. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard College in Statistics, worked as an Business Analytics Fellow at McKinsey & Company. He founded WSG to give ambitious students the same insider access to finance and consulting recruiting that top-school students take for granted.