Reuters & Bloomberg Experience

[rsh01]

(adult) bloomberg contract is quite pricey per terminal, download feature again is an extra but its 24 hours, uninterrupted hardcore exposure to world events.

i think reuters are doing free demo trial at the moment, but the bottom half of the screen is faded out and it shuts down a couple of minutes after the open (NYSE). there are no subtitles either.

 

[rsh01]

but front-office excel guys bill around £650 per day

indeed, know a lot of guys who have done v well coding purely vba for excel for FO.

its been the FO add on for every trading platform since the beginning afaik. f crazy. a bank i worked in used it for skew vol projection cos the trading platforms werent adequate enough (for £500bn asset book), it was clearly too expensive to add this function to the bespoke platforms, in fact thats what i shld have gone into - creating a platform with that sort of flexibility/functionality.

and every CDO / MBA collateralised piece of junk was/is valued in an excel file - in the bank i was in anyway.

excel is great. but i do hate the '07 change of toolbar stuff, esp as i only use it infrequently.

 

[oscarthecat79]

Probably not unless you've actually used the application to do these things. Could probably bring it up in an interview or somehow work it into your cover letter to show your interest/passion/drive bla bla bla... My uni has a trading room with Reuters and we have to opportunity to work toward a certificate in the use of it, i read through all the tutorials and walk-throughs and then when it came to the application i really didnt have a clue, its one of those things you only really learn when you actually use it.

Excel is really useful though, just learn how to use the functions and formulas on the software, i had on my CV that i was great at Excel, but didnt really have a clue. Is worth having a surf around, just google things like 'how do investors use Excel' or something, useful stuff will come up.

When you leave uni, and want to get into trading, you'll start by doing analyst work, so research how to analyse data, look at standard deviation/variance functions.. all that kind of thing..

I would go and take a look at this website Fintute - they have heaps of basic videos as well as tips and tricks. very handy to start from scratch.