Life of a Trade

In this second series on the inner workings of an investment bank, we look at trade lifecycle.

On the activities around product conceptualization and trade inception.

Once a trade is booked into the trading platform, it is monitored and processed on a daily basis. Here is a short summary of such activities.

On the termination phase of the life of a trade.

Quick summary of the section on the trade lifecycle, before we move on to the final section on the perspectives held dear by various business units in a bank.

In this last section of this post series on how a bank works, we will see how the quants, quantitative developers and the middle office professionals (and the rest) see trades and trading activity.

The perspective of the mathematical wizards of the bank, and why they often appear far-removed from the rest of the bank.

The product-centric view of the quantitative developer suits their work paradigm.

The perspective employed by the Middle Office team is that of queues running in a first-in, first-out mode.

The perspective that is most common in the bank is still trade-centric. But view that the whole bank appreciates is the view of the senior management, which is narrowly focussed on the bottom line. Here is more about such perspectives.

Winding up this long series with book recommendations. All right, recommending my own book…