On my university's job board there is a listing for a Global Portfolio Strategy Internship at JPM Chief Investment Office. It's open to current MSc and PhD students in quantitative subjects. Responsibilities include analyzing assets and liabilities of the portfolio, understanding regulatory changes, and evaluating market risk. What kind of career path would this put you on? Would it be something like asset management or risk management? I'm very interested in investing, but not as much in risk though of course any opportunity is good to get your foot in the door.How would you present yourself in the best light for this role? We need to submit a cover letter and I was going to mention reasons for wanting to work in financial investing, like retail trading as a hobby for 10 years. Are there any other ways to separate yourself from the pack?Thanks in advance!

>> like retail trading as a hobby for 10 yearseither you got held back a few years in highschool or you started daytrading when you were like 12 ?

I take it that you've heard of the London Whale ?But this is a big thing, so there's lots of things to learn and it would look good on your CV.A bit of personal trading is good, but a pervasive theme in CV design is that anything you say is a source of interview questions.Thus you need to be able to field questions about your investment decisions, how you managed risk and what you learned from the experience.Which trades did you not do ? Why ?The difference between a victim and a veteran is what you learned from the bad times.You've shared nothing about yourself, so I cannot say what of your background would be useful, but you might want to look at Matlab & Excel.One thing some people look at in bright young things is whether they can actually do anything useful and a scary % of all finance happens in (spite of) Excel and Matlab/Mathematica are used a lot in financial research.No one is going to hire you for a good job just because you know Excel VBA and Matlab, but you mght stand out if you can say honestly that you're good with these tools, that counts as useful everywhere, but no one is impressed by VBA so they need to be on top of other stuff.

QuoteOriginally posted by: DominicConnorI take it that you've heard of the London Whale ?But this is a big thing, so there's lots of things to learn and it would look good on your CV.A bit of personal trading is good, but a pervasive theme in CV design is that anything you say is a source of interview questions.Thus you need to be able to field questions about your investment decisions, how you managed risk and what you learned from the experience.Which trades did you not do ? Why ?The difference between a victim and a veteran is what you learned from the bad times.You've shared nothing about yourself, so I cannot say what of your background would be useful, but you might want to look at Matlab & Excel.One thing some people look at in bright young things is whether they can actually do anything useful and a scary % of all finance happens in (spite of) Excel and Matlab/Mathematica are used a lot in financial research.No one is going to hire you for a good job just because you know Excel VBA and Matlab, but you mght stand out if you can say honestly that you're good with these tools, that counts as useful everywhere, but no one is impressed by VBA so they need to be on top of other stuff.Hi Dominic, thanks for your reply. Yes, I have heard of the London Whale and that JPM's reputation was significantly affected by this. At their networking event at my school everyone very carefully steered clear of any discussion about it. But I'm guessing an internship like this would put someone in the thick of things and let them observe how a BB rebuilds its reputation.I'm in the first year of a MSc in computer science and had been working as a web developer for 10 years. The only reason why I'm applying is that I spoke to a MD of Capital Markets at a Citigroup presentation who said he started his career in finance after 10 years of working as an engineer. He encourage me to apply to Citi and I had gotten a request from someone in HR to send my resume, so I'm also giving this JPM internship a shot. Course-wise I plan to focus on numerical methods and research a numerical analysis open problem related to the Strassen algorithm for a masters thesis.With investing I had learned a lot through trial and error by losing my own IRA money. Things like no trading on impulse, set limits for what you're willing to lose, don't be too proud to admit your stocks have tanked and irrationally hold on to it for years, research companies, avoid companies with serious problems in the news, invest in what I know (mostly tech stocks), and watch what people on the street like and buy. So far it's worked and my returns average about 10% a year. I can't compete with the math and engineering PhDs at my school, so hoping a demonstrated interest in trading/investing will help!

QuoteOriginally posted by: xploringHi Dominic, thanks for your reply. Yes, I have heard of the London Whale and that JPM's reputation was significantly affected by this. At their networking event at my school everyone very carefully steered clear of any discussion about it.Why on earth would you 'steer clear of it'?!?!?!

QuoteOriginally posted by: xploringAre there any other ways to separate yourself from the pack?Enter the room wearing a yellow sou'wester, carrying a harpoon and shouting "Thar she blows!".

QuoteOriginally posted by: TinManQuoteOriginally posted by: xploringHi Dominic, thanks for your reply. Yes, I have heard of the London Whale and that JPM's reputation was significantly affected by this. At their networking event at my school everyone very carefully steered clear of any discussion about it.Why on earth would you 'steer clear of it'?!?!?!I didn't at all, but everyone from JPM that I talked to about it was pretty squeamish and didn't say much but shook their head like they were talking about that one embarassing half-wit relative who the family tries to hide in the closet during holiday get-togethers.

Another thing to make yourself standout is to show interest, which may sound stupidly obvious, but...Reading up on the sort of work your target does will make you stand up and is to an extent raising the bet.Saying "I'm very interested in Cheese futures" opens you up to questions on how supply & demand in the underlying dairy market coupled with increasing consumption of milk based products in China affect the market, who are the big players ? and most importantly how do they make their money ?Is it liquidity provision ? Funding of producers ? Risk management for producers and consumers of cheese ? How does the price of cheese interact with currency ?Is there increasing regulation in the Cheese market ? What ways that used to make money have gone away ? Which are the most spectacular fails ?You won't make it all the way to expert in that lot, but merely by trying you look better.Also of course as a CS grad they will have expectations of you that you're good with computers, forgive me for saying this, but it far from uncommon for CS grads not to be that "into" computers. Hence my earlier advice about Matlab/Excel/VBA/R and I'm glad to see you're doing numerical methods, these are an optional part of many CS degrees, so many people in your position can't do anything outside integers, you need to swim in the sea of floating point.A bit of SQL won't hurt either.So I've suggested a volume of work that is comparable to an entire year of a degree...So realistically we're not talking about getting you anywhere near expert here, but the two deliverables are that you have shown you're "into this stuff" and that you can at least fumble through questions that will leave your competitors looking blank.

I will guess the most important thing going on (or should be going on) in that office is preparing for the Volcker rule.If so, the natural cover letter would express a deep interest in that and a strong desire to be part of the effortsthat integrate those rules with the trading.

I was definitely thinking about how to demonstrate greater interest in the markets and trading, so I researched topics in algorithmic trading and changed my master's thesis topic to "Machine Learning Techniques for Portfolio Selection and Optimization". Hope this thesis topic doesn't sound too uninformed / amateurish.I'll definitely keep in mind these questions about investing. It's hard to comment on things like options and futures since I haven't traded them, but I understand how they work conceptually. Might be time to open an Interactive Brokers account.I actually haven't heard back from Citigroup or any of the other BB Sales & Trading groups that I'd applied to. Do they usually contact applicants pretty quickly or do they sometimes take weeks to respond? So far I have one interview request from Signal Technologies, but they haven't replied back yet... Ugh the waiting is the worst...