Steep Learning Curve

In the last six weeks (of the internship at Citigroup, London) I have

• learned that Investment Banking is very different from what I thought it was
• learned that the trading floor ( the Fixed Income trading floor commonly called the 2nd floor in Citigroup) has more than 2000 people of more than 100 nationalities
• learned that the Black-Scholes model of valuing options is the most important model in Investment banking sales and trading
• learned that Black-Scholes is not good enough but the best
• become conversant with the Greek letters and know that you must know the alpha, amma, theta and vega of your derivatives
• learned that there are the vanilla options and then there are the exotics - barrier, chooser, asian, rainbow, quantos, best of n, knock-in, knock-out
• learned swaps, swaptions, caps, floors, collars
• learned asset swaps, securitization, repackaging, credit default swaps, collateralized debt/loan/bong/mortgage obligations, single tranche portfolios, first to default baskets
• learned you try and trade all kinds of risks - interest rate, forex, volatility, credit
• come to know there is delta hedging, there is gamma hedging
• learned that there is static hedging, there is dynamic hedging
• learned constant portfolio protection insurance, option based portfolio protection insurance
• learned what hedge funds are and what their strategies are to generate alpha

And I have been paid 960 pounds per week to learn all that and more that I am sure I have missed out and many that cannot be put in black and white.

Amazing, aint it?