RE: Goldman Sachs Yeah. With $700,000 bonus per employee this year at Goldman, and most of it thanks to their trading team, I am sure Goldman is begging for any college graduate with any degree to join them.
My advice to the OP: Make a decision: do you want to work as an economist, or do you want to work as a trader. If you want to trade for a living, then forget about all the economics stuff. It can help you very little. You can analyze the world's economy until the kingdom comes, the market (be it equity, bond, forex, commodities) does what it does. e.g. if your economic study told you that the crude oil prices should not be higher than USD80 a barrel last year, and you traded according to your "study" to short crude, you are done. Heck I have a MBA degree in business too... not that I had ever put anything I learned from my curriculum in my trading.
I am shocked at the amount of horrible replies here ... Listen to the one guy who said go to career services. Goldman, JP Morgan and most big banks recruit straight from U of C including on campus interviews. DRW or SIG are great places too that recruit from U of C. All the best, Yoyoman
Some Investment Banks imploded (Lehman, Bear Stearns) and others like UBS have been hammered . Many financial institutions have spat out tens of thousands of jobs. And most of those people are still looking. This is NOT a normal year. Few people are going to come out of U of C or any other university with no experience, and get any kind of real job at these places. Americans and Britons have been travelling to Dubai, Hong Kong and other places, hat in hand, begging for any kind of trading-related job. In fact, a recent publication said that the class of 2009, only about 20% of people got a job in their major, down from 51% in 2007. And computer science, nursing and others lifted those stats. Finance was unlikely to be doing well.
U of C is a top five business school. If you can't find a job as a trader, just take any job and trade for yourself.
University of Chicago: http://grad-schools.usnews.rankings...raduate-schools/top-business-schools/rankings
Thanks a lot for all your replies. I'm not in the business school, I just graduated from their undergraduate college. I'd love to trade on my own, but I would need capital for that-and I'll need a job first. At the same time I think that it's more important at this stage in my career to learn trading from a firm to have a good understanding of the strategies necessary in this competitive field rather than venturing into the markets with my limited knowledge hoping to strike it rich. I want to spend the next few years studying the markets - my long term goal is to be in portfolio management. I have applied through the campus recruiting, but hiring was not so good this year, and these positions at the top firms are very competitive, even within the UofC.
I'm looking at trading rather than as a economist - one day I hope to run my own fund. It's funny, I had a similar discussion with a friend who works at a prop firm - I was absolutely convinced that you should short oil in June as it seemed very unsustainable. He strangely disagreed with me - "Don't short oil!!!".
I'm a little confused. I understand the EMH (I think), but uh it seems more like a long-term equilibrium concept for a "market portfolio"...