What is trading?
Broadly speaking, trading is the buying and selling of securities on financial exchanges. There are many different types of securities, the most common ones including: foreign exchange (FX or Forex), equities (or shares), indices (such as the Dow Jones), commodities (such as gold and oil), fixed income products (bonds) and derivative products (this includes options and futures).
Trading these products on the financial exchanges centres around price movements in the underlying securities. Market participants include institutional investors, retail investors, banks, brokers and market-makers. Active traders, or speculators, will try to predict price movements. Market-makers, or liquidity providers will show prices at which they are willing to buy and sell the given securities, with the aim of capturing the difference between them, known as a bid-ask spread.
Trading Divisons
Quantitative Trading
Quant Trading focuses on a market taker role typically seen in trading houses and hedge funds. This subdivision aims to teach students how quant/proprietary traders leverage statistics, probability and market dynamics to profit from trades for themselves. Trading with a paper portfolio, and competing against other top global universities, the team writes and runs algorithmic trades in order to beat the market.
IB Trading teaches students about the role of a market maker, how they use market knowledge and client relationships to capture bid-ask spreads for the bank. This is the role traders in investment banks play. Focusing on trades such as commodity, currency, and cross currency.
Sales & Trading / IB Trading
Purpose of the Trading Division
Education
Meetings of the Trading Division are held weekly, during which members are given an insight into the various roles available within Trading.
Awareness
In line with our overall aim, the Trading Division of the SMF will focus on educating members on market basics throughout the year in weekly meetings.
Experience
The division will be running market-making mini-games and simulated trading competitions to give members an opportunity to apply what they have learned.
