Writing from the desk
The parts of the job no course teaches — in plain English. Practical guides for breaking into a trading, structuring or sales seat, and first-hand desk notes on the trades that go wrong for reasons the textbooks skip. Every note is anonymised: no employer, no sizes, no counterparties.
Guides
- 13 min read
Getting the Interview — how to land a derivatives desk seat
Why the graduate-portal route has a response rate near zero, where the seats actually are (buy side, insurers, brokers), and the three-line cold email that changes your odds by an order of magnitude.
Read - 15 min read
How a Derivatives Desk Makes Money — the answer that ends most interviews
The three revenue lines of a market-making desk — spread, hedging efficiency and financing — with the formulas, the turbo worked end to end, and the flow that makes the dividend curve slope down. The single thing to read before a front-office interview.
Read - 14 min read
Mental Math and Pricing Tricks — the numbers before you open a pricer
The 0.4 rule for an at-the-money option, the rule of 16, greeks converted to cash, put-call parity and the arbitrage checks. Almost everything a mental-math interview question is really testing comes down to one constant and one square root.
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Desk notes
- 30 July 20265 min read
March 2023: I was long gamma into a banking crisis. I still lost money.
Long gamma and long vega into the bank-name vol spike — right about the crisis, right about the hedging, and losing money anyway by failing to monetize the convexity.
Read - 6 June 20265 min read
When a hundred turbos knock out at once — a structured-products desk on 24 February 2022
A gap through hundreds of barriers in one open. The hedge unwinds, the operational avalanche nobody teaches, and the vice of re-issuing leverage into a volatility spike.
Read - May 20264 min read
Right about the drop, wrong about the dividend — Bayer, February 2024
Long gamma and long vega into a 95% dividend cut — green on delta and vol, and still handing money back on the axis nobody watches: dividend risk and the forward, which grows with maturity.
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