Lehman Brothers

This morning, the Bucknell in London UK economy class visited the Lehman Brothers office where John Candillier, a Bucknell Alum, is a managing director for European equity sales trading. While there, Mr. Candillier took us to his desk (which, by the way, had three separate computers-as did every other desk) and explained in detail how the trading business worked. To further explain himself and demonstrate his points, Mr. Candillier showed us several company's trading portfolios. To further our experience, Mr. Candillier took two calls from clients. Since he is a MD, he had several of his workers run shares for him, which I found to be very interesting; the teamwork involved in sales trading is phenomenal. Everyone works together as a team to make profits not only for their clients but also for themselves. I'm not quite sure of the exact number, but I do know Mr. Candillier said that they do millions of trades a day and make/lose millions of dollars/pounds while doing them. By the end of his talk it was obvious that Mr. Candillier was extremely intelligent and talented and was very passionate about his profession.

After our lecture by Mr. Candillier's desk, we were then shown a presentation on exactly what the Lehman Brothers company did and all of the success it has acquired over the years. Two recruiting employees also spoke at the presentation about possible summer internships.

Even though I am most likely not going to have a career in sales trading, I still greatly enjoyed my visit to Lehman Brothers. I learned a great deal about this realm of economics and got to experience first-hand what it's like to be a sales trader. It got quite noisy in room with all of the yelling and telephones ringing, but nonetheless it was still exciting, although that kind of profession would be way too stressful for an already stressed-out person such as myself. Mr. Candillier was an excellent host and lecturer and was extremely helpful in explaining equity sales trading and all of the other aspects of Lehman Brothers.