Best Trading Jobs

If you land a trading job with any of the companies listed on this page, you should be pinching yourself. The companies listed here have among the highest standards, the best reputations, the most generous benefits, the greatest job satisfaction, and the best opportunities to make connections in the financial industry. Based on input from our contributing traders, we have assembled the following scores and scoring system, but all should be considered solid winners, the best of the best.

Outcome: We were not surprised to see that the companies within each section tended to score similarly across all criteria. This makes sense because successful companies of similar size and similar objectives tend to function similarly.

Keep in mind that just because a company is not listed in this table does not mean that it is not an excellent employment opportunity. Conversely, just because a company rates highly here does not mean that a job at that company would be a good fit for every trader. As stated abundantly, the “best” job for any trader is the one that fits the best.

Explanation of Scoring

• When the institution tends to offer the most "ideal" scenarios (as described below), they receive a green checkmark and a score of 3 for that issue.
• When the institution tends to offer "uncertain or inconsistent" scenarios (as described below), they receive a yellow checkmark and a score of 2 for that issue.
• When the institution tends to offer scenarios that many traders would consider "not ideal" (as described below), they receive an orange checkmark and a score of 1 for that issue.

Scoring Method

To assemble our scoring method, we sought traders’ feedback on features for each company that fit them the best, and that is displayed below. Please note that when a condition is listed as “unknown”, that is not to say that the trader was unaware of the condition at his/her place of work; it means that we were not able to tell based on the input we received what the condition was at a particular company. Further, “variable” means that the condition changes within the company depending on the department, group, or section that a trader works in.

Important Things To Consider As You Review The Table of Best Trading Jobs

Whenever an institution receives a yellow or orange check mark, that is often because that's just the way things are with that type of company. For example, most of the big companies simply don't let their traders trade from home for a variety of security reasons. These companies are still exceptionally great companies to work for….but if you do land a job with them, you should expect that you will be working at their offices each day, not from home.

Next, don't get hung up on subsections because there can be a lot of overlap. For examples, there is a lot of overlap between financial services and banks. Also, the difference between small, medium, and large hedge funds is not only evolving, but each fund’s size changes continually, so this distinction can sometimes be artificial.

Also, there is a lot of variation even within the same financial institution. For example, a large hedge fund might have one division which enables traders to implement their own personal trading strategy; whereas another division within the same company might restrict its traders to following specific trading strategies defined by the institution. This is where we often assign a yellow checkmark, reflecting variation within the company.

Another thing to consider is that the sources who provided the information necessary to construct these data provided information relative to his/her own experience and that of their colleagues. The experiences of other employees in other parts of the company over the same period of time might vary. In order to determine the policy of any given company with regard to any of the criteria, you should contact that company’s HR department.

Finally, in addition to the parameters that we chose to measure on this site, there are additional things that we could have looked at but did not, because that list is endless.

So, it is best for each trader to use this website as a starting point and for each trader to do his/her own due diligence...just like when entering a trade.

Worst Trading Jobs

We received a fair amount of input regarding companies that traders considered the “worst” fit and/or the least ideal places to trade, along with some colorful descriptions. We decided not to publish that information for a variety of reasons. Our main reason was because a few traders’ bad experiences should not be used to draw judgment upon an entire company. So, we will leave it to other sources to out this information. We remain committed to our primary goal which was and is to outline to traders the most important factors that they should consider when looking at trading jobs, and we hope that we have met this objective.