Three weeks, five desks, countless lessons learned – Markets interns on their summer journey

Time flies when you’re busy having fun, learning and networking - which is the case for the three summer interns at our trading floor in Stockholm. The past three weeks, they’ve been quite busy investigating interest rate risks, digging into portfolio theory, hybrids bonds and autocallables, while cracking cases, and getting a taste of what it’s like to work in Equity Sales. All topped with nice lunches, fun after-work drinks and dinners with various Markets teams.

Let’s check in with our talented Markets summer interns, Nora Engvall, Erik Langwagen and Carl Hörfelt, and see what they’ve been up to the past weeks.

By Nora, Carl & Erik  

Weeks two, three and four, coming right up. We said goodbye to Derivatives, said hello to hybrid bonds, equity swaps and credit-linked notes. 

Week two ended with our case presentation on the Derivatives desk. We'd been given a client to dig into, looking at their business model, their debt and their derivatives portfolio. From there, the task was to investigate their interest rate risk, come up with ideas for what they should do differently, and work out how our proposal would affect their interest rate costs. 

Before we presented, we had a goodbye lunch with Philippa, analyst in the Derivatives team, which was a great chance to look back on everything we'd picked up – which turned out to be quite a lot. Our presentation went well, and afterwards we celebrated with the other desks over a drink. A really nice way to wrap up a busy but rewarding week.

Building a portfolio - a fun challenge

Week three brought us to Securities Advisory, where we dug into bonds, portfolio theory, and got a crash course on hybrid bonds, something none of us had even heard of before Monday morning. Instant new favorite topic.

Our case was to build a portfolio for a foundation, mixing equities, bonds and hybrids. This meant days of reading company reports, hunting for holdings worth picking, trying to optimize the “Sharpe ratio”, and weighing the risk against what would actually suit the client. Just when we thought we'd cracked it, the real test came: explain the whole thing to someone with almost no finance background. A fun challenge in its own right, and honestly a great way to test if we actually understood what we'd built.

It wasn't all spreadsheets, though. We had after-work drinks with the team on Wednesday, and lunch on Thursday. Once the presentation was done, we stuck around to keep chatting with the team, squeezing in as many questions as we could about the case, and what the job looks like day to day.

Week four: three desks, five very full days

Back from a week of vacation and straight into Equity Sales & Research on Monday. We kicked off with reading reports, we sat in on a Q2 call with a company, and got the full rundown on what Equity Sales gets up to on a normal busy day.

By Thursday, we'd moved on to the Structured Products team, getting our hands on autocallables, credit-linked notes and capital-protected notes. Our second case of the week was to run the numbers on how different products had actually performed in the past. We presented our findings for the team on Friday – and think we did alright.

We rounded off the week with a crash course in Balance Sheet Management, tying together credit risk and derivatives pricing. 

And just like that, we're halfway through the internship already, and there's still so much more to look forward to.

Watch this space for the third blog with our Swedish summer interns. Meanwhile, and in case you missed out on their first blog, you can read it here: “Our brains have gotten a proper workout” – Meet Markets interns, Nora, Carl and Erik | Nordea - or check out some of the other blogs by our interns in Denmark, Norway and Finland.