First Week at Cantor Fizgerald

First Week at Cantor Fitzgerald (June 2-June 6)
By Victoria Dey

Being a Communications major and not having that much background knowledge on the stock market and finances in general, you could only imagine how nervous I was going into this internship. Five days a week from 7:30am-4:30pm for 10 weeks in NYC is a lot, especially in a field where there are so many complex terms and so much to know. But, to my surprise, my first week went pretty well.

There are 10 interns on the equity floor with me, the majority of us going into our junior year. Some are interested in being traders, while others would prefer to dive into being a broker or research analyst so it is great to have such a wide range of interests among us. I was very nervous about meeting the other interns and how we would interact but they are all so friendly and outgoing, which really adds to the internship.

For those of you who don't know Cantor Fitzgerald is an investment bank that has offices and trading desks all throughout the world. Cantor specializes in institutional equity and fixed income sales and trading. Our assigned desks on the equity floor are among the other employees who are actually doing all the trading and sales so we get a first-hand experience, listening in on the calls they make either "on the floor", with clients or with other countries. In the morning, we are told to walk around and go to the different sectors of the equity floor (options, international, research analysts etc.) and talk with the workers. It is a great learning experience because we are able to watch them do the trading on the 4-5 computer screens in front of them and then they will explain to us how the sale or trade worked. Furthermore, having access to Bloomberg, which is software that provides 24 hour coverage of the stocks and news, allows us to observe stocks around the world and see how well each one is doing on a scale that can be set either hourly or as far back as a year.

I had no idea what any of these different positions or terms meant before starting this internship so I can say it is going pretty well taken I've learned this much in only a week. I am very excited to see what the rest of my summer at Cantor Fitzgerald will offer.