A Day on a Fixed Income Trading Desk in London

Before you read on

Desks differ by bank and by product, so this is one person's routine, not a rule. I trade emerging market credit on a London desk: bonds issued by governments and companies in emerging markets. I run my own book, and I will not say what I traded on any given day. What follows is how the day is structured.

6:30am: reading

I start at 6:30. The first half hour is reading: the overnight news, and market colour, which is what other dealers and clients are saying about what is trading and who is buying or selling. Asian markets have closed by then and US markets kept moving after the desk went home, so there is always something to catch up on.

7am: the morning call

The morning call with sales is at 7. This is where I give my key axes. An axis is a bond I want to buy or sell, and sales use it to find clients who want the other side. Sales also tell me what clients have been asking about, which shapes what I think the day will look like.

I also send out runs: lists of hundreds of bond prices. They are indicative. A run is there to give a client an idea of where the market is, not a price they can deal on.

What moves the market

In emerging market credit, the news flow is wide: US Treasury yields, the dollar, rating decisions on countries, IMF programmes, elections and commodity prices. Take a headline from the week this post was written. A Bloomberg story republished on 28 September 2026 was titled "Traders grow wary on emerging dollar bonds as US yields soar". Emerging market dollar bonds are priced as a spread over US Treasuries, so when Treasury yields jump, the whole picture shifts and investors become more careful about the weakest issuers. That is the kind of story a desk reads first thing and trades around.

Source: Bloomberg via BusinessWorld Online, 28 September 2026.

Managing risk

I think about risk in two parts. The first is outside factors: US rates, the dollar and news from the countries I trade. The second is VaR, or value at risk, which is an estimate of how much a book could lose over a short period at a given level of confidence. The outside view tells me what might happen, and VaR tells me how much the book can take if it does.

6pm: the end of the day

After the close there is housekeeping: checking the day's trades and the risk numbers. I leave at 6pm every day.

What surprised me most

How much of trading is adapt or die. Running your own book makes that real. The market changes and you change with it, or it costs you.

What to do with this if you are applying

Interviewers often ask why you want a desk and what a day there involves. A few habits help: read a morning market summary every day, follow the economic calendar, and be able to say why a rise in US yields matters for bond prices. Module 1 of the course covers how a desk is organised and how banks make money from markets.