If you are coming from another industryEasy

Arriving from software, law, engineering, academia or anywhere else, with a real skill and no map. The problem is not that finance is hard — it is that nobody tells you what the shape of it is.

6 min read · 1 076 words

The hard part of arriving here is not difficulty. It is that the field has no visible shape from outside: every explanation assumes you already know which room you are standing in, and the words that would tell you are used differently in the next building. This page is a map rather than a syllabus, and it adds nothing new — it is an order through what is already on this site.

The three divisions, and why nobody states them

Almost every confusion about "what does this person do" resolves into one of three questions being asked at once. They are separate, and this site is built on all three:

• What is being traded or transacted — an instrument on a screen, or a negotiated deal. That is the two atlases: Markets and Investment Banking, and the switch under every page's headline moves between them.
• Which market it belongs to — eleven asset classes, and they differ in almost everything: how a price is quoted, who is forced to trade, how a trade settles, what a bad day looks like.
• Who does it for a living — the industry map: six sides, fourteen groups, 53 seats. This is the axis that actually answers "what job is that", and it is the one an outsider is never given.

Those three are different questions through the same material. An asset class is a subject and a seat is a job, and collapsing them is what makes finance look like it contradicts itself when it does not.

Start with the shape, not the detail

• The industry map, first and for twenty minutes. Read the six sides rather than the seats: the top-level division is a seat's relationship to a price — quoting it, taking it, lending against it, controlling it, or setting the rules it is quoted under. Almost every "who are these people" question falls out of that.
• The role map — the same question from the reader's side, with the route through this site for each.
• The questions section, and specifically the block called what is it, actually. Written from a standing start: what a derivative is, what a bond is, what a share really is. There is no shame in this and it is faster than inferring it.
• First-week vocabulary — the words that are used constantly and defined nowhere, which is the specific thing that makes a first month exhausting.

Four misconceptions that cost the most time

• That "sell-side and buy-side" divides the industry. It divides two of the fourteen groups. A retail bank quoting a mortgage is neither; risk, compliance, audit and operations are neither; a central bank, a clearing house and a rating agency are nobody's counterparty; and the corporate treasurer everybody is selling to is on the other side of the table entirely.
• That the maths is the barrier. It is occasionally, and far less often than people arriving from technical fields expect. The barriers are vocabulary, conventions and the fact that a contract decides — which document governs is the page nobody arriving expects to need and everybody does.
• That a term means one thing. Margin is a deposit in one sentence and the settlement of a loss in the next; underwriting means one thing in insurance and another in equity capital markets; a "float" is two unrelated ideas. The glossary marks the senses apart where they collide.
• That the number is the answer. A reported figure is produced by a rule somebody chose, and price, value and mark is the difference between what was observed and what was computed. Coming from a field where a measurement is a measurement, this is the adjustment that takes longest.

What actually transfers, and it is more than you think

• From software and engineering — state machines, edge cases, provenance and the discipline of not trusting a number whose source you cannot name. If you are building the system is the route written for that seat.
• From law — reading the document that governs rather than the summary of it, which is this site's whole method and a skill most people in finance do not have.
• From academia and the sciences — knowing what an assumption is, and that a model reproducing today's data is not a model that describes the world. Model risk is that distinction, and it is a live professional issue rather than a philosophical one.
• From accounting and audit — provenance and reconciliation, plus the habit of asking who checked it. If you are not the one trading is the route for those seats.
• From any operational job at all — the knowledge that the interesting failures happen after the decision, which is exactly where finance keeps discovering it was not looking.

An order that works, and roughly what it costs

• The shape — the industry map and the role map. An evening.
• The nouns — the what is it, actually block, then whichever eleven-instrument shelf is nearest to where you have landed. A week of short sittings, and the difficulty labels on every page mean you can start at Easy and not be lied to about it.
• The cross-cutting frameworks, which is the point at which it stops being memorisation: the analysis section asks one question of everything at once, and each of those pages transfers to instruments this site has never covered.
• Then say it back. The four-sentence drill deals an instrument and runs a clock. Reading feels like progress and does not reveal whether you can produce any of it, which is the gap this exists to expose.
• And keep a path. Build one for the fortnight ahead rather than deciding each evening what to read, and tick it off.

Two things this page will not tell you

• Which seat to aim for. That depends on facts about you this site does not have, and a page ranking jobs would be careers advice rather than education.
• What a particular employer wants. Firms genuinely disagree about where the lines fall — structuring sits in markets at one bank and in the investment bank at another — and this site says so rather than claiming an authority nobody has. Nobody is quoted here and no employer's process is described.