Which Role Needs Which Part of This SiteStart here

Twelve jobs that have to understand financial products without necessarily trading them, what each one actually deals with, and the shortest useful route through this site for it.

1. Markets — trading, sales, structuring

• What you deal with: a narrow set of instruments in enormous depth, and every other desk's product the moment it touches yours.
• Start with: which desk trades what, then that desk's asset-class page end to end.
• Then: the arithmetic without a screen, and the words of the first week.
• If you are interviewing: the product round has a two-week route.

2. Risk

• What you deal with: every product the firm holds, seen as exposures rather than trades, plus the far harder question of what the exposure numbers assume.
• Start with: risk measures and how products fail — six patterns that between them cover every case study on this site.
• Then: margin and collateral, the arithmetic of drawdowns, and as many case studies as you have evenings for.
• The habit worth building: for each product, name which of market, credit, liquidity, funding and operational risk dominates. It is a two-minute exercise and it is most of the job.

3. Quant, strats and technology

• What you deal with: the models and systems that price and book everything above, and the reconciliation of yesterday's number with today's.
• Start with: curve construction and volatility — the two places where a small modelling choice changes a large number.
• Then: valuation, clearing and settlement, and the calculators here, which are deliberately small enough to read line by line rather than treat as a library.
• Useful framing: a model wrong in a known direction is usable; wrong in an unknown direction it is not. Most of the work is converting the second into the first.

4. Operations, settlement and custody

• What you deal with: what the trade legally is, as opposed to what it was described as — confirmations, value dates, deliveries, margin calls, fails and breaks.
• Start with: clearing and settlement and corporate actions.
• Then: reading a broker statement, securities lending and repo — the two places where an asset can be somewhere other than where the statement suggests.
• Worth saying plainly: this seat teaches instruments faster than almost any other, because it deals with the obligations rather than the opinions.

5. Compliance, audit and internal control

• What you deal with: whether a client could reasonably have understood what they bought, and whether the record would survive being read by somebody hostile.
• Start with: investor protection and reading a key information document.
• Then: what the wrapper changes, reading a term sheet, and the product pages for whatever your firm actually sells — autocallables, structured deposits, unit-linked policies are the usual suspects.
• The most useful single page may be why a protected product lost money: four mechanisms, all disclosed in advance, all of them regular complaint material.

6. Asset management, fund selection and research

• What you deal with: wrappers as much as underlyings — what a fund actually holds, what it costs, and what its stated return is measured against.
• Start with: reading a fund factsheet and what the wrapper changes.
• Then: ETF against fund against certificate, physical against synthetic, costs and fees, reading a market number.
• The recurring trap: a performance figure whose benchmark, currency, fee basis or start date was chosen after the fact. The gap between fund and index covers the honest half of it.

7. Corporate treasury and the finance function

• What you deal with: turning unknown cash flows into known ones — currency, rates, commodity input costs, and where the company's spare cash sits overnight.
• Start with: hedging, then FX forwards and swaps.
• Then: money-market funds and commercial paper for the cash side; factoring and trade finance for the working-capital gap.
• The one case study to read: Metallgesellschaft — a hedge that was economically right and fatal on timing, which is the specific way corporate hedges fail.

8. Financial journalism, communications and investor relations

• What you deal with: explaining an instrument accurately in a paragraph, to people who will not read a second one.
• Start with: the four-sentence template — it is written for exactly this problem.
• Then: reading a market number, which is about what a quoted figure leaves out, and how products fail, so that a new event can be named as an old pattern rather than as unprecedented.
• A standing check: can you say who is on the other side of the trade you are describing? If not, the piece is only half reported. The other side of the trade.

9. Law, tax and accounting next to finance

• What you deal with: documents that define instruments you may never see priced — and the gap between what a contract says and what everyone assumed it said.
• Start with: reading a term sheet and reading an annual report.
• Then: securitisation for structure, CDS for definitional risk — an instrument whose entire value turns on how a credit event is defined — and the 2023 AT1 write-down for what a subordination clause is worth on the day it is read carefully.
• Also: reading financial statements, if the accounting side is the one you come from.

10. Supervision, policy and central banking

• What you deal with: the plumbing rather than the trade — where leverage sits, who owes collateral to whom, and which mismatch is currently being described as innovation.
• Start with: money markets and margin and collateral.
• Then: monetary policy, securitisation, and the case studies where the mechanism was systemic rather than local — 1998, 2008, the LDI episode, 2023.

11. Students, teachers and exam candidates

• What you deal with: a syllabus that names instruments faster than it explains them, and a lot of formulas without the sentence that says why they are that shape.
• Start with: the learning paths — ten routes, each ordered so that no page assumes anything that has not already appeared.
• Then: the five levels on each product page, which exist so that the same instrument can be met at whatever depth the course needs, and the flashcards and market exam for testing rather than re-reading.
• For teaching: every page here is original to this site and free to read; the licences page says exactly what that means and what the three third-party components are.

12. Someone who simply holds something and wants to understand it

• What you deal with: a document you did not write, about a product somebody else chose the shape of.
• Start with: the questions section — one page each, plain words, no assumed background.
• Then: the playbook for whatever is actually in front of you — a factsheet, a statement, a key information document.
• And then stop. Understanding what you hold is a finished task. This site does not tell anybody what to buy, sell or keep, and the disclaimer means it: nothing here is a personal recommendation, and no page knows anything about your circumstances.

If none of the twelve is you

• The atlas does not require a reason. Open a market, pick something whose name you have heard and never had explained, and read the first level.
• If you would rather be asked than choose: the market exam deals random questions across the whole site, and getting one wrong is the fastest way to find the page you needed.