The Best Paying Wall Street Jobs & How to Make It There

As a college graduate there are good chances that you must have dreamt of flying in private jets, cruising around the world in your own private yachts and dining out at some of the best restaurants like Noma. But all the good things in life come for a price, and to pay that price you have to have a well paying job (unless you have inherited a goldmine from your father). Wall Street has helped create many rags to riches stories. Here are some Wall Street jobs which can help you translate your dreams into reality with general career advice to make it there.

There is no denying this fact that every single college graduate is bewitched by the munificent lifestyle of Wall Street big hitters.  Who wouldn’t like to have a million dollars in the bank and another million in the wallet to spend on anything that is worth spending? A Wall Street career promises this and much more.  Making millions is just one of the benefits of a career which also offers multiple opportunities to rub arms with the rich and the famous.  But you must be really naïve to think that such jobs are advertised in the classified section of your local paper. Most college graduates acquire enough knowledge and smartness to understand that most of these jobs are unadvertised and require more networking and self-advertising than a resume. These job opportunities will always be an extremely limited commodity and will only go to those who are willing to fight tooth-and –nail for a shot.  So if you are looking for something similar, here are the most glamorous Wall Street jobs:

Investment Banker

Investment bankers have served as fuel for imagination of countless Hollywood directors, and common job seekers as well. They are the classic symbol of Wall Street glamour. Although the nosedive of the financial market in 2008 and the burst of the dotcom bubble has hit the reputation of an investment banking career, it still remains one of the most tried and traversed routes to Wall Street riches. Finance graduates seek this career and hope to strike it rich by becoming a part of IPO, corporate lending, mergers and acquisitions, institutional trading and other major Wall Street activities.

The best thing about this job is that even the entry-level investment bankers seem to do very well for themselves, earning average starting salaries from $75,000. Within no time, (4-5 years) as one becomes experienced, the investment banker can easily earn $150,000 to $250,000. If luck favors, and you stick around for a while, you can find yourself in the middle of multimillion dollars, walking away with a paycheck that will be the cause of envy to all your friends.

Getting there:

A MBA from a top tier business school can be followed by a job as an analyst where you will brush up your skills in accounting and networking. These skills will come handy while cutting through the competition and rising the ranks. It doesn’t depend on which country you belong to, whether you started your career journey from India or the United Kingdom, if you want to make it big in Wall Street moving to New York is inevitable.

Mutual Fund Managers

If managing billions of dollars of mutual fund assets seems like a challenge that you will love to face then a career as mutual fund manager is what you should be looking at. Mutual Fund Managers are the most sought after finance professionals, almost akin to “God” for millions of investors who are ready to shell out thousands of dollars just for their advice and opinions. A mutual fund manager’s work involves implementing a mutual fund’s investing strategy and managing its portfolio trading activities. Your responsibilities will include making all the investment decisions on behalf of the investors.

Getting there:

Owing to the significant money riding with each of their advice, mutual fund managers need to have financial expertise to make sense of the available data and make key decisions based on core study of investment sectors. For the same, good academic credentials are quite necessary, which include an undergraduate degree in economics (a good grounding in economic and accounting is essential), followed by a MBA degree in Finance. A Chartered Financial Analyst certification is optional.

Prop Traders

Proprietary Traders or Prop Traders can make anything in between $2-3 million. The earnings are mostly in the form of a bonus which can easily dwarf annual salaries and be multiples higher. Prop traders use a variety of strategies to trade stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies with the firm’s own money so as to make a profit for the firm. It is a risky profession; nevertheless the payouts make it totally worth it.

Getting there:

In order to break in prop trading jobs, you need not have any real academic degree. However, you need to be well versed with the latest trading strategies that actually work. Sometimes you need to have some sweet connections or brand-name qualification, or both.

In addition to these, there are many other highly lucrative professions such as hedge fund management, stock broking and equity propping that can deliver the results for you and make you a millionaire within no time. Rarely do we find such wonderful opportunities other than the field of finance.

Saurabh Tyagi is an expert author, with an experience of over 4 years in writing content for articles and blogs. All through these years he has developed a special interest in career and employment related trends. This article comes from his knowledge and understanding of the finance jobs, from entry level finance manager job opportunities to the best paying Wall Street jobs as discussed above.