The Capital Markets Division specialises in offering financial products to investors and acting as a market maker in the financial markets

Capital Markets Division (“CMD”) clients include institutional investors, hedge funds, high net-worth individuals (“HNWIs”) and retail investors. The division plays the essential role in the execution of capital raising transactions underwritten by the bank by offering clients the opportunity to participate in primary debt and equity offerings.

Given the continuing creation of new complex financial products, many CMD bankers perform very specialist roles.

Sales

Salespeople originate and maintain client relationships with investors including institutions, pension funds, hedge funds and HNWIs.

They generally specialise in particular products and work to propose solutions tailored to their clients’ investment objectives and also provide investment ideas and the opportunity to participate in new equity and debt issues. They seek to generate orders from clients which they pass onto traders to execute.

They also keep their clients abreast of market activity.

Trading

Traders act as market makers by creating a liquid platform, providing real-time price quotes and match buyers and seller of financial securities. Through the bid-ask ‘spread’ they are able to generate commission on trades. They may also trade with other market makers.

They are most in tune with the markets and provide pricing and market activity information to salespeople to pass on to their clients.

They also execute trading orders received from the sales team.

Traders may specialise by product including equity, debt, commodities, currency and derivatives.

Research

Research analysts study and report on public companies, industries and economies.

Equity research analysts typically follow an industry or a set of companies within a particular industry.They maintain dialogues with company management and express views to the market on the company’s performance and outlook. Reports usually conclude with a price target and a buy / sell / hold recommendation.

They brief sales and trading colleagues on the market and offer their views.

Apart from equity, research analysts may specialise in fixed income, credit or macroeconomic research.