Senior Dealer
Fidelity International

Scott R

00:00:03 I’m Scott R, and I work as a Senior Dealer in the City of London. I work for a Fund Management company, and I’m involved in buying and selling shares on behalf of the company. I talk to a number of our Fund Managers, and keeping them in touch with market developments and possible opportunities for them to be able to trade stocks during the course of the day. It’s my job to keep them aware of what’s happening in their portfolios, particularly if they’re away – or can’t get access to a screen – because I’m obviously looking at everything that’s going on in the markets during the course of the day. This picture just shows my colleagues who I’m working alongside. There’s a team of fourteen of us who work on the desk, and we’re all sat on one big desk where we can actually communicate very effectively with each other. We need to be able to interact well, and so we couldn’t all just be pigeon-holed in our own little offices. So it’s very much an open-plan environment when you’re sitting on a trading desk.

00:00:58 If I look back to what I wanted to do when I was very young and thinking about what I’d like to do when I grew up, I was actually thinking it would be nice to be an astronaut. But I think I began to realise as I reached my teens, it probably wasn’t a very realistic goal. The UK space programme wasn’t going particularly well at that point in time.

00:01:18 When I was coming up to leaving college I was considering my options, and what I applied to do was a short service limited commission in the Army. And that would be for one year, as a gap year, and that I would then from there go to University. I had a place offered to me by Imperial College, to study Physics. Unfortunately things didn’t work out quite as planned, because just after finishing my A-Levels, I managed to dislocate my elbow, and as such was unable to take the physical tests to apply to join the Army. So I was then left thinking what do I do from here? And it was at that point I really then focused on the idea of going into the City, at least for a year, just to see what was out there, and what could be done. Dislocating my elbow did turn out to be a lucky break, because I was able to refocus my life from where I was going. I started working in the City, I started in the back office, at the bottom of the pile, but I quickly realised that there was the potential to be able to do well in the City if you were prepared to work hard. And so when it came to a year on, whether I decided I would then leave the City and go and work – go and study for a degree, I decided that really there was no choice to be made, it was definitely the right thing to do to pursue a career in the City.

00:02:36 When I first started in the City I was working in the back office for an Italian broking firm, and effectively I was just handling the settlement of trades. We had dealers who worked for that firm, and when they had executed their trades, they needed to be settled. And my job was to be involved in that settlement process, to make sure that trades that they’d executed – monies and securities changed hands. After about a year working for that firm, the opportunity arose for a Junior to work on their trading desk, and they offered me that job, and I didn’t really have to think about it, I was very happy to pursue that and start working on the trading desk. I enjoy the City – the fact that it’s a very – a social environment. And I enjoy just the fact that, if you work hard, then you’ll be rewarded for that. And I felt that you are rewarded for your ability, rather than just because of who you are.

00:03:30 In terms of where I think I go from here, I’m very happy with the job that I’m doing, and I feel I still achieve a lot and get a lot out of it. So I would look to carry on doing the job that I do now for a number of years yet. Maybe in ten years or so I’ll look to move to do something else, but it – at this point in time I’m not sure what I would want to do after I leave the City. For me, for the moment, this is where I want to be.

ENDS