Full speed ahead

Hello blog readers! How are you? (I am still getting used to this question here). And for me, it is still uncommon to hear this conversation in a store or in the office: “Hey, how are you?”, and the answer: “hi, how are you?” :) Well, I hope you all are doing great.

Actually, this is my first post, so I spent a lot of time by thinking what to write, what would be interesting and useful for the reader to read. So, I made a conclusion - I will write separate posts on separate topics: internship (from the professional side) and free time in the U.S. (New York mostly). This part will be more about the internship from the professional side.

I get many questions such like how is the internship, is it worth it, what are you doing there and what the responsibilities are, is it useful. I will answer them in this post.

I perform my internship at Lloyds TSB bank in New York and work in a small and friendly team. I report to VP & Portfolio Manager, who is a very interesting and open-minded person (we discuss about many economic and non-economic questions with him). That's right -my internship is related to portfolio management. Mostly I have to work with Excell - prepare portfolio, portfolio attribution analysis models, etc. I also work with Bloomberg terminal - to gather the data and monitor markets (you can get almost everything from that machine, I really like it). We have meetings with portfolio managers as well (one was last week). Also, we went to a Franklin Templeton’s conference two weeks ago, and last week I had an opportunity to attend a phone conference with Pimco's Bill Gross and Mohamed El-Erian. They were discussing about a camel with two humps :) - very good metaphor for possible scenarios in financial markets for 2012. By the way, if you are wondering why the font changed - I am writing this part while going to the office by metro. One station left. Will have to finish a Due Diligence report today and present one model to my line manager.

I am back. The day was really productive, finished the report, presented the model. We also discussed about the markets (good news from Greece!- nobody knows for how long), and perhaps we will have to change the allocation of one of our portfolios .

So, is the internship worth it? Well, it didn’t end yet, but for the moment - yes, for sure! And I think that my opinion will not change in the future.

By the way, the weekend was very nice – on Saturday we met other BAFF interns performing their internship here in New York, went to a restaurant, had a really great time! Hope to see them in the near future again.