#2: The Lingo
“I’m axed in half a yard.”
“The client’s looking for a bridge. They’ll term out with a revolver in due course”
If these sentences make no sense to you, the first few weeks in your new finance role will be totally baffling.
There is a huge amount of jargon and slang which is day-to-day language in all banking and financial services organisations, but is semi-magical nonsense when you hear it for the first time. You almost need to learn a new language before you can even begin to operate in this industry.
Beyond basic financial terms which you should be familiar with, such as “bonds”, “equities”, “balance sheets” etc, people throw around slang terms like “bar”, “axe”, “hedge”, “cable”, “bookie”. Even worse, many of these words have completely different meanings in real life, adding to the sense of confusion.
Beyond that, many mathematical terms get thrown around very casually, for example, “yield curve”, “derivative”, and “basis points”.
It all adds up to the feeling that you don’t have a clue what anyone is talking about, and that’s a very sobering, confidence-sapping experience. Henry, our CEO, started out in a hedge fund and he recalls: