[TW]Fox;17422390 said:
Do you have a 1st from UCL or similar?
Irrelevant, you don't need one. Don't even need a degree tbh.
Depends on what area you wish to go into. I've got my first interview coming up with a very large insurance company for a job that would lead me into becoming a fund manager. They prefer to take people on as blank slates to train them up from scratch to manage their portfolios etc.
That being said, so many of the big banks (JP Morgan Chase, Golden Sacks, Barclays Wealth etc) take influxes of applicants throughout the year to go through their ultra-competitive recruitment process.
It's all really dependent. Obviously having higher levels of certified education will by no means harm you, but a great deal of the guys earning big bucks don't have university degrees. I was told by one fund manager that they didn't really care enough about university education to offer a graduate recruitment scheme, as far as they were concerned as long as you could prove an aptitude for finance you were as qualified as anybody with a degree and to a large extent, that's true.
It's all relative to what you want to go into though. Stockbrokers hours are pretty much from the market's opening to its closing each day but the vast majority of them don't earn the phenomenal bonuses to supplement their salaries. On the opposite end of the spectrum you have forex traders who spend days on end watching monitors for slight fluctuations in currency but who earn astronomical salaries if they're good at it.
I started job hunting in finance when it was pointed out to me that 'what better industry could there be to make money in than one that is entirely based around money.' My father is an IFA, which was once a great profession - you could earn a boatload of money if you had rich clients and set their investments up with great portfolio managers charging commission as low as 3-4% per investment. Sadly that industry is being hit very hard by the Retail Distribution Review to the point where it will become difficult for financial advisers to even consider charging commission above 0.5%.
Finally, bear in mind that very few people who work the long hours and make exorbitant amounts of money in the financial sector pursue it as a lifelong career path. They get in young, make a buttload of cash and get out whilst they're still able to have some fun. Working and playing as hard as those guys do will kill you if you don't!