Quote from landboy:
Middle office has to involve a risk analysis component... You'd have to be doin P&L, allocations and most importantly, analysis of risk vs. reward. You'll hve to explain to the bosses exactly where the performance each day came from and how much risk is in the books...
If you're just bookin trades, reconning and making sure trades settle and square out, then you're simply "trade ops" which is really the menialist of all back-office...
Nope, we don't book trades as techops, or settle/square em out, that's ops' job (which I guess is the equivalent of tradeops). We write scripts that automatically generate rec reports. We also do the software that the ops group uses to book the trades, as well as manage the software that the traders use for risk management.
Any support we do for the traders are technology related.
Ex: If they're having a problem with the software, they come to us, if trades aren't reconciled correctly, and it's due to a file missing (that's supposed to come from the counterparty), we track down the file.
If a trade that isn't ours gets booked for us, ops are the ones to track that down. They also use our system to book trades into the database.
Also, anything that needs a change in the database (such as allocations) is our responsibility, since we're the only ones with database access.
This means that I will learn their risk system, and pretty much everything else. If I'm going to be working on the software they use for risk management, then I'd obviously have to know how it works.