After spending two very exciting, dynamic and busy weeks, I am feeling a little sad today, realising that most of my internship is over now... Probably this feeling has been boosted by the farewell party of the other RBS interns, recruited in Boston, that took place last Friday (their programme started 4 weeks earlier than mine). We have become very close – we worked together on some projects, attended conferences and presentations and discussed a lot about our future career path and it wasn’t nice saying good-bye. I am horrible in this part...

Furthermore, I myself said good-bye to the people I have been working with for the last 5 weeks, the Front Office team. As I will spend second part of my internship with Operations (it is on different floor), I will not have much chance to see the people I worked with so far. This was also sad. I prepared some small gifts from Scotland for the people I worked with and everyone said very kind words. I have been invited to dine with some of the teams again while I am still in Tokyo. I was flattered.

So back to the last two weeks - I spent my time with the trading and sales teams for non-yen products, i.e. US notes and treasuries, bunds, gilts, derivatives - swaps, repos, futures and options. I was very busy, because I have been given many small projects, which I found very useful. Their customers are mainly Japanese and therefore the sales people are also Japanese. Here in Japan the relation to customers is unique, very traditional, in sense that is hard to be a good sales person if you don’t know the manners and it is almost impossible to be a good sales person if you are not native Japanese. I tend to think so, because some sales people told me that despite the fact they are born Japanese even they sometimes struggle to find the right way to speak to customers. Apparently not only all the small gestures and body language are extremely important, but you should be able to use the right “level of politeness” via you verbal expressions (the language is changing according to the status of both parties) and one can easily get upset if the appropriate respect hasn’t been demonstrated. So, I, the gaijin, most certainly won’t be good sales person here.

However, I very much enjoyed the trading side! The team is currently formed from 4 people, two of them are trading in treasuries and notes, one in swaps and futures and one is volatility trader, i.e. trades options. They told me that the US products “behave” during the time of Asia market, because there is not much “flow”, so first when London comes in the action starts. My observation showed though that it is not really the case... The early mornings are also busy – when it is dinner time in New York, some people (understand fund managers, etc) get on their Black Berry, checking their Bloomberg and call to put a trade on, following the indications the Asian market gives. That is absolutely crazy lifestyle!! Anyway the job this team does is great! They seem to be trading a lot with the interbank and hedge fund sectors, which is very dynamic field.

What I did where mostly daily projects on the various topics we discussed, something like a quick check on how much I understood the material. I also did some programming in VBA in Excel, for first time in my life!! It was quite hard, but I was successful (I need constant instructions, but it still counts.

We (the interns) have been taken out last Wednesday by the credit team to izakaya hopping in Kanda. It was great fun, the places (final count showed 7) were very different and the conversations – very interesting. I was invited to another semi corporate event last weekend – colleagues together with people from other banks organised canyoning in area near Niigata. It was very good networking and at the same time so much fun. Japanese people seem to be very keen on any outdoor activities, but I can understand why – the nature is so beautiful... The water near Niigata is the purest in Japan and it is so green...

Today I am heading to Tokyo Stock Exchange with my Futures team, I am so looking forward! I will report how that went soon! Excited!