McAdams Wright Ragen

Evan Caplan, 2011

The morning of the first day of my internship, I was handed a printout of a portfolio of the most illiquid, obscure securities McAdams Wright Ragen’s principal trading group owned and instructed to find as much information on the securities as I could.  Once that was completed, I was to aggregate the information and provide the clearest depiction possible of the portfolio as a whole.  It took me the entire day to find only the most basic information (industry, market capitalization, type of security, price, and yield).  It was a battle to find just these bits of data using only publicly available sources available on the internet.  After much searching, I relied on Yahoo! Finance, Quantum Online, and Bloomberg for the majority of the information.  (Note: QuantumOnline.com is a great online resource for income investors.  It is completely free and provides a wealth of information on preferred stock and all types of bonds.)  Somehow, by Tuesday morning I had an Excel spreadsheet with various charts and weighted averages that provided a useful illustration of the portfolio’s characteristics.

In many ways, my entire internship experience closely resembled the anecdote above in that I was bombarded by a diverse array of projects for which I had absolutely no background and told to do my best.  Most times, I was able to work hard and creatively enough to find or produce what was requested, however, this was not always the case.  Many times during my internship, I was forced to return to my supervisor and tell him that, to the best of my knowledge, what he was looking for was not readily available.  While, at times, I was unable to complete a certain project due to factors outside of my control, I put my best work into each and every assignment.  In this regard, my efforts were properly recognized and I consistently exceeded my supervisor’s expectations.

Reflecting back, this internship proved extremely valuable due to the variety of roles my supervisor and his group performed compared to a similar team at a large, integrated investment bank.  Through the four weeks I spent at McAdams Wright Ragen, I watched and asked questions about proprietary trading, market making, sell-side brokerage operations in addition to directly working on buy-side asset management research projects.  This diversity of experiences has allowed me to see a broad array of possible career choices in a single month.  While I thoroughly my entire internship, I have learned that I would likely prefer to work in an asset management/buy-side role in the future.

Contact the Career Services Office for more information on this internship!