Embrace the chaos: A Morgan Stanley derivatives exec on life at the desk

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4 days ago

Sales and trading desks have thrived amid market volatility this year, boosting bank revenues.
To decode what industry upstarts need to succeed, BI spoke to a top exec at Morgan Stanley.
Iliana Bouzali, a global derivatives head, shared her advice and experience on the trading floor.
When you think about Wall Street, you usually think about M&A — but with dealmaking in the slumps, big banks' sales and trading desks have become the stars of the show.
In the first half of the year, several major banks reported record-breaking revenues from helping institutional clients, such as hedge funds and pension funds, trade stocks, bonds, and derivatives. A volatile 2025 market has brought more price swings, more trading opportunities, and more client activity than ever before.
With all eyes on this booming business, Business Insider set out to shine a spotlight on Wall Street's sales and trading business. What's life like at the desk? What does it take to thrive in this fast-paced job? And what should young people aspiring to work in sell-side sales and trading know?
For answers, we turned to Iliana Bouzali, global head of derivatives distribution and structuring for Morgan Stanley. She started her career as an intern at Morgan Stanley in 2003. She was pursuing an economics degree at Yale when she fell in love with the trading floor and never looked back.
"The energy of a trading floor is like nothing else. It's not for everyone, but if you like it, you love it," she told Business Insider. "It's a very flat architecture, there's no hierarchy. If you have something useful to say, you say it. If there's a problem to solve, it doesn't matter what your title is, you solve the problem. And it can be very infectious, so I was hooked."
Whether you're pitching clients on the products they need to grow and protect their portfolios (sales) or executing on those orders (trading), Wall Street trading floors are known as fast-paced, high-intensity environments where people thrive on the adrenaline and competition of following the market. To succeed, she said, you must embrace the chaos.
"Life, markets, clients — can be complicated. It will be chaotic at times," she said, adding, "The best young hires don't panic, they adjust under pressure."
Here is Bouzali's advice for interns and industry upstarts after 21 years rising in the ranks on the trading floor of one of Wall Street's most competitive banks.
Embrace insecurity rather than avoid it
Bouzali said she often tells young hires to use their inevitable feelings of fear and insecurity as motivation to work hard instead of faking confidence or know-how.
"I always like telling our incoming interns: You will be insecure, it's a fact of life," she said. "Embrace it and let those insecurities, your fears, become a driving force. Use them instead of pretending that they're not there."
Bouzali, for example, admitted to feeling both excited and terrified during her first summer on the trading floor, and was worried she didn't know enough about finance.
"It's important to not compare yourself to peers and start competing against a more honest metric — the version of yourself that plays it safe."
Learn to deal with "opacity"
One of Bouzali's earliest lessons was learning not to expect the structure and direction she was used to at university, where the path to success is clearly laid out in syllabi and measured via homework and tests.
"A trading floor is particularly opaque, and that ambiguity is a feature, it's not a bug," she said.
If that's confusing, it's meant to be, Bouzali said.
"It's something that I try to convey to our interns early on," she said, adding, "You will not always be handed tasks or told exactly what to do and how to do it."
Opacity is not a signal to wait, but to move, she explained.
"You have to throw yourself into problems. You have to sniff out what matters and what doesn't matter. You have to pin point what people's bottlenecks and pain points are and just start being useful," she said.
Make decisions with less information than you think you need
Bouzali referenced what Jeff Bezos once coined as his "70% rule." It argues that you should make decisions with 70% of the information, and Bouzali says it's something she tries to live by.
"In certain domains, if you wait for 80% or 90% of the information, the opportunity will be gone," she said. It's a mantra she thinks more industry upstarts should adopt.
"I sense that young people — and generally all people — overthink, overplan, and wait too long to curate the perfect path forward," she said. "Many decisions can be reversed, few decisions are irreversible."
Chase impact rather than promotions
No one — not even the best investors in the world — can predict the future. Bouzali knows this and suggests young people learn to focus on what's in front of them.
"Don't obsess over the next 10 years," she said. "Just focus on winning the next 6 to 12 months."
Getting things done versus chasing titles will naturally lead you to the next big thing.
"Promotions don't follow ambition. They follow impact," Bouzali said. "A better question than 'How do I get ahead?' is 'What are the hard things that need to get done that I could do?'"
Learn to slow down
Bouzali's job demands she stay up to speed on the news and market at all times, so she uses reading as a way to diversify her perspectives outside the here and now. From obscure medieval history to art criticism and strange fiction, she prefers to read things "off the beaten path."
"I try to avoid the super contemporary and super trendy because I really want to develop completely different mental threads," said Bouzali of her book choices. "It's been very good for me to just step completely outside of what is trendy here and now and find older, slower modes of thought."
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