I started a junior trader position very recently on the mortgage desk at an insitutional AM firm. The firm is not small (>250B AUM), but does not offer structured training of any sort. My main day to day tasks are: answer phone/take bids, entering and allocating trades to hedge/adjust portfolio risks, and running reports. I have a good amount of downtime throughout the day, which i use to study and read market commentaries/primers.
The PM tells me I should be able to understand strategies behind trades in a few months, and be able to formulate my own trade ideas in 6mo/1yr. What else could i do to speed up the process of understanding the fixxed income/MBS market? What screeens on BB to follow, resources to decipher trader lingo, good books/primers, etc?
On bloomberg follow
TBPF shows the coupon stack and how it is trading relative to UST (wider/tighter)
TFLO shows real time flows so you can see if there is net buying/selling by coupon
TACT shows actual trade prices which is more helpful if you are trading spec pools than TBA
You should get on daily trader loops, mostly primary dealers who send updates a few times a day speaking to the flows/sentiment they are seeing. Read their formal weekly commentary as well. I prefer MS and noumra.
from a valuation perspective you should have access to yieldbook to look at OAS, convexity, yield and duration. Learn how to calculate when a coupon is trading long/short and how to structure a trade to profit on that. Most weekly primary dealer commentaries have trade recommendations based on dislocations like that. Follow theirs for a few weeks and then start constructing your own.
you will be fired if someone in the MO finds out that your book is misvalued. I guess you should try to stop this happening so make sure you understand how the process works and what can go wrong…