a (good) day in the life of a product controller

so, i've tried to keep this as objective as possible.
if you have a friend or know someone that wants to know what a day in the life of a product controller is like, read this.

9:20 am
- come into the office
- 30 new emails, 25 deleted
- check a morning report, make sure the systems properly ran their batch jobs last night
- need to setup a new curve for the trader who wants it asap
- there seems to be a break in the numbers between one system in London and one locally here, but not on the front end, only on the back (whatever the hell that means). need to post a reversal entry on the backend to sort it out.

10:20 am
- new curve has been setup by my outsourced teammate in manila, however there is an error, one of the data fields needed to be entered by the trader is empty. i chase the trader, trader doesn't know it & doesnt think it needs to entered. i tried telling that to the system, it didn't care. error persists, now must contact IT for further assistance.
- we have to approve the accounts we manage every month by "signing off". for some reason, one of our accounts has been incorrectly assigned to another team, i need to fill out the form and transfer the account. however, no one is here to sign the sheet, and the acting manager that is around, wants no part in this - doesn't want to pick up any more liabilties....smart man.

11:20 am
- went down to operations/middle office to pick up some structured notes packages to review the cashflows that are hitting the accounts I manage.
- reviewed some packages to confirm amounts and will let these packages hit the daily p/l
- curve is still not setup, IT simply doesn't want to help, tells us to "wait for Moscow to wake up"...if I were a Trader requesting this, trust me, he'd be fixing the issue as well as providing me a "happy ending".

12:20 pm
- reviewed and confirmed structured trade's cash flow amounts from the trade tickets, even drew a diagram.
- checked p/l that was produced by outsourced teammate in manila, sent it off to the traders.
- IT still not helping yet
- off to lunch

2:20 pm
- continue to verify cashflows
- got a long email from trader, he's being asked to check some catagorization of a curve from London, he doesnt want to deal with it,says one line to me "could you plss amend?", that's it.
- got an email from middle office asking me (6 months BAC) and another VP on another product desk (10 years) how to book a trade. VP doesn't know and doesn't want to fix it, he's waiting for me to deal with it, and it's his own book. This lady didn't even know he was the controller for that desk because he's been avoiding her calls all week, he's been here for 10 years. He used to, to kill time, have the p/l generated from a system & then do the p/l by hand, just to check/kill time.

3:20 pm
- finished cashflows reviews, going to release and reserve certain amounts. sent out a detailed email to front office, middle, and back on the amounts to be taken upfront and over the life of the trade.
- chasing IT on two issues now
- uploaded the flash figures for yesterday's performence (T-1) to London
- now going to pick up transfer pricing form colleague who will be leaving the firm in 2 weeks. Eyes open, mouth shut...Transfer pricing is the act of transferring revenues/costs from regional location to another. People wanna get REVENUE for doing work for other offices, those same people don't want COST for someone elses work. So it's a fun game of back/forth.
- almost forgot, another trader gave me a call,1 year older, debated about an upcoming party, about home, the OC, unfortunately had to interrupt him from his free thinking and joyous spirit, had to get back to reviewing his trade tickets and chase London on a misbooking for him...

4:20 pm
- went down to Koots for a cup of green tea for 20 mins
- came up to do Transfer pricing. Spent an hr matching up the mtd amount for various accounts to our ytd amount - yes, manually.
- IT has claims that the curve has been setup in a different curve system and must be reverted to the correct one
- colleague has come up to me and told me he will resign by next Monday, yesterday it was October, tomorrow he'll probably say this Friday...

5:20 pm
- called another new grad controller in London to compare our day-to-day
- p/l as been confirmed and signed off for the day
- IT has provided a solution to the curve issue, I am now asking manila to amend it.
- IT has called me if I use treasury allocation method for treasury bonds (i have no idea what he has just said, i said no)
- chasing london on a loss booked in one of my trader's books that my trader does not agree with
- chasing manila on the progress my backend system break
- got a call from London asking about a product granularity issue with the system, because there is field that is left blank that needs to be filled in for a particular book or else there is an error in system that causes a break, etc ,etc ,etc...it wasnt my book.

6:20 pm
- going home, i'm on exit mode while the rest of dept. stays until 9-10pm.

now go make your judgement








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