I need a crash course in financial jobs. Can anyone tell me what the following means?

Question

What types of accountants are there and where would they typically work?
How many types of financial services companies are there, what do they do (eg what are hedge funds?) and what are the main job roles in these companies?

Answer 1

1. Financial accountants, cost accountants, tax accountants
Financial accountants work in every company.
Cost accountants work generally in manufacturing companies.
Tax accountants work for tax preparation firms and corporations (doing in-house tax).

2. Financial services company.
Too numerous to name. Really. There are hundreds of financial services. Short list? Insurance, commercial banks, merchant banks, export-import banks, credit unions, project finance, brokerage, exchanges, credit card companies, trusts, hedge funds, mutual funds, closed end funds, securitized trusts... this doesn't even count the firms servicing the financial sector like credit agencies, treasury functions, escrow...

3. What's a hedge fund? The term used to mean those funds that would use hedging strategies to remove a portion of risk. For example, go long on a good shipping company, go short on a bad shipping company with the same beta and you hedge away industry risk (shipping) and market risk (beta). However, the terms has been bastardized to really mean any non-traditional fund (i.e. not a mutual fund, not a trust, not an insurance company, not a close-end fund).

4. What are the main roles? Eeks. Way, way too many roles to name here. But in broad terms - there's product development, sales and execution/settlement - as well as all the traditional roles like accounting, HR, marketing...