Or to help your friends decide whether to invest in a technology stock that they got a hot tip on. And last, but not least, understanding finance can help you manage your own life better as you prepare to buy a house, send your kids to college and invest to increase your own personal wealth. If you have an intuition for ideas in economics such as opportunity cost, supply and demand and the importance of scarcity you probably will understand finance well. There are few, if any, borders in the world of finance. If you need to change dollars to Japanese yen you are just as likely to do it by calling a trader in your same city as calling a trader on the other side of the world.
Finance is truly global and can involve significant international travel.
An emphasis on quantitative analysis. To figure out what the best investment for you or a business might be, you probably would want to undertake some statistical and mathematical analyses of those investment possibilities. Accounting numbers are also important in finance because they are our way of keeping score on how our investments are doing. Most finance jobs don't involve direct selling, but you will usually need to convince someone, whether it be your boss or a customer, about your point of view on a financial decision. While the economy has been through hard times in the 1990s, hiring in finance has been brisk.