I have always been interested in Finance since I was in Junior College, and this led me to start learning more about investing and trading prior to entering university. During this time, I also started a tennis racket stringing business and used my profits generated from it to invest in the US market. Through the years I have dabbled in different kinds of securities trading and investing including cryptocurrency, stocks and options, trying out various strategies to try to give myself the edge in the market.

Most recently, I completed a summer Internship with Capital Group under the Global Investment Control team. The internship allowed me to the chance to work with both the middle office and the investment group. Doing projects with the research analysts, managing orders between the research group and the traders, aggregating portfolio information for the analysts as well as looking to understand if the company was optimally positioned operationally in the Chinese onshore market. Other than the technical skills and the on the job knowledge I picked up from the work I did, this also gave me a much broader overview of how an asset management company function. Through the internship, one of the biggest takeaways was the product innovation that was going on in the company as well as the different roles and functions of the different departments and how they work together to ensure the best for their clients.

Prior to that, I completed a semester Internship with Maybank Kim Eng under the Market Risk team. Due to personnel issues, the full timer count was reduced from 3 to 1 for most of my internship and I was given a lot more responsibility. For the role, I covered the brokerage risk for the Asian and UK markets each day. This presented me a golden opportunity to learn first-hand about how to analyse and deal with different types of risks in the market.

Apart from work experiences, in school, I have been exposed to a multitude of modules. Being a Business Analytics and Finance student, I have been exposed to Financial Markets, programming, data visualisation, data wrangling and forecasting methods in R & Python. I have also taken modules in SQL to learn more about database systems.

Sean Lau

Student from Singapore, Singapore