Confessions of a Cat-holic (215)

That summer when I met Cyrena, she already had finished her internship at Morgan Stanley in New York. I told her I intended to major in OR too and was pondering the option of working in sales and trading (that was after I finished my internship with Vanessa Chin at HKU). Cyrena told me that I should go for fixed income because they loved quantitative people in that particular division. I took her words very seriously. She was another person whom I really looked up to in convincing me to consider working in fixed income.

That summer I worked at Morgan Stanley, Cyrena already moved onto another role in corporate finance. She was no longer working in FX options. I saw her in Chinatown once in a supermarket when I shopped groceries. I asked her how she was doing, while also telling her that I would be starting in fixed income at Morgan Stanley New York. She already forgot our conversation at Capstone Hong Kong apparently. She told me that she was transiting from the trading floor to a corporate environment at Morgan Stanley. I believed she had moved into DCM or corporate finance. Only after I checked her profile that I realized she was a TV show host for the Hong Kong Disney Show. She worked at Disney's business development department as a senior financial analyst after Morgan Stanley. After that, she matriculated at HBS. Both Caecilia and Cyrena were very successful with a very good track record in finance and business, that eventually placed them onto the world's best MBA. I wanted to be like them too, but then I thought I probably wouldn't need an MBA from Harvard for a marketing or PR role in events or corporate communications. I really couldn't see myself on the trading floor for more than two years. I still agreed that an undergraduate business degree at Columbia would be enough for a sales and marketing role.

During my rotation, I shadowed Cyrena's boss, that MD from my super day interview. He was the head of foreign exchange. I worked at Lehman the summer before so I had working knowledge about different products. Foreign exchange was by far the fastest paced products within fixed income. The currency rates were amongst the most volatile across all the products. There would be no way I would consider working in foreign exchange. I also had problems converting currencies, even though it only involved elementary school mathematics. Well, I tended to excel in calculus better than simple maths anyways. I had no problems understanding the ABS, but foreign exchange? Definitely not my forte.

Cyrena's boss was the MD who told me I answered the question right on spot, the only person out of 200 candidates he had ever asked. I told him on his desk that actually it was a problem I was taught in high school, I really wasn't that smart. Then all of a sudden, his face turned very serious. I was back facing him, and when I turned around to see what he was doing, he was going through his archived emails in his email box. He told me that he was deleting all his emails and his recommendations for me. He told me that he was a key person for the internship committee. He said I would have to work very hard to convince the others to guarantee myself a seat in the full time analyst class.

He said it in a way like I made a racist comment against a black person or something. What the hell had I done? Seriously, I really didn't like the trading floor, but then I didn't like corporate finance either. I really wished I could beat Eddie up for the tortures he put me through. I felt that I was tiptoeing the whole time on the trading floor. I thought that the trading floor was too crazy for me.

It was then when I started to ponder my options in securitized products group. It was relatively slow paced with a lot of financial modeling and derivatives pricing. I asked the structurer for quotes when I worked at Lehman. It was relatively straight-forward, I just had to input the right parameters, the financial models built in excel would do the maths. That should be fine.