Shanzheng Ba is a student on the Joint Bachelor's Degree Program between CityU and Columbia University. He majored in Computational Finance at CityU and he is now in the final year of study at the ColumbiaU. Last summer, he had an internship at Morgan Stanley's New York office, and was then given a return offer. He will be joining the company’s Fixed Income Division, Foreign Exchange Trading and Structuring Team as a full-time analyst on his graduation later this year.
The good days at CityU
I always dreamed to study and work in a world financial centre. I took a Maths Olympiad in my high school and was an active member of Model United Nations of my high school in China. Considering my interest in business and my strength in maths, I chose the Computational Finance programme at CityU.
I am thankful that the College of Business provided me with a lot of excellent opportunities to accelerate my career. One of the most valuable experiences was the internship programme in Singapore. I was eagerly searching for internship opportunities across Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore in my sophomore year. It was especially hard for a young Computational Finance student because a quantitative-related job usually requires high proficiency in programming, a deep understanding of finance, and advanced maths and probability knowledge. CB has partnered with various firms in Singapore to provide oversea internship opportunities. I was very lucky to pass the interview and had chance to work at a quant private equity firm called Ecquitas. During my 4-week internship in Singapore, I was mainly responsible for scraping data for different start-ups and cleaning the data sets for further processes. I developed my understanding of data processing and polished my programming skill in Python. I built my first multi-processes python scraper for the real financial world, which was probably the python project of which I am most proud.
Internship in Singapore
Another valuable experience was the Culture and Language Immersion Scheme which I joined in my first summer holiday at CityU. I flew to New Zealand for Business English classes and volunteering activities. In the six-week programme, I not only practiced my English but also developed a deep friendship with my host family – Katrina and Lou. At that time, I was not confident enough with my spoken English and was worried about my ability to fit into a new environment, which were two of my primary concerns in applying for the ColumbiaU Program. Lou was born in New York and moved to New Zealand later. He shared with me a lot of fun stories about New York. That time in New Zealand was the longest time that I was immersed in a fully English-speaking environment before I came to New York. Looking back, this experience encouraged me to apply for the Joint Degree Program.
I didn't fully realise how valuable my experience at CityU had been until I started to compete with students from the US. I was really proud and appreciated my internships and summer programme at CityU. My experience in Hong Kong and Singapore helped me to distinguish myself from others in the recruiting process.
At Morgan Stanley
I worked in the Fixed Income Division of Morgan Stanley last summer and really enjoyed the collaborative culture there. When I worked in firms in Asia, 90% of the work I got was tedious work such as printing stuff, cleaning data, and editing slides. On the contrary, Morgan Stanley invests in the interns. I basically spent all my time understanding the business, developing knowledge about products, and building my network across the firm. I was even a bit shocked when I wasn’t given any task when I first hit the desk. The whole objective of the internship was learning! Bringing added value to the firm was a bit hard because I felt like everyone else was actually adding value to me. The work styles for my three rotations were very different but I liked them all.
Photo with Katrina and Lou
My first rotation was in Foreign Exchange. FX is a 24/7 global market and I usually woke up at 5:30am and listened to the global news whilst washing up. I got into the office before 6:30am and prepared for the morning meetings. We usually had two meetings, one global focusing on G10 currencies and another focusing on the local Latin American markets. Interns are responsible for taking the meeting notes. Interns were not licensed to trade, but we could observe how traders reacted to market news and asked questions about different trading strategies. “Shadowing” best describes my day-to-day position in the trading seat. Markets cool down after 3 pm and then interns have more chance to ask questions. Usually people leave before 5:30pm. At the end of the 3-week rotation, we were asked to present a trade pitch. FX was the most challenging and attracting work during my internship, which is also where I got my return offer from.
In my second rotation, I sat on the private side of fixed income – Securitization and Lending. This role is a banking seat, not a trading seat, and a typical working schedule is 8:30am-8:30pm. Securitization is the process of trenching asset cash flow into new securities. One example is the kind of mortgage-backed securities which started the subprime loan crisis in 2008. Those securities are still issued and traded on the market and are growing fast. My role was to build the cashflow model for consumer loans. The model itself was less math-heavy but focused more on understanding the client’s needs and polishing the securities details. Modeling itself is not rocket science once you get your hands on it. What is more important is to understand the nuance of the goals between originators, credit facilities, and investors. Just to give an example, originators want to pay lower interest, but lower interest makes a bond less attractive to investors. On the contrary, higher interest might result in a lower credit rating, making a bond less attractive. A structurer needs to understand different counterparties’ interests delicately.
My last rotation was in XVA trading – a very niche trading desk that emerged after the financial crisis. It provides a digital option that calls on a default event. The desk is usually busy from 7am-12noon and cools down after lunch time. It is the most quantitative desk in the entire Fixed Income Division and I really enjoyed my learning there.