Tell us a bit about yourself. 

I grew up in Dongguan, Guangdong. My parents had their own business, so I was interested in the field since secondary school. I’m still interested in doing something entrepreneurial! AI is something I’m currently studying. 

How did this translate to your choice of university? 

I was in a unique position. It so happened that in China, HKU was the only school I applied to as the application results came before I could apply to other universities. I’d wanted to come to Hong Kong anyway, so I accepted the offer for the Accounting and Finance programme. 

So from an early age you wanted to come to Hong Kong? 

Yes, well. In Guangdong, we are culturally quite close to Hong Kong. I grew up watching TVB, listening to music from Hong Kong, etc. So I had always considered coming here. 

Cool. And why Accounting and Finance 

Well, accounting is the language of business. I was interested in Business, but no particular subset. So I actually tried many different programmes, internships, functions at university. 

Take me through what you tried throughout university. 

In year 1, I participated in a volunteering programme that took me to mountainous areas in China to teach for about two months.  

In my second year, I joined a bond fund in China to do strategy research and backtesting. 

I then managed to get an offer for a role in the global markets team at Bank of China Hong Kong, which was a rotation across several desks, though my main role was in FX. 

After this, I continued on finding roles in global markets, and got a semester internship at JP Morgan’s global markets team, where I gained exposures to equity structuring and derivatives trading. After this, I also had a summer internship at Morgan Stanley’s research team, covering consumer stocks. 

After I’d finished, I realised that research was different from what I really wanted to do, so I focused on markets roles. In the end, I got an offer from BNP for a trading role, and began full-time in 2018. 

I see! That’s quite an extensive CV even ahead of graduation. Did being at HKU help in building this exposure? 

Yes – the most memorable experience for me was actually taking a HKU common core course on entrepreneurship, which required us to work at a startup and gain real-life experience. It was good exposure to understand how business worked. 

Aside, things like CEDARS was also helpful. I did indeed find alumni resources to be helpful, as senior in the industry were all quite open to sharing their experiences, providing feedback, offering referrals and other such support. 

Lovely. So back to your first job, how did you overcome what I’m sure was a steep learning curve? 

I really had to learn on the go. The difficulty wasn’t on the trading side as much, but more the behind the scenes activity, the trading lifecycle.  

To do so was not only about being willing to self-learn. My boss was very helpful to me in overcoming these challenges. Even in university, it’s important to leverage the people around you. Always ask people for advice and help. 

Ok! So what’s next after BNP? 

So after BNP, during Covid, a Chinese hedge fund headhunted me into a long-short focussed role. I had wanted to try the buy side, so the move made sense. It was very different from a sell-side role, as I had to manage the trading platform – here you need to deal with even more counterparties and manage more relationships, which was a key difference. 

After 2 years, I was headhunted again into a multi-strategy fund. As opposed to my last company, which was quite well-established, this company was quite fresh. It was a good opportunity to build out a new platform from scratch. I took this opportunity, and I’m still there. 

So what was your approach to navigating all these roles successfully? 

I wouldn’t say I’ve been very successful! But my goal throughout has been to try to stay ahead of my peers, try to do better. Always try to learn and keep an eye out for opportunities. In finance, the more experienced you get, the more limited the number of roles there are in the market. 

If you would like to reach out to Eric, please contact us directly and we may refer any questions to him.