Investing in the stock market at an early age made me consider this as a career seriously. I realised I wanted to join a business school. At University, where I did a Bachelors in Business Administration, I got good exposure to finance, marketing and operations. During my exchange program, I got an opportunity to interact with bankers and understood what they did at work. Right after graduation, I was picked by a Top Banking firm. I work in the financial markets dealing with equity.

On a day-to-day basis, I build relationships with institutional investors, hedge funds, and asset managers. For example, say a company goes public, investment bankers like me talk to portfolio managers who represent the clients, to understand demand and figure out a price. When a company goes public, it is important to get an understanding of how many people are interested to invest and how much are they interested in investing. I spend about 60-70% of my time with 20 - 30 clients. Rest of the time I understand and get updates from the research team to sell the investment research to these clients. The research would be from the listed stocks in the Asia-Pacific region and I would advise them on where they should deploy the money, which stocks they should buy, which sector they should invest in, etc.

I believe in order to thrive in such a role you need to be comfortable working in groups, be persuasive when talking with clients and be aggressive at times as the situation demands. In fact, you should be able to think on your feet to thrive in different situations. It is quite competitive at work and it definitely helps if you have good foundational knowledge in financial metrics and modelling.

There was a lot of investment/ finance industry-related words used in this Newsletter. While we try our best to make the content as understandable to you as possible, we see a lot of merit in exposing you to these words. If you have difficulty in understanding any of these words (equity, hedge fund, asset manager, institution investor, etc.), Investopedia is a good online resource, which we highly recommend.