Personal statement!!! Please comment!!!! Thx alot!!!!

“The water that bears the boat is the same that swallows it up.” It is the Chinese metaphor that suggests if something is used correctly, it will be of benefit. If used incorrectly, it will do harm. Over the past few decades, the emergence of financial innovations has played an important role in financial markets for better risk management. However, structured products such as CDO created in recent years often appear difficult and ambiguous to be understood. Mismanagement of such tools could result in a disaster to the users themselves as if a short gun misfired. Realizing the importance and the necessity to master the edge of financial techniques and to develop effective hedging strategies, I found that a graduate education in Mathematical Finance and Computation would be vital for my knowledge and career development.

The year of 2008 was the time when the wake of financial tsunami arose. Starting my career as a management trainee in the corporate banking industry, I was granted the perfect view to witness the consequences of overtrading financial risks in the hands of market participants. During the difficult time, we structured credit facilities with more stringent requirements to mitigate counterparty risks as well as assisted corporate clients to hedge their financial risks with financial instruments, for example, interest rate swaps and currency forward contracts. My experience on dealing with increasing counterparty risks and hedging financial risks for clients inspired me to advance my practical techniques in derivatives for hedging. Therefore, I moved forward to be a trading analyst with xxx Investment Ltd, responsible for financial analysis on stocks and derivatives recommendation. At the security firm, as well as hedging, derivatives such as index futures and options are used to engage in arbitrage in reaction to market mispricing. I was impressed by one of the firm’s directors that demonstrated how mathematical finance combining technology derived conclusions that can be otherwise difficult to find or not immediately obvious from intuition in practice. My motivation to study Financial Mathematics with Computation was further developed.

While the above reasons have concluded the importance of financial mathematics, the choice of school will be equally important to be considered. The University of xxx’s Financial Mathematics and Computation programme stands out for me because of its practical and highly quantitative contents. The programme offers core courses dedicated to mathematical tools commonly used in finance – C++ Programming. Together with elective courses such as "Advanced Methods of Derivative Pricing” workshops, the curriculum of the programme will equip me with quantitative techniques and practical knowledge that are essential to achieving my career goals. In my undergraduate study, both of my majors had a close relationship with mathematical finance. From the courses of Financial Econometrics, I learned to generate models based on historical data for trend projection. From the courses of Finance, I learned the reputed financial models such as Hull White models and Black Scholes models to price the derivatives. Both majors provided me a good preparation for the study of Financial Mathematics. Yet, in order to fully comprehend the master’s degree program, I would like to study Mathematics Pre-Master Diploma Program towards the postgraduate degree progressively. I also believe that my past working experience would add value to class discussions by bringing in real-life examples in the banking industry and stock markets.