IAP: Quant Research Project at Credit Suisse

The Independent Activities Period (IAP) is a four week term at MIT that runs through the month of January. During IAP members of the MIT community have the opportunity to organize, sponsor and participate in a variety of activities, including a broad set of mini-courses, forums, lecture series, and independent research. 

During IAP, I’m working on an equity trading research project at Credit Suisse. This project is led by a quant research team with five people. I'm required to develop models to measure the impact of short selling on future stock returns and create a scorecard to be used by long only managers and long short managers in their investment process. It was quite exciting when I found out my supervisor at Credit Suisse is one of the two people who created 130/30 index (the other one is Professor Lo from Sloan). During the project, I've got help and guidance from colleagues at Credit Suisse and Prof. Kogan at Sloan. Many thanks to them. So far, we have finalized our planned approach and will start modeling next week. Hopefully we will finish the whole thing by the end of this month. It is truly a meaningful project and definitely worth the effort. 

In the beginning of this month, some of my classmates and first year MBA students went to the Asia Finance Trek, which is a collection of formal and informal events designed to connect students focused on an Asian finance career with top-tier employers in Hong Kong, Beijing and Singapore. The trek is co-sponsored by the Asia Business Club and the Career Development Office. This year, they visited 15 firms from Investment Banking, Asset Management and Commercial Banking, including Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JPMorgan, Fidelity, Barclays Capital and BoA Merrill Lynch. The participants said this two-week trek was very rewarding.