What does a Financial Analyst Really do? An Interview by Dr David Chui

June 4, 2016
Written by Mandy Ng
Published in Economics and Finance News
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The Department of Economics and Finance hosted a forum on 4 June 2016 and invited two CFA Charterholders, Mr Samuel Lee and Mr Sunny Tam, to share on the topic: What does a Financial Analyst Really do? – An Interview by Dr David Chui.

Through the conversation, Samuel and Sunny shared their experiences in working as financial analysts in Hong Kong. They discussed the challenges of being an analyst nowadays. “It is always a difficult task to satisfy both institutional customers and the company. There are always tradeoffs and a balance is needed,” Samuel said. Sunny also emphasised the significance of entering Chinese-funded institutions and advised students to equip themselves with communication skills in order to gain more opportunities.

To be a good analyst, they shared that “A good report does not mean putting tons of words and numbers in it. You know, the time of the sales team is costly. We only have one minute to sell our report during morning meetings. Therefore, it is important to keep it simple, come up with a catchy title and end with a sound conclusion to grasp attention.”

They also shared some personal techniques on analysing a company – “Under the property market, our valuations are normally based on the Net Asset Value method. We will analyse the time of booking the projects and the cost of projects. In the oil and gas industry, there are numerous assumptions and variables that exist. We should always keep our financial models simple. The less changes in variables, the better accuracy we have.”

About Mr Samuel Lee, CFA

Samuel is currently taking a mid-career break to pursue personal endeavors and was with JP Morgan for 8 years with his last role as the Head of Asia Petrochemicals and Refining research. He also held a similar role at HSBC for a brief period before going to JP Morgan. Before joining the financial services industry, Samuel worked 8 years with BP, one of the largest oil companies globally, in numerous roles while also spending some time at CLP Holdings working on environmental research. His education background includes an Engineering degree from University of Calgary, MSc in Biotechnology from HKUST and MBA from INSEAD. He was the Industry Mentor for the HSMC team during the CFA Institute Research Challenge and will soon be appointed as the Industry Advisor for the BBA (Hons) in Financial Analysis programme.

About Mr Sunny Tam, CFA

Sunny is currently a Credit Analyst at JP Morgan Asset Management, specialising in China State-owned enterprises, Asia Utilities and Asian TMT companies. He was also a sell-side analyst covering greater China real estate companies both from an equity and credit perspective for 9 years at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan. Prior to that, he spent some time with the HKSAR government as a Research Analyst at its Economic Analysis and Business Facilitation Unit, covering China and South East Asian economies.