Finance is a vast subject and what I hope to ideally take away from being a participant in the
program is to be able to navigate through the areas of finance unbeknownst to me such as
investment banking or private equity. Furthermore, I believe the program can complement my
understanding of any given company from more of a fundamental perspective as opposed to my
current view of looking at a given company as simply a trading vehicle. Finally, I think the overall
professional focus of the class would serve as motivation for me to go above and beyond to be able
to achieve my goals.
I come from a combination of a computer science and finance backgrounds. My dad was a
so!ware engineer and a majority of the family from his side was as well. My mom, on the other
hand, was an accountant and my uncle and grandparents from my mom’s side ran their own
financial firm in India. One theme or subject rather that seemed prevalent throughout my life was
math. Both my parents had a very strong background in math and it became one of my strong points
as well.
I became interested in finance from a very young age. My dad initially introduced me to the
concept of stocks from in 7th grade and I quickly grew a passion for the subject as it intrigued me as
to how people could make money from something that seemed so intangible. My dad was a
so!ware engineer so his knowledge in the subject was limited but I was hungry to learn more any
way I could whether it be waking up at 6 am in the morning to watch the markets or simply reading
education materials that covered strategies to trade the stock market.
During the summer of 2013, I started trading with my own money. I started out trading binary
options which are basically a derivative of forex pairs. I had developed a profitable trading strategy
that combined a few technical indicators to figure out where market maker algorithms were buying
or selling a certain forex pair. However I knew this kind of trading was not sustainable as the liquidity
trading.