Jingwei Lu
Professor Barry Ridings and Rob Symington
Wall Street Trek
April 27-28, 2017
The Museum of American Finance (MOAF) is located at 48 Wall Street, the former headquarters of The Bank of New York, and close to the New York stock exchange (NYSE). Though maybe a little small, MOAF can still be a place of great fun to those who are interest in finance.
During my visit to MOAF, what impressed me the most was the exhibit about Alexander Hamiton’s contributions to the development of American finance. Less than five months after taking the oath of office in 1789, President George Washington appointed Alexander Hamilton to serve as the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury. In this role, Hamilton created the U.S. Mint, the customs Department, the tax system and the Coast Guard, as well as the Bank of New York and the country’s first central bank.
【MEET WITH FINANCIAL EXECUTIVES】
During the 2 days’ course of Wall Street Trek, 8 special guests shared their observation and insight into finance, and at the beginning of the class, we also received a warm welcome from Mr. Xu, President of New York branch, Bank of China.
Among all these, Mr. Andrew Chin’s lecture about leveraging big data in asset management impressed me the most. Artificial intelligence and big data have brought a large number of investment opportunities to the modern world, and are greatly changing the existing business model of almost all industries. The ability of data analysis and storage grows fast, accompanied with the rapid growth of data scale. Mr. Andrew Chin from Alliance Bernstein showed his knowledge on leveraging big data in asset management, and also shared his views on questions about this field which exist at present and also will in the near future, including the model of cooperation between financial institutions and consulting agencies on big data, as well as the relationship between data collection and privacy regulation. This lecture was of great use to us, especially when we had just finished our Hackathon sector, which focused mainly on AI and big data.
Another impressive part was the lecture given by Mr. Shawn Musselman, advisor at Lazard in Global Energy team, on energy industry. He gave a big picture about the ups and downs of the energy industry over the last few decades, and shared his views on the future of international energy industry.
New internal and external environment provide unlimited possibilities for everyone, and the Belt and Road initiative is greatly transforming the global system. Understanding the global market is of great importance during the process of internationalization of Chinese firms, especially when the national economy of China has entered the ‘new normal’ stage, and more and more Chinese firms are going global nowadays. It’s essential for individuals to gain the ability to profoundly grasp national policy and industry trends, and form their own theoretical system, which are exactly what we have learnt from this Wall Street Trek course.
