What I do in my day job

I’ve been getting more LinkedIn visits recently which I guess is due to people looking up what I do in my day job, so I might as well write a blog post about it.

So not surprisingly, yes, I work as an analyst for financial services, and a disclaimer as usual, everything I share online is my personal opinion and not of the company I work for.

It’s pretty common to have a job in the financial services given that it’s one of the main pillars of Singapore’s economy. Here’s a little back story of how I got into banking.

It started way back when I was a teen learning how to make money online, because back then we’re broke and we wanted money to buy the things that we want. I got hooked on learning how to trading stocks and FX online, again not financial advice, so I looked up professional traders and studied their methods. Anyway I don’t do any directional trading today and I believe dollar cost averaging an index is the most efficient way to grow wealth, but that’s a topic for another day. So in particular I followed this guy called Anton Kreil, who was a professional trader and I did his online courses because I was really serious about getting a job as a trader back then, working with 9 LCD screens and charts everywhere. I end up not getting any offers as a trader, but I got my first internship by cold-mailing a private wealth management firm, and I got in because the CIO saw I was into trading and part of the interview assignment was to propose a trading strategy, and I applied what I learnt and got a foot in the door.

Fast forward, I did several internships afterwards - the first one was really hard to get after a long search, but it gets easier after the first one - and one day, I chanced upon a role in operations for a global bank. I sort of given up being a trader since I felt I wasn’t good enough to do that, but working in a bank sounds cool and I totally didn’t mind working in the back office, even though my peers always aspire to be the front office investment bankers or the traders making the bank millions of dollars. I was like nah, I can just be at the back and chill. Turns out, I managed to make a career out of it.

I grew up loving excel and do most of my stuff on it, learning how to write formulas by googling about it, fixing other people’s spreadsheets, and gained a reputation as an excel “expert”, though I don’t consider myself one. I just use it a lot to be familiar with it.

Anyway, working in operations in a bank is basically providing business services, like checking the numbers are correct before submitting them to the regulators, analysing internal cases, managing internal changes to processes, doing up powerpoint slides to present to stakeholders, so on and so forth. I gradually grew and acquired analytical skills as I learnt and observed from my seniors and others who got promoted and how they got there.

I think it’s partially linked to my personality too. I’m relatively more reserved and not as sociable as the cool kids or loud people. I just like doing my own things, analysing how stuff works, drawing insights from data etc.

So anyway, I also did economics as my major in University and it is also a very analytical subject, looking at equations, but more importantly, using graphs and curves to illustrate ideas and concepts. I think equations are pretty dry to understand, whereas visuals always help, so I like to present my ideas using a chart or graph where possible, so you might have seen a graph or chart in my videos.

I also like to show numbers and a progressive comparison to visually see how stuff changes under different conditions, like rice grains absorbing a range of water amounts to see how it ends up tasting too.

Back then, I noticed there was a food science major in University but I didn’t spend much considering it, as I thought I didn’t want to end up working in a lab, and the discipline was more on chemistry. I didn’t really like college chemistry as it was mind-boggling hard, had to memorise all different kinds of shapes and equations etc. so nah I didn’t do food science. But today, I’m attracted to entry-level food science because it helps me to understand why food tastes good and how we can use the principles to make better food. Blogs like seriouseats and America’s Test Kitchen write about food science and probably have food scientists writing blogs, but they do so in an approachable way that’s easy to read for anyone to understand, so that’s pretty cool too.

So back to my job, I was working happily in operations and one fine day, a recruiter called me up and asked if I wanted to join them for more money. Since I struggled with getting a promotion back then, I readily agreed, so that’s how I end up in my current role now, mostly working in an consulting company for financial services. Typically, banks hire contractors on a short-term basis to do projects that last for a limited time only, like to fix some internal issues, or to meet a regulatory timeline and they need help fast. While it sounds like an unstable job, it’s actually a permanent job for me with the consulting company because after one project, I get placed onto another project as there’s always demand for contractors in this space. It’s a win for banks because they don’t have to keep us around after the project ends and not having anything for us to do, unlike their permanent staff who always have something to do like daily responsibilities. But banks pay a lot more for short-term help, so that’s where consulting companies pitch in. Projects come and go, sometimes they call us back again to do another related project or based on good reviews. So for me personally, I get exposure to many different kinds of projects at different parts of the bank, but still mostly back-office to fix their internal issues.

Outside of my day job, I write and film my home cooked meals and weekend investigations into cooking. Most people have families but I don’t have kids at the moment so there’s where I probably have more personal time than other people. Most people also keep their personal interests private, but for me, I see value in practising in public as much as I learn from others online. It feels good to help others and receive positive comments on my videos about how people enjoyed learning about a subject. I also measure myself on how effective I am in presenting a topic online. These days, content is everywhere, but I embrace this challenge by learning how to make good videos that people want to watch, which I learn of course by observing how good people do it. So overall, I feel it’s worth the risk of making content online, as long as there’s clear separation of my personal work from my day job, because I learn how to sharpen my thoughts and market my ideas well, get real feedback online, and compete with other creators in an international stage where the best of the best are ranked according to algorithms.

Making content online has also shaped how I think and work in my day job. I realise we need a hook or a strong reason for people to listen to us, so at work, I share the key conclusion first, before sharing the reasons and brief, and only go into detail when requested. I used to do the other way round, as I thought people want to know how I got to the conclusion and avoid literally jumping to conclusion. But turns out people don’t really want to know the full detailed story unless they really want to. They just want to know the headline news and key words to save time and it’s easy to understand so we can all move on. Only later on I found out from looking consulting training online, that they call this the pyramid principle, basically presenting the conclusion first, before diving in to the reasons.

Now, I prefer to present my data using visual charts, or a table at the minimum so it’s easy to understand the data. I also began to appreciate colour schemes and making slides look pretty neat and elegant so it appeals to a general audience to get my points across simply and elegantly. Later on, I learnt from the agile manifesto that we should try to simplify things and avoid unnecessary work. Here’s the quote: "Simplicity - the art of maximizing the amount of work not done - is essential”. But actually, I realised it takes a lot of work to make things simple. There’s another favourite quote something along the lines of “if i had more time, I would have writen a shorter letter”, because it takes time to write out what matters and condense to just the essence to save people time.

So anyway, hope this clarifies what I do in my day job currently and it’s pretty cool I could write as long as I want on my own website. Could have been shorter, but I thought I should just address this topic quickly.

Some people at work have noticed I have a better camera than most people because I use them to make videos online, so I am invited to take pictures of company events - which I enjoy doing also because it’s a dynamic form of art and it’s cool to capture exciting moments of an event. I also do so at no additional charge which I don’t mind at all because there’s no pressure to deliver like a professional photographer - I don't consider myself one either. I initially thought of sharing some of the pictures here on my website, but I realised it might not be appropriate unless I have written permission. So I might only share my own photos that I’ve taken at other events or some interesting images of food.