Tim Wong, CEO of AHL, Man Investments

I studied engineering at university and initially looked at engineering jobs before considering a career in finance. Growing up in the huge financial centre of Hong Kong meant I was familiar with investment and had seen my parents buying and selling stocks. Coming from a scientific background, I could relate to the analysis involved.

Starting out in investment

Once I’d got a job, starting my career was remarkably straightforward – mostly because I was deeply interested in the work and found that I loved the markets. Investment management is all about trying to forecast what might go up or down and I had real enthusiasm for learning about it all. There was a lot of new terminology to get to grips with and I had to learn about the markets and how to get data. I had no idea how many different types of tradable instrument are out there! I soon found I could apply my analytical skills to financial data as well as the engineering data I’d been used to as a student.

Analysing the markets

No matter what area of finance you work in, you’ll always need to use analytical skills to frame a problem, analyse it and then arrive at a rational conclusion. At the same time, you can’t just treat the data as numbers; you have to have some interest in figuring out what might actually drive those movements. There is an element of problem-solving. The financial market is like a living thing; it’s not exactly a science but a large part of the investment approach can be scientific.

Continual learning

I’ve been with this company for 17 years but the industry changes so much that it feels as if I’ve gone through two or three jobs! The thing I like most about my work is that the problems I think about on a daily basis keep evolving – not just because markets change but because there’s a constant stream of new emerging markets and financial instruments – so I keep on learning new things.