Sean Liu
Sean Liu
My story started in Chongqing, China, where I was born and raised and spent most of my childhood. At age twelve, I moved with my family to Vancouver, Canada for my teenage years and secondary education. Then at age nineteen, I went on my own to New York City, USA, where I attended New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business and completed a Bachelor of Science degree with dual majors in Finance and Economics, with a minor in Psychology. During this time, I joined a programme that took me abroad for a semester each to London, UK and Shanghai, China, enabling me to gain perspectives from not just one, but three financial centers of the world.
It was on Wall Street, following my graduation, where I jumpstarted a career in proprietary equities trading. My source of income, for more than two years, depended upon my abilities to take money and make profits from US listed equities and ETF’s, as my job paid no baseline salary. As challenging and daunting as it was for a recent graduate, I appreciated each and every trading day and its opportunities, for giving me the unique set of perspectives on time value, money, risk, rewards, consistency, and discipline that I would not have acquired elsewhere.
Multiple MBA programmes in Asia came on my radar as I grew increasingly complacent in New York and sought a location change to further challenge myself and to seize the opportunities in and around China. HKU quickly won me over for the same reasons NYU had years ago: location, location and location, with Hong Kong being the last of the four major financial centers where I had yet to live full time. That said, HKU’s excellent network of alumni and mentors, small class size, and high quality of staff and students definitely made it a privilege for me to be with a class where I can contribute and learn about doing business in Asia.