Dear Sir or Madam:

In my capacity as professor of modern western economics and information economics with the School of Economics and Management of Beijing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics (BUAA), I would like to offer my utmost support, via this letter of reference, to Mr. Wang XXX who is currently applying for admission into your renowned Master’s program in financial engineering. I made my acquaintance with Wang when he audited my course Game Theory as a graduate student of computer science at BUAA’s School of Computer Science and Engineering. By a pleasant coincidence, we became next-door neighbors five years ago and our regular contacts since then have allowed me to gain a thorough understanding of his outstanding qualities as both a professional and a person.

Wang’s background in computer science has been an important input to my own research. His broad view about information technology, his insightful percipience of the technical trend and his precise prediction about the future development of IT industry all proved to be quite valuable for my own research in information economics. His outstanding academic background and his rich multi-industry IT projects experiences have brought him superb engineering competency. Being my close neighbor, he has been providing constant consulting and support in terms of IT technology for some of my research projects. His recent help is to provide architecture consultancy for one of my MIS projects developed in VB.Net, where he quickly identified the hidden performance bottlenecks and designing deficiencies. On many occasions, his opinions based on his penetrating IT skills and experiences have proved invaluable.

Our contacts have been reciprocally enriching. Under my influence, Wang gradually developed increasing interest in economics and finance and, among many economics and finance publications, he has been a regular reader of the 21st Century Business Herald, the most authoritative of its kind in the country that offers in-depth coverage and analysis the major events in economy, finance, politics, business, and the industry that happen both in China and across the world. Obviously, Wang has been reading this thick newspaper not simply out of curiosity but as a student studying his textbook, for he would frequently consult me regarding many intriguing issues. Over the years, he has managed to accumulate a knowledge base in finance close to that of an average economics major. In addition, his knowledge is dynamic, for it is related to all the latest developments of the financial industries both at home and abroad.

A turning point in the development of his financial interest came when I initiated him to the emerging subject of financial engineering, which he realized could bridge his academic background in mathematics and computer science and his growing interest in finance. Passion would be the only right word that could adequately describe his enthusiasm for the subject. Among many conscious efforts to build up his knowledge and skills in financial engineering, he has lately studied the Co-integration Theory and his desire to apply the theory to a case study in the real world culminated in our collaborative project on the hedging performance study of copper futures in China’s Shanghai Futures Exchange (SHFE).

For a few months, he was immersed in studying the relevant financial mathematical and statistics theories of hedging under my informal mentoring. Being a smart and fast learner, he grasped the key mechanisms of hedging and was soon able to carry out comparative studies of the hedging performance by applying mathematical approaches. To compare three different hedging models — naïve hedge strategy, OLS method and the Error Correction Model (ECM), he inferred about the hedging ratios, using the three models, on the basis of SHFE’s relevant data from 20XX to 20XX. In this way, we succeeded in concluding about the hedging performance of those three different models. During the research, Peng’s solid mathematics foundation and outstanding computer skills played a paramount role. With a deep understanding of the essence of EMC, he applied it flexibly in analyzing the hedging ratios. In addition, he used relevant computer software to process a wealth of statistics. All our findings went into a research paper entitled The Hedging Performance of Copper Futures in SHFE, which has been accepted and published by Modern Management Science, a leading scholarly journal, even at the first review.

This unique collaborative research experience has allowed me to gain insights into Wang’s unlimited potential in financial engineering – that rare asset to be a top-tier, high-achieving financial engineer. He has all the necessary academic and professional foundations to succeed in the most rigorous and challenging Master’s program in the world. Most importantly, he has a most unquenchable motivation to venture into a new field which he believes would lead to a more exciting career path. I am convinced that a systematic training in financial engineering through your esteemed program would give him the platform to soar. With such a conviction, I hope that you would share my comment of this promising young man, recognize his special talents, and accept him into your prestigious program. We have every reason to expect his pioneering contributions to the future development of China’s financial engineering.

Yours sincerely

Liu XXX

Professor of Economics and Information Economics
School of Economics and Management
Beijing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics (BUAA)