Internship Spotlight: Chenyu Zhang ’22, Merrill Lynch
Chenyu Zhang ’22 shares insights from an internship with a newly listed Chinese-based internet company.
We asked rising second-year MBA students to check in from their summer internships, where they are applying the lessons of their first year at Yale SOM.
Chenyu Zhang ’25
Joint MBA-Master’s in Asset Management candidate; Silver Scholar
Internship: Equity Research, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Hong Kong
Hometown: Wuxi, China
Pronouns: She/her/hers
Favorite SOM class: Portfolio Management in Practice
for work visas
This summer I interned at Bank of America Merrill Lynch Hong Kong office as an equity research summer analyst. I was with the internet team, which is one of the busiest but most interesting industry groups. The team works at fast pace and is highly collaborative. The team stays on top of everything happening in the industry each day, producing views on the market and updating clients. This summer was especially busy as much was going on in the Chinese internet industry, including policy change, product launch, and company listing/delisting, etc.
My internship project was a stock initiation on a newly listed Chinese-based internet company. The project can be mainly divided into three parts—financial models, initiation report, and presentation slides. I started with modeling, and the key part is revenue projection. For internet companies, traffic is everything and the key driver behind revenue growth. I modeled traffic growth based on my own analysis, company management’s expectations, and benchmarking with peer companies. With three statements ready, I performed a company valuation using DCF and comps analysis. The second step was to draft the report, which is the main product by equity research. We normally pick three investment theses after carefully studying company fundamentals. Investment theses can be bourgeoning market size, increasing market share according to expectation, solid business moat, etc. Making slides is the easy part as we basically pick highlights from the report and squeeze the report into a 15-minute presentation. As I worked on the stock, we kept receiving inquiries from clients asking for investment views on the company. Our clients are mostly buy-side investors and their questions were sometimes very enlightening, providing us with new angles to view the market.
My internship was 10 weeks long and it passed by very quickly. It was a steep learning curve as I for the first time, dive into the finance industry. I appreciate how people working in this field carefully look at the market and come out with their differentiated views. I look forward to returning to the company next summer and progressing in this field.
