Promptly at 10, I met Mr. Stephen Shueh ’97 who was the managing partner at Roundview Capital. We began by introducing ourselves – our backgrounds, interests, and perspectives. The first on the day’s agenda were a set of conferences calls to from various clients. But before these calls I was given time to familiarize myself with some of the concepts that would be useful to know. Then, promptly, at eleven we began the first conference call with a lawyer in California, then another call with a potential client who was travelling in India. In these conference calls I observed many of the underlying subtleties in client relationships and I believe the lessons I learnt just by observing the interaction between Steve and his client can by applied to any type of social interaction. In addition to his role at Roundview Capital, Steve is also a member of the board of the Bank of Princeton, and on that afternoon I was fortunate enough to sit in on one of the board meetings. As a local bank, the setting of this meeting was very different from what I was expecting, nonetheless I thoroughly enjoyed the more casual, yet meticulously efficient manner of execution in this meeting. During the return trip to Princeton I had some time to talk to Steve, reflecting on the events of that day, and learning some of the softer aspects important to a career in finance.

In the next two days I shadowed some of the other members of Roundview Capital. In the morning I worked with Andrew Lieu ’06 who is a director and he gave me a project on Apple Inc. that day Apple stocks dropped below $500 per share. My project was to investigate, summarize and analyze the cause of this drop in share price. This project involved me going over the last few years of Apple’s Form 10-K and also, for comparative purposes, some of Google Form 10-K’s and Facebook’s Form 10-Q’s.  Also, Mr. Matthew Wallack, President of Orchard Park Capital, gave me a crash course in stock market investment. This was in the “Bloomberg room,” a relative innocuous looking room whose main feature was a Bloomberg machine saturated by green and red text. For the rest of the day Matt demonstrated the amount of information the Bloomberg machine had access to, and at the same time imparted to me his value-centric mentality of investment.

This experience was a valuable learning experience for me to learn the many skills in the financial sector. The culture at Roundview Capital is definitely very different from some of the larger financial firms. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed being a Princetern and I greatly appreciate the kindness of Mr. Shueh and his colleagues in offering me this first-hand overview of the workings of Roundview Capital. This experience really motivated my interest in working in the business side of finance and I would like a send a big thank-you to Steve for offering myself and the other Princeterns for this experience.