Workplace reviews and discussion: 奧沰有限公司

The overall feeling is:

The system looks very polished, but when it actually operates,

a lot of things are really absurd.

A certain brokerage firm hastily arranged an event called

“Investment Education Training” before the Lunar New Year market closure.

The company’s public explanation was that it was concerned about clients’ lack of long-term investment education

and therefore hoped to strengthen their investment knowledge.

The instructor was Wang JiaX, a fairly well-known lecturer in the market.

But at the beginning of the course, instead of first discussing models or strategies,

he started by telling a story about himself.

He said:

“On the last day of the holiday, I took the high-speed rail north to meet

my classmates for a meal.

I actually really like booking those quiet little rooms to chat. At that

time, I suddenly thought of when I was young, watching the sunrise on Hehuanshan,

with a bag of Kuai Kuai beside me, while the taxi radio happened to be playing ‘TAXI GIRL.’

Actually, the rhythm of the market is sometimes a little like that too.”

Quite a few participants were somewhat moved, but also somewhat confused.

Then he turned around and slowly wrote three things on the whiteboard:

Investment education training participant list

Address

Phone number

Then he said:

“The market is actually very cruel.

If one person develops a strategy alone, it is like being locked in a room by the market.

But if a group of people do it together, then it is actually an institutionalized plan.”

Someone in the audience asked:

“What should we do if the strategy fails?”

Lecturer Wang JiaX smiled and said:

“That is why I usually recommend that senior management promote the overall plan,

and then arrange for more participants to join.

Everyone learns together and bears the burden together.

If the market fluctuates, people will not point fingers only at me.”

After the course ended, the company began discussing internally whether to formally promote this

‘strategy + investment education training’ model.

However, when the risk-control department reviewed the entire system, it found that the most stable part

was not the investment model at all, but rather the fact that the number of participants kept increasing.

From the perspectives of financial organizational governance and behavioral finance,

which of the following best describes the core logic of promoting this strategy?

A.

Establish large-scale hedging positions through the futures market, then collect client data through investment training

to improve market liquidity; the strategy’s success mainly comes from the pricing efficiency of derivatives.

B.

Use narratives and interaction to make participants believe that the strategy has a high degree of insight,

and deliberately expand the number of participants so that the strategy’s results are averaged across the group;

when performance is poor, responsibility also becomes difficult to concentrate on a single decision-maker as the number of participants increases.

C.

Use warrant time-value decay and implied-volatility trading strategies;

the investment training is merely a promotional tool, while the actual profits come from arbitrage based on market structure.

D.

Use nostalgic narratives to establish a long-term investment culture, encouraging retail investors

to reduce their trading frequency; the strategy’s success mainly comes from the patience premium in behavioral finance.

As an aside, my previous experience interviewing at this company was also quite interesting.

I don’t know whether it was because it is a large company, but it seemed as though it felt it did not need

to show interviewees much respect.

From the very beginning, scheduling the interview was chaotic. HR first asked the applicant to provide their availability for the following week.

After I did so, they did not respond until the following week, and then asked me to provide availability for the week after that.

The interviewing manager even said at the time:

“An interview-result notification email will be sent in 1–2 weeks.”

Heh, it later turned out to be a lie, because no interview-result notification was sent at all.

Later, I messaged HR to ask about it, but they simply read the message and did not reply.

You can actually tell from these small details that the company does not even have basic courtesy.

I also later heard quite a few things about the company internally, for example:

Performance targets are raised endlessly and are never considered sufficient.

As soon as you fail to meet a target, you have to write a self-review report—it is practically like writing an essay.

Whether you work yourself to death or barely do anything,

the salary you receive is almost the same.

The company seems not to have a formal HR department, only a so-called underground HR team handling personnel matters.

I also have no idea whether this is legal.

Some departments do not even have company computers, and employees are required to use their own laptops.

The so-called flat organizational structure actually means that you have to do everything.

The workload just keeps increasing, but no additional staff are hired.

When you do more, the company simply treats it as though that is what you were supposed to do anyway.