Shawn Amirthan

Shawn Amirthan is a freshman from Mumbai, India and a graduate of St. Christopher’s School, Bahrain. At Columbia Engineering, Shawn intends on pursuing a degree in Financial Engineering with a minor in Entrepreneurship and Innovation. His ultimate goal is to create an alternative investment firm after gaining experience in the field of computational finance.

Shawn Amirthan

Shawn’s first exposure to finance was through stock investment competitions using online simulators, as a high school freshman. His varying degrees of success in the investment competitions led to him being selected as an intern in Citibank Bahrain’s wealth management department. As a high school junior, Shawn created an algorithm that uses news sentiment from CNBC, WSJ, and Bloomberg as an index and buys/sells the S&P500 based on moving average cross-overs with the news sentiment index. Shawn also led his school’s investment team in TradeQuest, a national competition run by the Bahrain Bourse. He led his team to 1st place in 2016 and 2nd place in 2017. As well as that, he received prizes for the best financial performance, based on Sharpe ratio, and the highest return rate on the NYSE.

During high school, mathematics has played a prominent role in Shawn’s development as an engineer. He has received a gold medal and has ranked in the top 0.25% of British mathematics competitions such as the UKMT Senior Math Challenge and the UKMT Maclaurin Olympiad. As well as that, Shawn was also the founder and leader of his school’s math circle where he taught probability theory and group theory to advanced math students. To learn more about his favorite mathematics fields, Shawn participated in the Hampshire Summer Studies in Mathematics (HCSSiM) program where he specialized in probability theory and combinatorics.

Alongside mathematics, economics has also played a key role in Shawn’s high school experience. As a high school senior, Shawn was an economic and geopolitical researcher at the Bahrain Centre for Strategic, International, and Energy Studies (DERASAT). He used data analysis tools to analyze the GCC sovereign wealth funds and create a database of the GCC countries’ investments in the US. He also researched the significance of the Chabahar trilateral agreement to India, Iran, and Afghanistan and published in Strategic Analysis, a refereed, geopolitical journal.

When he’s not at school or managing his investment portfolio, Shawn enjoys playing postmodern songs on the piano; reading absurdist novels; watching animated sitcoms; and playing trick-taking card games. He is also an ardent of follower of Formula 1 and can frequently be seen lamenting the demise of his favorite team, McLaren Racing.