Dear Admissions Committee:

At the request of Miss X xx, I would like to offer her my full recommendation to assist her entry into your Master of Finance program. Specializing in studies on Monetary Banking, International Finance, Foreign Exchange Rate and Financial Risk Management, I have been a professor with the School of Public Finance and Finance of Renmin University of China and, concomitantly, a senior research fellow of Plus Institute of Finance and Economics (http://www.plusemi.com/), a non-profit research institute established in 20xx, comprising of leading scholars and economists from major universities in China and abroad and industrial leaders. An important aim of my teaching and research is to develop young talents in those fields and Miss XXX is precisely one of such potential talents whom I strongly recommend.

Miss XXX attended some of the courses I have been delivering and I have been impressed by her strong intellectual curiosity and academic motivation which have driven her to pursue academic excellence by making committed efforts. She is the kind of student who is truly interested in learning economics, finance and accounting and has made conscientious endeavors to achieve balanced and outstanding performance in all related fields. As it has turned out, she has demonstrated her true talents in learning those subjects and she is well on her way to even greater academic and professional successes.

Miss XXX’s ranking as the top 3 student in her grade was fully justified by her performance in my courses. In the Foreign Exchange Risk Management, her performance in regular classroom discussions was rated 92/100 and her grade in the final exam was 95/100, making her legitimately one of the few best-performing students in the class. She has an inquiring mind that motivated her to discuss a range of topics with me even after class, not only on exchange rate but also on asset securitization and others. She has all the necessary qualities, as well as the full potential, to be an emerging financial specialist.

The central part of my teaching was a course project that I assigned to students to complete by making their own research. Students were required to form teams to make investments with 1 million RMB of virtual start-up money by exploiting the changes in the foreign exchange rate. The teams must first perform the trends of the exchange rate fluctuations of major currencies in the world, make weekly transactions for a period of two months, and maximize the profit. The project was very meaningful because it coincided with the initial outbreak of financial crisis toward the end of last year and governments in many countries were implementing bail-out programs. Any specific policies, measures, and actions taken by those governments and the financial institutions would result in appreciable fluctuations in the exchange rate and it was the best time for students to learn about the risks and the opportunities in foreign exchange investments.

My rule was simple enough—the team which made the biggest profit and presented the most detailed and convincing analysis would be the winner. It was interesting to see that different teams adopted different analytical and investment strategies. Some teams dominated by members from computer and mathematics departments could be called “Chartists”, whose analysis was heavily dependent on technical support from forex prediction software, making predictions purely on the basis of historical prices. Whereas teams dominated by members from business schools became “fundamentalists” who relied primarily on macro analysis, their lack of rigorous quantitative training prevented them from detailing the quantitative changes. As team leader, with her training in economics, finance, and computation, Miss XX persuaded her team members to employ an eclectic and interdisciplinary approach: with econometrics as the basis for exchange rate prediction, they constructed an econometric Adaptive Expectation Model, which incorporated the historical data of the Chartists and incorporated the analysis of fundamentalists by quantifying macro economic events. One of the students in her team was from the computer department and was asked to give different weight coefficients to different events and chose the most appropriate coefficients that became independent variables of the model. Based on their accurate predictions, the team chose the right investment strategies and maximized their investment gains.

The project proved a most rewarding learning process. Miss XX and her team came up with a most rigorous prediction model, with minimum variations, compelling analysis and detailed and concrete process demonstration. As mastermind of the project, Miss XX displayed her facility in applying interdisciplinary knowledge and methodologies. Finally, she did a presentation on the project during which she impressed the entire class with her clear logic, verbal expressiveness, and convincing arguments. Her leadership played a decisive role in her team’s winning the first place in the project competition.

As I see it, the most important quality that Miss XX demonstrated in this project is her powerful analytical caliber and her great potential to perform fruitful research. I believe this and many other qualities are her greatest personal assets, which she will bring them into full play during her studies in your course. I fully support her application to your esteemed institution and will be looking forward to seeing her become the person she wants to be.

Yours sincerely

Du XXX

Professor of Finance, School of Public Finance and Finance of RUC
Senior Research Fellow of Plus Institute of Finance and Economics
Director of Beijing Municipal International Finance Society
Email: XXXXXX
Phone:86-010 XXX