Teenage interns managing wealth of billionaires in Singapore!

Giving an internship to a 16-year-old in the cutthroat world of hedge funds is almost unheard of. When local talent is scarce, it might be worthwhile to teach a minor how to become an alpha.

Yi Ke Cao, now 17, spent two weeks at Modular Asset Management which is a billion-dollar hedge fund. While working there, she soon found herself entering data into spreadsheets and having meetings with investment managers. She acknowledged that the experience was intimidating.

"I was a bit terrified; I didn't know how to react to them speaking to me, and I didn't know how to hold a conversation, but they were welcoming," Cao told Bloomberg. "I'm definitely more likely to consider it now."

In reality, Cao is part of a new generation of talent that Singapore has been fostering recently in response to a lack of local asset management skills. The government has forced businesses to employ locals rather than dependent on expatriates as more foreign hedge funds move to the region. It has also provided scholarships for asset-management courses and promised to pay up to $75,000 in expenses as multinational companies send local staff overseas through different programmes. 

Bloomberg notes that many hedge funds from Asia, Europe, and the United States have migrated to Singapore due to the turmoil in Hong Kong. Because of a government crackdown, China's special administrative region has been in trouble in recent years. Other firms have simply chosen to make Singapore their regional base. 

Business Insider further points out that an increasing number of billionaires have made Singapore their second base of operations. Billionaire hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and vacuum inventor James Dyson, for instance, have all set up offices in the city-state due to enticing incentives. 

As a result, a handful of firms are now addressing Singapore's talent shortage in house by either converting interns or retraining executives. Quantedge Capital CEO Suhaimi Zainul-Abidin, for example, told Bloomberg that most of the firm's hires will come straight from internships. The process of securing a full-time offer, however, won't necessarily be easy — the firm's recent program recently hired just 10 interns out of a pool of 300 candidates. Of those 10, only three managed to transition into full-time employees. 

Still, Zainul-Abidin said he believes Singaporean locals are well-prepared for the challenge. As he elaborated in his interview with Bloomberg, the country was once home to "graduates who'd have the ability to join banks and big financial institutions because those were the names we were trying to draw into Singapore. Today, the nature of the job has changed."