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Spencer Li

Tips for your Resume: How I Managed to Land a Job With the Big Boys

Last updated: 3 July 2026 · By Spencer Li, CFTe

How to Write a Resume for a Trading or Finance Job

A resume that lands a trading or finance interview is one single-sided page, cleanly formatted, with only your best and most relevant achievements on it. A hiring manager spends a few seconds scanning each one, so your job is to make those seconds count: lead with what makes you stand out, cut everything that does not, and never let the good material get buried under filler. The point of the page is not to tell your life story. It is to earn one thing, an interview. Below is the exact checklist I used to get into the industry, and the same one I now use when I look through other people’s resumes.

Let me walk through what to keep, what to cut, and why each rule exists.

What is a resume actually for?

A resume (your one-page career summary) exists to give a future employer or headhunter a quick glimpse of your achievements and skill sets. That is the whole job. The purpose is to stand out enough to win an interview, nothing more.

That framing changes how you build it. You are not documenting everything you have ever done. You are choosing the few things that make a busy person, with a tall pile of other resumes, decide you are worth a conversation.

After looking through many resumes myself and talking to many employers, I have a pretty clear idea of what they look for and what gets a resume tossed. Here are my personal guidelines.

The rules: what to keep and what to cut

RuleDo thisAvoid this
LengthOne single-sided pageTwo pages, no one scans them
FormattingA decent, clean templateUgly formatting, it gets tossed before it is read
PhotoOptional, but if used, a professional portraitA webcam selfie
Personal dataName, address, mobile, emailBirthday, height, weight, race or religion, horoscope, next-of-kin, favourite colour
Email addressOne that resembles your namecute_boi88@gmail.com and friends
ContentOnly your best, most relevant materialAn autobiography of every experience
StructureClear categories and dated entriesA wall of undifferentiated text

Now the reasoning behind each one.

Keep it to one single-sided page

Employers have piles of resumes to look at. They will spend only a few seconds scanning yours to decide if you are worth a shot. They do not have time to scan two pages. One page forces you to choose your best material, which is exactly the discipline you want.

Use a decent template

A resume with ugly formatting may get tossed before it gets read. You do not need anything fancy. You need clean, readable, and professional. Presentation is the first signal an employer gets about how you work.

Treat the photo as optional

A photo is optional. If you include one, make sure it is a professionally taken portrait shot, not one snapped on your webcam. A bad photo hurts you more than no photo.

Provide relevant data, and nothing more

Relevant data includes your name, address, mobile number, and email address. Irrelevant data includes your birthday, height, weight, race or religion, horoscope, next-of-kin, and favourite colour. Leave the irrelevant stuff out. It eats space and signals that you do not know what matters.

Use a professional-sounding email address

School email addresses are fine. For a personal address, use one that resembles your name, for example john_tanxx@gmail.com, instead of something like cute_boi88@gmail.com. You get the idea. It is a small thing, and small things are exactly what a first impression is made of.

Put in only the best stuff

Given the space limit, and the few seconds of attention your resume will get, you want to make sure they read the good stuff. Do not dilute it and bury it under less important experiences. This is not an autobiography, so you do not need every single thing you have been through. Write only what is relevant to the job, and what might let you stand out. Hint: no one really cares about the medal you won in primary or secondary school.

Categorise your experiences

Group things so the reader’s eye can move fast. Common categories include:

  • Education
  • Awards and Honours
  • Leadership and Activities
  • Professional Certifications
  • Skills and Interests

Date everything, and elaborate briefly

Include the time periods for each work and education entry. After each work experience, add two or three bullet points describing what you did and what you achieved. Keep them short. The achievement matters more than the description, so where you can, show a result, not just a duty.

Why this matters more in trading and finance

Trading and finance desks read a lot of resumes, and they are reading for signal under time pressure. That is, in a small way, the same skill the job itself rewards: filtering a flood of information down to the few things that actually matter, and acting on them fast. A resume that buries its best line under a wall of irrelevant detail tells a hiring manager exactly how you would handle a noisy market. A clean one-pager that leads with your strongest, most relevant result tells them the opposite.

A template can make your resume look tidy in a second. It cannot supply the judgment to decide which two achievements earn a spot on the page and which ten do not. That choice is yours, and it is the part that actually gets you in the room.

If you have additional tips of your own, add them in the comments below. Good luck.

FAQ

How long should a finance or trading resume be?
One single-sided page. Hiring managers spend only seconds per resume, so a second page usually goes unread. One page also forces you to keep only your best material.

Do I need a photo on my resume?
A photo is optional. If you include one, use a professionally taken portrait, not a webcam shot. A poor photo does more harm than no photo at all.

What personal details should I leave off my resume?
Leave off your birthday, height, weight, race or religion, horoscope, next-of-kin, and favourite colour. Keep only your name, address, mobile number, and email address.

What sections should a resume have?
Common, employer-friendly categories are Education, Awards and Honours, Leadership and Activities, Professional Certifications, and Skills and Interests. Date every work and education entry, and add two or three bullet points of achievement under each role.

Does the email address on my resume matter?
Yes. Use an address that resembles your name (for example john_tanxx@gmail.com). An unprofessional handle is a small detail, but first impressions are built from small details.

Got a resume tip that earned you an interview? Share it in the comments.

And if you are eyeing the markets themselves and not just a desk job, start with the pillar: How to Start Trading: A Beginner’s Guide.

Want a system you can actually run? Grab the free 15-Minute Swing Trading Starter Kit. It is the exact routine I use to scan once a day and trade any market in 15 minutes.

About the author. Spencer Li is the founder of Synapse Trading and a Certified Financial Technician (CFTe) with 15 years of trading across stocks, forex, crypto, commodities, and bonds. His trade log is public, 404 trades, losses left in. He teaches low-risk swing trading in 15 minutes a day, one system for any market.

Education, not financial advice. Synapse Trading is not licensed by MAS to advise on investment products. Trading carries risk of loss; past performance is not indicative of future results.

Related

How to Start Trading: A Beginner’s Guide (pillar) · How I got into trading and quit my corporate job · Is a finance degree worth it for trading?

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Spencer Li

Superior Long-term Investing: How to Catch the BIG Swings

There is a general misconception that chart-reading and technical analysis are only for short-term traders, but this is not true. Investors who learn to read charts and adopt long-term trend-following techniques can achieve superior returns to a pure buy-and-hold investor with the added benefit of taking on less risk.

 

Superior Long-term Investing: How to Catch the BIG Swings

Superior Long-term Investing: How to Catch the BIG Swings

 

Why the traditional buy-and-hold strategy fails

A buy-and-hold strategy only works in a prolonged bull market, or if you are fortunate enough to buy in at the start of a short bull market. As long as people keep buying a particular stock, the stock price will continue to rise, thus buy-and-hold enthusiasts will sit through minor corrections or occasional bad news, because these small events do not affect the strong fundamentals of the company.

However, when the economy turns bad, and the stock market plunges, all stock prices will plunge together. A stock with stronger fundamentals may plunge to a lesser degree, but losing less money is not the same as making money.  In a prolonged bear market, the stock beomes cheaper and more under-valued as prices fall. Many investors go on a buying spree until they run out of capital, and become locked-in, waiting for prices to “revert to true value” while the market continues to fall. It could take years for them to breakeven, let alone profit.

In such scenarios, does it make sense to hold onto long-term investments for the next few years as losses accumulate, or to add more positions since stocks are now “cheaper”? Is there a better way to avoid this pain? This brings us to the new idea of trend-following investing.

Case Study of Buy-and-hold vs. Trend-following Investing

Let us examine the chart below. This is a weekly chart of the Straits Times Index, showing the period from 2003 to 2008. This is a hypothetical case study showing 2 investors – investor A and investor B.

 

Case Study of "Buy-and-hold" vs. "Trend-following"

Case Study of “Buy-and-hold” vs. “Trend-following”

 

Both investors managed to buy near the start of the bull market, near 2003. Investor A is die-hard Warren Buffett fan, adopting a pure buy-and-hold mentality, believing that “a good company is one that can be held forever.” Note that the Straits Times Index is made up of the 30 strongest blue-chips. Investor B is an investor who uses charts to time the big market trends, willing to take profits based on charts and turn short when the charts give a clear signal.

After 5 years, investor A finds that he has made a measly 10% return, having given back most of his profits while holding on though the decline. I did not include dividends here,because investor B would also have got those dividends, for the sake of fair comparison. Investor B, having locked in a 200% return (this is not picking the top, notice that he did not sell at the exact top), goes short and makes another 50% on the decline,raking in a grand total of 200%.

Since our goal in the market is to make money, it makes sense to adopt the approach that gives us the maximum returns within our time horizon and within our risk appetite. This means acquiring skills that give us an edge over the markets.

“I believe there are no good stocks or bad stocks; there are only money-making stocks.” – Jesse Livermore. Do you agree that for any stock, regardless of its fundamentals or value, if you buy and sell at the right time, you can make money from it?

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Spencer Li

The Random Walk Myth: Theory vs. Practice

The random walk theory, which started off from academic offshoots, put forth the idea that one should give up trying to predict or beat the markets because it was impossible to do so. In theory, this theory sounds plausible, but in practice, financial history has proven otherwise, with both investors and traders consistently beating the markets.

 

The Random Walk Myth: Theory vs. Practice

The Random Walk Myth: Theory vs. Practice

 

The random walk  theory states that price history is not a reliable indicator of future price direction because price changes are “serially independent”. In other words, there is no definable relationship between the direction of price movement from one day to the next. This does not mean that prices meander aimlessly or irrationally, but it means that prices have no patterns of order within the chaos.

We know that prices are determined by a balance between supply and demand. Random walk theory asserts that prices reach that equilibrium level in an unpredictable manner, moving in an irregular response to the latest information or news release. New information, being unpredictable in content, timing and importance, is therefore random in nature. Consequently, the theory puts forth that price changes themselves are random.

Try this interesting optical illusion:

The Random Walk Myth - Can you see the pattern here amid the "randomness"?

The Random Walk Myth – Can you see the pattern here amid the “randomness”?

While price changes might seem random in nature, the trend of prices themselves are not. In reality, price movements contain well-known components of trend, seasonality and cycles which are not random in nature. Although these are mostly clear when prices are considered over the long-term, if one observes prices very closely in the short-run, price trends or patterns are also readily recognisable.

Technical analysis and chart-reading analyses the impact and action of market participants in response to the latest news or information. As a result, it is possible to understand what the different market participants are doing, and which way the market is likely to trend next. Besides, the market is not perfectly efficient, and reading the actions of the smart money will often alert traders to what is happening in the markets.

 

“The illusion of randomness gradually disappears as the skill in chart reading improves.” – John Murphy

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Spencer Li

Volume Spread Analysis – Spotting the Hidden Clues in Volume

20091030 Dow Jones Industrial 800x600

Price action and volume lies at the core of technical analysis, since that is all the data a market technician works with. Almost all technical methods, such as chart patterns, candlestick patterns or even Elliot wave are studies of price action. Indicators like RSI, Stochastics or MACD are all calculated from price data as well. To understand the big picture, it pays to first understand the building blocks.

Volume Spread Analysis - Spotting the Hidden Clues in Volume

Volume Spread Analysis – Spotting the Hidden Clues in Volume

At the most basic level, price action is the movement of a security’s price. This encompasses all technical and classical pattern analysis, including swings, support and resistance, trends, etc. The most commonly known tools are candlestick and price bar patterns, which are ways of cataloging common price action patterns.

However, the crux about price action is not about memorising patterns and names. It is about understanding. That is what professional traders do. No two people will analyze every bit of price action the same way, and that is why a lot of traders find the concept of price action so elusive. That is why it takes experience to read price action.

Below is a useful picture summary of essential candlestick patterns:

candlesticks patterns

Volume is the number of shares or contracts that trade hands from sellers to buyers during a period of time, and serves as a measure of activity. If a buyer of a stock purchases 100 shares from a seller, then the volume for that period increases by 100 shares based on that transaction.

Hence, volume is energy. It represents the level of commitment and participation by buyers and sellers, hence it indirectly indicates the supply/demand equation. Volume at times also serves as a leading indicator, because large movements in the market are due to the actions of market-movers (also known as the professionals or smart money), and these actions will show up in volume and price. At times,either of these two could provide the leading clues to future market movement.

The level of volume marks the significance of events – for example a breakout, a gap movement, or breaking a key support, etc. The higher the volume, the more significant these events are, because it shows more participation by smart money. In general, volume should be rising n the direction of the trend and decreasing on corrections, which would also be useful for identifying pullbacks in a trend. Watch out for unusual climatic moves in volume, for a climax usually results in a swift reversal or rebound.

The key is understanding the relationship between price and volume.

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Spencer Li

What is Technical Analysis (TA)?

What is Technical Analysis

What Is Technical Analysis? A Trader’s Plain-English Guide

Last updated: 3 July 2026 · By Spencer Li, CFTe

Technical analysis is the study of price patterns and trends in a market in order to trade them. It is, in effect, applied mass psychology, because a chart is the collective action of every participant in that market, drawn out in price. Technicians do not try to calculate what a stock is “really” worth. They assume the market has already priced in everything known, and they read the chart to find moments when the probabilities tilt in their favour. The big draw is speed and reach: reading a chart can take five minutes where a full valuation takes days, and the same skills transfer across stocks, forex, crypto, and commodities, because every one of those charts is just human psychology plotted over time. One honest caveat up front. Technical analysis is a calculated guess about the future built from past data. It is not a crystal ball.

Here is what it actually is, how the two schools differ, and where it stops working.

What does technical analysis actually study?

A chart is a record of every buy and sell decision in a market. Technical analysis reads that record for patterns, because crowds behave in repeatable ways at the same kinds of price levels.

That is the whole premise behind the technician’s core belief: market action discounts everything. Instead of trying to figure out the “true” value of a stock through valuation, the technician lets the market do that work and reads the consensus of all participants off the chart. The “true value” is whatever the crowd is willing to pay right now.

This is why the same skills travel. A head-and-shoulders pattern on a stock chart can be read the same way on a forex or commodity chart, because all three are pictures of the same thing: market psychology, which is just the collective psychology of individual traders. That portability is genuinely useful. If you need an immediate opinion on a market you know nothing about, the chart will give you one in minutes.

Classical vs statistical: the two schools of technical analysis

There are two main schools of thought, the classical approach and the statistical approach. Most of the noise online treats them as rivals. They are not. They answer different questions.

What it usesWhat it producesThe catch
Classical (chart-based)Hand-drawn lines: support, resistance, trendlines, channels, chart patternsBehavioural read of where the crowd actsSubjective, two technicians can read the same chart differently
Statistical (data-based)Indicators, formulas, algorithms run on the price dataMathematical patterns and probabilitiesObjective, but blind to context a human would catch

The classical approach came first, from the days before computers, when people plotted charts on graph paper by hand and drew lines to spot behavioural patterns. It is still widely used today. The statistical approach uses data and mathematical formulas to find quantifiable patterns and estimate probabilities.

Personally, I find the best approach is to combine the two. Think of it like driving. You let the autopilot handle the calculations and feed you useful input, but in certain situations it is better to take the wheel yourself. The indicators do the arithmetic; you supply the judgement about when to trust them.

Is technical analysis art or science?

It is both, and that is the point. The two branches complement each other precisely because one is part art and one is part science.

The classical, chart-reading side carries real subjectivity. Different technicians can look at the same chart and draw different conclusions. Charts also cannot predict sudden fundamental events, things like earnings surprises, a rights issue, an M&A announcement, or an employment data release. Those arrive from outside the chart.

Hence, a technician still has to track the fundamental news that acts as a price catalyst. Reading the chart well does not excuse you from knowing what is about to hit it.

Technical analysis vs fundamental analysis: which one should you use?

You do not have to choose. Technical analysis gives you a fast way to scan markets, find opportunities, and time an entry. Fundamental analysis tells you the bigger story behind why a price is moving. Used together, you get both the timing and the reasoning.

The cleanest way to hold the relationship in your head is cause and effect. Fundamentals are the cause, the economic reasons a market moves. Technicals are the effect, the actual movement of price on the chart.

Technical analysisFundamental analysis
StudiesPrice action and the psychology behind itUnderlying value: economy, industry, company
SpeedMinutes per chartDays for a full valuation
Best atTiming, price targets, key levelsExplaining the “why” and long-run direction
Blind spotSudden news shocksPrecise entry and exit timing

In the short run, cause and effect can conflict, and it is close to impossible to pin every observed price move on a specific cause. Over the long run, though, the two tend to converge. Price eventually reflects value.

There is a humbler reason to pair them. In stock investing, only the insiders truly know everything about a company. The rest of us are outsiders, and even after gathering extensive research on the company, the industry, and the country, we can still be wrong. Coupling technicals (the price consensus of every participant) with fundamentals (specific knowledge of the industry and company) simply raises your probability of a positive return. They are not mutually exclusive.

Where the human edge comes in

A platform will plot the indicators and flag the patterns for you in a second now. That part is free. What it will not do is tell you when the chart’s read conflicts with a piece of news about to land, or when a textbook-clean pattern sits in a market you should simply skip. Technical analysis finds the moments when probabilities are in your favour and projects the likely paths and key levels price may reach. Deciding which of those signals to actually trade, and which to pass, is judgement. That is the first of the Five Edges a machine cannot trade for you, and it is the part worth building.

So, treat the chart as what it is. A tool for stacking probabilities in your favour, not a window into the future.

FAQ

What is technical analysis in simple terms?
It is reading a price chart to spot patterns and trends, then trading them. Because a chart is the combined action of every market participant, technical analysis is really applied mass psychology.

Does technical analysis actually work?
It works as a way to put probabilities in your favour and to time entries, exits, and price targets. It does not forecast the future with certainty, and it cannot predict sudden news events like earnings or M&A. It is a calculated guess from past data, not a crystal ball.

What is the difference between technical and fundamental analysis?
Technical analysis studies price action to time trades quickly, often in minutes. Fundamental analysis studies underlying value to explain why a market moves, which can take days. One is the effect, the other is the cause, and they tend to converge over the long run.

Should I use technical or fundamental analysis?
For most traders, a combination works best. Use technicals for timing and key levels, and use fundamentals to understand the bigger picture and to stay ahead of news that can move the price.

Can technical analysis be used on any market?
Yes. The same skills transfer across stocks, forex, crypto, and commodities, because every chart reflects the same thing, the collective psychology of its participants. A head-and-shoulders pattern reads the same way on each.

Now that you know what technical analysis is, the natural next step is learning to read the patterns the crowd leaves behind. For the full set mapped to a simple system, read the pillar: The Definitive Guide to Trading Price Chart Patterns.

Want a system, not just signals? Grab the free 15-Minute Swing Trading Starter Kit. It is the exact routine I use to scan once a day and trade any market in 15 minutes.

About the author. Spencer Li is the founder of Synapse Trading and a Certified Financial Technician (CFTe) with 15 years of trading across stocks, forex, crypto, commodities, and bonds. His trade log is public, 404 trades, losses left in. He teaches low-risk swing trading in 15 minutes a day, one system for any market.

Education, not financial advice. Synapse Trading is not licensed by MAS to advise on investment products. Trading carries risk of loss; past performance is not indicative of future results.

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Definitive Guide to Price Chart Patterns (pillar) · Technical analysis vs fundamental analysis · Beginner’s guide to trading and technical analysis · Expanding triangle strategy

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