Alex CHAN received B.Soc.Sc. (First Class Honours) with double major subjects in Economics and Statistics from The University of Hong Kong (HKU) and Ph.D. in Finance from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).  After finishing his Ph.D. degree, he worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Finance at HKUST, and then joined HKU as an Assistant Professor.

Alex has research interests in the areas of investments, derivative securities, fixed income securities, risk management, behavioral finance, exchange rate systems, and education.  One of his research projects is to investigate valuation of convertible bonds.  “Convertible arbitrage” is a popular hedge fund strategy, which is to take the arbitrage profit from the relative underpricing of convertible bond with respect to the underlying stock price. Alex hypothesized the observed underpricing in convertible bond is related to the future possibility that a convertible bond may renegotiate on some of its covenants; and he provided empirical evidence to support this hypothesis.  Another research of Alex is to investigate the improvement scheme for currency board system.  The project investigated the optimal way to use of HK dollar currency put option to extend the classical currency board system into an “Intertemporal Currency Board” system.  This research has been widely publicized and generated a series of local and international debates and discussions.  The results of this project provided Hong Kong a solution of how to optimally utilize her huge foreign reserve (through some explicit commitments) to enhance the public confidence and the credibility of her currency board system.  Another line of researches of Alex is to investigate the impacts from culture and personality on the investment decisions of corporate managers.  His researches demonstrated the relationships between culture and personality on the corporate governance and the M&A decisions of firms.

Alex has developed many courses for various programmes in HKU, including: Executive MBA class of “Risk Management”, Full-time MBA classes of “Corporate Finance” and “Managerial Finance)”, Master of Finance classes of “Corporate Finance and Asset Valuation”, “Investment Analysis and Portfolio Management”, “Fundamentals of Asset ValuationI)”, “Fundamentals of Asset Valuation (II)” and “Investments”, and Undergraduate classes of “Financial Statement Analysis”, “Risk Management”, “Derivative Securities” and “Investments & Portfolio Analysis”.  He is a distinguished teacher and has received various outstanding teaching awards for his undergraduate teaching and taught postgraduate teaching.

Alex holds various professional qualifications in finance.  He is a Financial Risk Manager (FRM) and a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA charterholder).  He also works closely with professional organizations.  He is Deputy Chairman of Associateship Examination Moderating Sub-Committee of The Hong Kong Institute of Bankers (HKIB).