Worked on Insider Trading Research and Fraud within economic policies
Throughout the fall semester of 2022, I worked as a fraud data analyst intern at Integra FEC, a company that does consulting work for various government agencies (such as the DOJ or SEC) and does internal projects regarding crime/investigative work as well. This company is located near campus, so it was practical for me to walk to work every day after my classes, and the type of work that the company does was incredibly interesting to me. This internship was one of the most valuable experiences of my life, as it was the first in-person internship I've had, and the company and my coworkers were all incredibly kind and welcoming people. I learned so much from my supervisor and coworkers and had incredible opportunities to work on unique projects and pick up plenty of different technical skills.Â
The structure of this internship involves each of the interns working under one supervisor and working on a main project throughout the duration of the internship. Due to the confidential nature of the work that the company does, I can't share any of the code I've worked on or explain too much of the projects, but I can provide an overview of everything that I did at the company. I started my time at the company working under an economist and data scientist on a project that involved researching insider trading that was believed to be occurring at SPACs (Special Purpose Acquisition Companies). I utilized Python, R, and Scala throughout the duration of the internship to analyze price and trading data from the Bloomberg terminal, created various statistical models/regressions, and created visualizations/probability distributions to analyze insider trading through data auditing of financial reports. I built data scraping and analysis pipelines and incorporated feature extraction into prediction models to uncover potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of insider trading. After this project, we looked into fraud with COVID policies. In the past, the founder of the company, Dr. John M. Griffin, also a Finance professor at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote about the PPP loan fraud. Similarly to this, there was suspected to be fraud with other economic policies which is something I worked on researching in my last few weeks with the company. Overall, I really enjoyed my time working at Integra and I learned various technical skills and gained industry knowledge in a unique and highly engaging type of work.