Dragons
Investment
Society

Leading the Way for Financial Wellbeing at UWCSEA East, Singapore

As teachers, we try to seek out opportunities for students to apply their learning in meaningful ways. What follows are stories about some of the best opportunities to support practical applications of economics and business-related knowledge that I have ever seen.

Since 2023, I have had the privilege of leading Dragons Investment Society at UWCSEA’s East Campus. This year in 2024, in addition to established practices like running student-led seminars on markets, saving, and investing, we pioneered exciting and collaborative initiatives that are intrinsically linked to the mission of all UWC schools and colleges worldwide - but more on that later.

Let's start by going through what we do as a society of young investors at UWCSEA East Campus, Singapore.

We enter the Knowledge at Wharton High School (KWHS) Global Investment Competition every year.

KWHS is a free, experiential investment challenge for high school students and teachers. Students work in teams of four to seven guided by a teacher as their advisor, and they have access to an online stock market simulator. Simply becoming rich is not the goal - financial stability and the creation of meaningful opportunities in a person’s life is; the ‘person’ is usually a Wharton alum introduced as a case study. These activities can easily translate into relatable, personal insights too.

Impressively, teams from UWCSEA East were global champions for the 2020-21 competition, and semifinalists (top 50 worldwide) for the 2023-24 session. Neither accomplishment was easy to do given the sheer number of global entrants! KWHS runs annually from September to December and attracts thousands of students from hundreds of countries. We’re proud of the tradition we have built around this competition; managing risk and planning for the future are key ideas in this challenge which is why we are big fans of it.

Ethical investing is always essential as an overarching theme and Wharton’s judges seem to value creativity, which are more reasons why we like to participate. Our weekly sessions that prepare our society members for KWHS are peer-led and our student leadership team love doing it. A special mention goes to Brendan Teh, Harshini, Jeenaev, Jasmine, and Ashir, all of whom are students from UWCSEA East Singapore, and all of whom have excelled in their peer-teaching roles.

I learned many new concepts in finance and investing during the process of creating lessons for both the Middle and High School sessions. We developed and refined a top-down approach to value investing that begins with macroeconomics, sector and industry analysis, and then valuation techniques.
Brendan Teh, Ex-President 2021-23 (Class of 2024)

Brendan Teh

Brendan Teh

"The Dragons Investment Society supports practical approaches to economic concepts, for example, the relevance of rational consumer behaviour, or market structures. They clearly foster collaborative and critical thinking, which are key skills that students can use in any other part of the UWCSEA learning programme."

Brett Bowman
Economics, Business, & Enterprise Teacher

"In IBDP Economics, we learn about fiscal and monetary policy and how it can impact an economy. In the Investment Society, we’ve extended that knowledge to analyse how policies influence certain companies. As a result, we better understand."

Jeenaev S.
Former President 2023/2024

Best practices for financial wellbeing involve starting early, and involve lifelong learning.

The former President of Dragons Investment Society, Brendan Teh, and current Presidents Jasmine and Ashir work tirelessly to engage our Middle School students, largely to prepare them for a more rigorous understanding of personal finance and economics for later on in High School.

We organise and provide forums for staff members...

...to conduct voluntary discussions around wealth planning, retirement planning, ethical investing, and personal growth, mainly to improve levels of financial awareness and wellbeing for older generations too.

Students do not attend staff financial wellbeing forums out of respect for the discussions that may happen at them and it should be noted that none of these discussions constitute financial advice of any kind.

They are simply student-organised forums for members of our community to swap stories, anecdotes, and problem-solve as a group with common interests on an entirely voluntary basis, and they're proving to be popular.

We continually seek out talents, knowledge, and skills.

We enjoy networking with industry professionals, parents, teachers, and students from other schools. For example, parents who work in Singapore’s Financial Sector have kindly supported us by running online Q&A sessions for some of our investment teams.

Some collaborations in 2023/2024 have even led to internships and job shadowing opportunities for our members. We're grateful for the partnerships we have, and always happy to hear from new people. Why not get in touch?

Email: eastinvestsoc@uwcsea.edu.sg

Our Home: The East HS Library

Librarians such as Philip Williams and his team at UWCSEA East have encouraged our society to be visible and welcomed into our communal presentation spaces.

Being invited to use the large screen projector and sound system enabled our society members to practise their public speaking and presentation skills.

It also allowed us to grow and work across different spaces and areas of the school. Our school leaders and a few parents have often dropped by to our sessions; sometimes by invitation, sometimes out of sheer curiosity.

Libraries are a place for discovery, collaboration, and entrepreneurial action. The Dragons Investment Society has exemplified these qualities in a place where others can be inspired and learn along with them. The group has engaged in formal and informal meetings, created displays, and used library resources to support their learning.

Philip Williams
Head Librarian

Dragons Investor Resources

girl reading book

Our Reading List

All of these titles are available in our High School library. The reading list was specially curated for our investment society and involves recommendations from investment professionals.

Yahoo! Finance


This is our top choice for researching company financial statements, if not from the companies directly. It is a free service and is great to use around every earnings season!

SimplyWall st

This is our top choice for fundamental analysis. All of our members enjoy a paid subscription to this service, which we mainly use to analyse companies, sectors and industries and generate ideas.

Financial Times

This is our top choice for keeping up to date with financial news. We have a subscription to this service, thanks to our library. The bankers we work with expect us to keep up to date before each time we connect with them.
assorted-title of books piled in the shelves

Dragons Investment Society &
UWC Endowment Management Fund

This recently launched fund (UWCEM) aims to manage charitable endowments for various UWC entities, focusing on providing scholarships to talented students facing financial constraints. Since January 2024, our students have been video conferencing with investment professionals like CIO Adriaan de Mol van Otterloo and Investment Analyst Dahao Feng to learn how to pick and analyse stocks that are good value at fair prices - straight out of the Warren Buffet playbook; high quality businesses that can stand up to the test of time.

The Dragons Investment Society is a key player in this initiative, working directly with investment professionals to learn, develop, and offer investment thesis’ that aim to be close to the industry standard.

In addition to enabling our members to become more involved in the global funding of UWC scholarships and the work of UWC International, they offer tangible benefits to our society members too. UWCEM seeks to train UWC High School students by working with societies like ours by sponsoring suitable UWC alumni to gain Chartered Financial Analyst certification. A lucky few UWC alumni postgraduates are also hired directly into the fund as investment analysts thereby launching their investment career!

Simply put, this offers a clear and concise route for UWC students to enter the investment industry that directly requires candidates to think about the funding of scholars and the furthering of the UWC mission on a global scale.

We believe that this does not happen in any other High School network in the world.

"UWCEM provided invaluable exposure to how institutional investors operate. I must also commend the UWCEM team for creating a truly transformational online experience that seamlessly connected students across continents."

Mairav
Grade 12 Dragons Investor

"Before joining UWCEM, lots of financial terms were completely foreign to me, but I quickly learned the basics of financial analysis and stock pitching. It was accessible. Working with UWCEM was a great way for me to gain knowledge and take part in mini-competitions!"

Sanjana
Grade 12 Dragons Investor

UWCEM's Global Stock Pitch Challenge 2024 – Dragons Win!

In May 2024, our student leaders from Singapore’s UWCSEA East Campus formed a team known as United Investments to deliver a presentation on American Express to UWCEM for the first-ever Global Stock Pitch Finals. Independent judges, three analysts working in the city of London, independently picked them as the winning team.

Honourable mentions also go to "KARS Capital" from UWCSEA Dover, and "TriFal Vision" from UWCSEA East, who were also finalists from Singapore, in addition to teams from UWC Atlantic and UWC Mostar.

Thanks to this collaboration with UWCEM, we now have a world-leading level of integrity to run sessions on economics, personal finance, and ethical investing for our members.

UWCEM investment analysts working in the city of London continue to connect online with us every Friday at 3pm SGT to instruct gender-balanced teams of four students on valuation methods and putting together a high quality, UWC mission-aligned portfolio.

From this, the collective interest from within our school community has put a spotlight on us that we’re very excited to be experiencing!

Ex-Presidents Jeenaev S. and Harshini S. (L) and President Jasmine L. (R)

Ex-Presidents Jeenaev S. and Harshini S. (L) and President Jasmine L. (R)

Our members meet Dahao Feng from UWCEM

Our members meet Dahao Feng from UWCEM

"Some of the conversations I have heard at UWCEM would fit in a boardroom. The students regularly scrutinise earnings, growth prospects, and ethical governance. Sitting in Adriaan’s lectures, even as a Chartered Accountant with a Masters in Applied Finance, I felt I have learnt things that I will use in my own approaches to investing."

Adrian Tan
Teacher of Business Management & Economics

"Not many students get the type of hands-on experience the UWCEM club equips them with. Learning from industry professionals has helped me to clarify that my career path should be in the finance industry. I believe that UWCEM has opened up new opportunities for me, such as gaining an internship with Triple P Capital – a private equity firm based in Singapore."

Harshini
Former President 2023/2024

Looking to the future, we’d like to expand our sphere of influence although we are going to need support from all of the school leaders of our 18 UWCs around the world! We have set the following goals:

  • Foster and lead a network of young investors that regard financial wellbeing as a ‘pillar of prosperity’ on an equal footing to their physical and mental wellbeing.
  • Develop scalable, inclusive, UWC-mission aligned career pathways to enable High School students to access the investment banking industry at UWCSEA.
  • Encourage UWCSEA students to support UWC International and UWCEM as a form of service-learning that serves to facilitate scholarships for deserving, yet financially disadvantaged students across our entire network of 18 schools and colleges.

By providing students with real-world exposure to markets and unwaveringly seeking to support the global UWC mission, we're empowering the next generation of leaders to make informed and impactful investments for themselves, and for future scholars they pave the way for.

I simply cannot wait for the day that a future UWC scholar posts their story of how their UWCEM-funded place enabled them to join our global movement towards creating peace and sustainability for a better world.

It is an inspirational moment to imagine. As we continue to grow and evolve in 2025, our members should be seen and recognised as key drivers of social change.

It is my belief that our society serves as a beacon for how to approach topics around personal finance as a whole school community. For anyone in the global network of UWCs, past or present, who would like to be more involved in what we do, please contact us, we’d love to hear from you.

eastinvestsoc@uwcsea.edu.sg

Join Dragons Investment Society!

We meet on Fridays at lunchtime in the HS Library as an activity, and we connect online to investment professionals on Fridays at 3pm.