Internship Opportunities

We are a data-oriented financial advisory firm offering primarily research-oriented internships in several long-term project areas suitable for candidates of varying skill levels.

‘Smart’ Money: This is our core area of focus. Drawing from a world of exponentially exploding datasets, our core work involves quantitatively identifying and tracking ‘smart money’ for use in managing diversified investment portfolios. Examples would include multi-year dives we have taken into topics ranging from the disclosed transactional activities of US Congresspeople and Senators to the published track records of thousands of sell-side Wall Street analysts.

Much of our current ‘smart money’ work involves analyzing patterns worldwide within regulatorily required personal transactional disclosures for public company directors and officers. We continually review and catalog the currently more than 200 published academic papers on this topic and do extensive original research to optimize investment signal opportunities for our strategies. We are also starting to publish academic work in competitive journals, with interns as co-authors. As our daily-growing data currently consists of 3.5 million insider transactional filings and the professional biographies of more than 200,000 executives mapped against 60 million historical stock prices and associated index benchmarks, this work (with exceptions) tends to be more suitable for interns pursuing or holding master’s degrees or PhDs in quantitative fields. Opportunities for undergraduates currently exist, however, in developing and studying exogenous datasets to combine with this insider trading data.

LLM Project: We are developing an AI/GenAI research infrastructure using large language models (LLMs) to analyse large volumes of corporate disclosures and related information sources. The goal is to organise and study information about corporate activity and external developments in ways that support systematic research and analysis.

The project involves using LLM systems to extract and contextualise information from large volumes of unstructured filings, link related companies and events, and analyse potential implications across industries and corporate networks.

This is technical and involved work involving Python-based data processing, working with APIs and large document datasets, extracting structured information from unstructured text, graph-oriented data modeling, and experimentation with modern LLM workflows and retrieval-based systems. Some prior experience with Python programming, working with databases or graph-based data, building or consuming APIs, web scraping, or developing LLM-based retrieval or reasoning workflows will be helpful before engaging.

Startup Success/Failure: We are engaged pro bono, running a quantitative study of startup success/failure for the Cleantech Open, a nonprofit that is the world’s oldest and largest venture capital accelerator for clean technology companies. Working with a 283-question startup due diligence checklist assembled by sixteen volunteer seasoned professionals and VCs across disciplines relevant to startup failure and success, we have engaged primarily undergraduate interns to score a large number of startups (900 and counting, each evaluated at least twice) while ascertaining the later success/failure outcomes for these companies.

Global Key invests only in public securities and does not make or recommend private company investments or otherwise use this startup success/failure data for commercial purposes. Our motivations are social good and intellectual curiosity. The smartest people working closely with private companies – typically, VC’s and investment bankers – are simply not geared toward collecting data on their experiences. We are uniquely positioned as quantitative finance professionals, recognizing the opportunity that can come from working with a large accelerator, and we are additionally engaging with academic collaborators.

This is a large project comprising subprojects uniquely suitable for candidates in specific majors such as computer programming, data science, finance, environmental studies, or other needs that may arise. Scoring startups is more detailed work, but it provides a uniquely hands-on educational experience. Interns will gain expertise and perspective in startup due diligence while engaging in the opportunities and challenges facing a unique study.

Startup success/failure is an area where the interest and stakes are high, but data is scarce. Our project takes aim at that.

Other Projects: We serve a clientele comprised primarily of current and former insiders of public companies and work closely with VC’s and investment bankers through these relationships. We occasionally recommend interns to projects with our clients and partners. Past projects have ranged from emerging market telecommunications to energy infrastructure to entertainment. These opportunities are situational depending upon timing, circumstance, and intern abilities and interests.

General: Most internships are unpaid educational research placements designed to provide training and academic experience consistent with U.S. Department of Labor guidance for internship programs. We commit to offering challenging, high-quality, skills-increasing engagement in cutting-edge areas. Interns enrolled in school during the Spring and Fall tend to work part-time, whereas we expect full-time engagement during the Summer or in circumstances where someone is with us temporarily, pending a future school or permanent job commitment.

For interns with us for longer periods, we recommend exposure to multiple project areas (e.g., smart money and startup success/failure). Our projects involve close collaborations with multiple professors in finance and computer science, and we anticipate future academic co-authorship opportunities for interns from our work. Such instances will involve an intermittent time availability commitment extending for years beyond the life of the internship.

Global Key Advisors is an E-Verify company. Candidates must be authorized to work in the U.S. and may use CPT or OPT if applicable. We do not sponsor H-1B visas or STEM OPT extensions for this role.