I'm Sean — a 21-year-old accounting and risk management student who spends too much time thinking about markets and not enough time sleeping. I'm not the smartest person in the room, but I ask a lot of questions and I write everything down. This is that.
Most retail investors watch earnings reports and Fed announcements. I watch the news. Geopolitical events move markets before most people connect the dots.
macro geopoliticsA recent EY piece argues most enterprise risk programs are backward-looking and fundamentally misaligned with how fast the world moves. As an ERM student, that landed differently than I expected.
risk ERMI'm pursuing dual degrees in accounting and ERM at Penn State. Two professors told me I'm the first student they've met doing this combination. Here's what I've figured out so far.
accounting careerI'm a Penn State student pursuing dual degrees in accounting and enterprise risk management, with plans to graduate in 2028.
Most people would probably describe that as a pretty standard path into finance. For me, it's become a way to understand how different pieces of the world fit together. I like tracing connections — how politics influences markets, how interest rates change business decisions, or how the people running a company shape the risks investors often overlook.
I started this site because writing helps me think. Whenever I learn something interesting, I write it down, organize my thoughts, and share it. Sometimes I'll be right, sometimes I'll be wrong, but every post is part of getting better at asking questions and understanding the world a little more clearly.
I'm not trying to convince anyone I'm an expert. I'm just documenting what I'm learning and how I'm thinking along the way.
Most retail investors watch earnings reports and Fed announcements. I watch the news. Geopolitical events move markets before most people connect the dots.
macro geopoliticsA recent EY piece argues most enterprise risk programs are backward-looking and fundamentally misaligned with how fast the world moves. As an ERM student, that landed differently than I expected.
risk ERMI'm pursuing dual degrees in accounting and ERM at Penn State. Two professors told me I'm the first student they've met doing this combination. Here's what I've figured out so far.
accounting careerMost retail investors watch earnings reports and Fed announcements. I watch the news.
Not because I'm smarter, because geopolitical events move markets before most people connect the dots. By the time it shows up in a quarterly report, the trade is already over.
The Transmission Mechanism Nobody Talks About
Here's a pattern I've watched play out more than once.
The US gets involved militarily in the Middle East. Oil exports get delayed. A global supply shortage follows. Inflation ticks up, gas prices rise, and consumers pull back on spending. Companies that run on diesel, logistics, retail, distribution, start seeing margin compression. Walmart gets hit from both ends.
That chain of events isn't complicated. It's just something most retail investors aren't thinking about when they're reading stock screeners.
Iran and Venezuela are two places I've watched this play out in real time. The signals were there early. The market caught up later.
Why the 2026 Midterms Are the Trade I'm Watching Now
Midterm election years are historically the weakest year of the four-year presidential cycle. Going back to 1896, the Dow has averaged just 4% during midterm years. In 23 instances since 1934, the S&P 500 declined an average of 20.8% at some point in the 12 months leading up to election day.
That pattern alone is worth paying attention to.
But 2026 feels different. The current debate around voting system changes has introduced something the historical data doesn't fully account for: questions about legitimacy before a single vote is cast.
Markets hate uncertainty. They hate contested outcomes even more. The normal post-midterm relief rally, which historically averages 12.4% in the 12 months after election day, is driven by clarity. Investors exhale when they know who controls Congress and what policy looks like going forward.
If that clarity doesn't come, if the result itself becomes the controversy, that exhale doesn't happen.
That's the scenario I'm watching. Not just who wins, but whether the result is accepted.
History says midterms are already a rocky stretch for markets. Add a legitimacy crisis on top of it, and the transmission mechanism is pretty clear.
Data sourced from BlackRock, U.S. Bank, and RBC Wealth Management.
A recent piece from EY's risk consulting team made a claim that's hard to ignore: most enterprise risk management programs are "backward-looking" and "fundamentally misaligned" with the speed of today's world.
As someone studying ERM at Penn State, that landed differently than I expected.
The Problem With Annual Risk Cycles
EY's argument is straightforward. Most organizations still run their risk assessments on an annual calendar. Build the heat map, update the register, present to the board, repeat.
But the world doesn't move on that timeline anymore.
The article points to the 2025 US tariff shock as a perfect example. Economists put just 5% odds on tariffs rising to near 20%, yet six months later, it happened. An annual risk assessment completed before that shift would have missed it entirely.
The authors call today's environment "NAVI": nonlinear, accelerated, volatile, and interconnected. That framing stuck with me.
What This Means Beyond the Boardroom
Here's where it gets interesting to me personally.
The same logic that makes annual ERM cycles ineffective is exactly why I track geopolitics and political cycles for market signals. Risks don't announce themselves on a schedule. A tariff decision, an election result, a central bank shift, these things move markets before most risk frameworks even register them.
EY's solution is "continuous risk sensing," using AI to synthesize signals across satellite imagery, social sentiment, supply chain data, and geopolitical forecast markets in near real time. That's essentially what active macro investors have been doing manually for decades.
The gap between institutional risk management and market reality is where the interesting trades live. When ERM lags, markets often price the risk before the organization even names it.
EY is right that risk functions need a rethink. But the bigger takeaway for me is simpler: the people who identify risk earliest, before the annual calendar, before the heat map, are the ones who act while everyone else is still documenting.
Read the full EY article here.
I'm pursuing dual degrees in accounting and enterprise risk management at Penn State. People ask me all the time what I plan to do with that combination.
Honestly, I'm still working it out. But here's what I know so far.
A risk management professor told me I was the first student he'd ever met pursuing both. A mentor at the Smeal Business Career Center said the same thing. I don't know anyone else doing it either. Whether that means I'm onto something or just doing something unusual, I haven't decided yet.
Where the Two Actually Overlap
The clearest intersection I've found is in the Big 4 advisory world. Firms like EY, KPMG, Deloitte, and PwC all run significant risk consulting practices alongside their audit and tax work. The article I reacted to earlier was written by EY's own risk consulting team. These firms use both accounting expertise and risk frameworks together, especially in transactions.
The most concrete example I've come across is Representations and Warranties insurance in M&A deals. When two companies merge, there are financial representations made by the seller. R&W insurance protects the buyer if those representations turn out to be inaccurate. Structuring that coverage requires someone who can read financial statements and understand risk exposure at the same time. That's the accounting and ERM overlap in practice.
Beyond M&A, the career paths that seem to use both skillsets include internal audit, governance and compliance, financial risk management, and risk consulting at the advisory firms. The demand is there. Risk management as a strategic function is growing fast, driven by AI, regulatory pressure, and the kind of geopolitical volatility I write about here.
What I Haven't Figured Out Yet
Outside of M&A advisory and Big 4 consulting, I haven't fully mapped where this combination is most powerful. That's partly why I started writing here. Working through these questions in public forces me to actually answer them, and the answers tend to get sharper when someone else might read them.
If you're further down this road than I am, I'd genuinely like to hear where you've seen accounting and risk intersect in ways that surprised you.
Reach out here.