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Wow - over three months since my last post. What have I been doing? Well, quite a bit actually. I changed jobs last Autumn, although I'm pretty much doing the same kind of thing. The one big plus is that my office is now on Orchard Road, and there's better shopping there. There's also more options on food, although no quick n cheap kopi tiams.

And this is primarily the reason I have not blogged for a while - work. I started at the end of October, and within a few days was of to Oz for some induction for a fortnight. Back in Singapore for a week, and then off to Manila to meet my new team fro a fortnight. Back for a few weeks, then off to the UK for Christmas. Things have started to settle down now, but for a while it was pretty busy. Just as a little aside, we're right in the middle of the rainy season here in Singapore, so rain most of the time. It usually starts at aorund 3-4 in the afternoon, and can continue for most of the evening. Just so as you know it's not all fun in the sun here. Only 9 months of the time.

What else have we been up to? Well, in October we went to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon for you romantics), which was great. Food was fantastic, with serious French influence. Coffee was the best I've had, and the buildings were interesting too. We only went for a few days, but would recommend it.

Some of you may know that we're going back to the UK this week. Guess we'll catch up with most of you then. I'll try to keep blogging, although it may not be as frequent as before. Fear not, I'm still here, although gaining in girth by the day...this may have something to do with the fact that I have not jogged much since I bought my expensive new "running shoes". This will (hopefully!) change now, as I'm signed up to do the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge in Singapore in April, along with my office colleagues. How will I fare? That kind of depends on the amount I have to drink between now and then...

adidas Men's adizero LT DC Trainers (sorry, Running Shoes)

Having started to jog (for jog, read collapse in a forward motion) regularly, I thought it time to buy some trainers more suitable. I had been jogging in my more than respectable adidas trainers (similar to these ones, bought when trainers were more colloquially known as “pub loafers”, and worn by all, everywhere). These were fine for looking good at le discothèque (or is it la discothèque?), but were a little too heavy for jogging. So, we headed on down to the Queensway Shopping Center and ended up with a pair of adidas adizero trainers (sorry, running shoes). Sticker price $180. We pay $136. Not bad.

As excited as a small boy in a sweet shop with a pocket full of change and a brand new set of dentures, we headed out for a test-jog yesterday. What a difference! The trainers (sorry, running shoes) were incredibly light. And, I can prove that they help me run better, faster, longer, higher (well, maybe not the last one). I normally last for 15 minutes before collapsing. Yesterday, we ran for 17 minutes. That’s a little over 13% improvement, just from a pair of trainers. Who knows what a new pair of socks could do…

Red Arrows

So it would appear as though the Red Arrows are too British to fly at the Olympics. I sometimes have difficulty in considering my position on this - is it too jingoistic to call it ridiculous, and allow the Pride of Britain to fly (especially if the BNP seem to be outraged – but then so were The Times), or is it just a ridiculous decision? I have to say, that, although I can perhaps see what the organisers are trying to achieve, this is a bit of a PR disaster, and actually a bad call on their part. There’s a petition to sign, and by Jove I’ve gone and signed it.

- - - - - - - - - -

UPDATE: Erm, having signed it, I've just read on the petition that "The organising committee of London 2012 will decide what to include in the celebrations - but with five years to go, decisions are yet to be made on what the celebrations will look like, although you can be assured that they will be a spectacular showcase of Britain's best." Hmm, well, could have put that up top, right? Or did you really want the address information first?

The land of the shiny green suit...

Earlier this month I was in Hong Kong for a quick visit. Hong Kong is perhaps one of my all-time fave cities (although maybe Shanghai has overtaken in…), so it’s always great to go back. The weather was quite cool at this time of year (at least for the first few days), so it was also nice to escape the heat of Singapore! The flight itslf is only three and a bit hours, so its a fast hop (for anyone who wants to visit next time they're in Singapore...)


When I first arrived, my colleague form HK was feeling a little under the weather, so I had a whole Sunday night to kill. I remembered that the walk along Nathan Road was quite a nice one, and as it was around 5pm when I set off, I figured that if I started at one end, by the time I reached the Causeway it would be dark, giving me a nice view of Hong Kong Island at night. I took the MTR to Prince Edward, thinking it was a short walk to the causeway. Wrong. I had underestimated the length of Nathan Road, and ended up pretty damn far from where I wanted to be. Nonetheless, it was a nice (but tiring) walk that night, finished off with some Sichuan noodles with bubble tea (left). Not sure how Sichuan the noodles were (they seemed to be mostly carrots), but nice enough.

Next day I was off to Lan Kwai Fong in the evening. I was pretty beat after work, but I figured I should venture out a little to soak up the nightlife. Being a Monday night, LKF was a little empty, but was still as I remembered it, the hang-out for expats and local businessmen. Full of bars and pubs, it looked like an ideal place to have a beer after work. Only I was too tired. I wanted to eat, and sleep. So I found a neat little noodle bar in Central and had some beef noodles. Some of the best noodles I’ve ever had, although maybe a little too much tenderiser in the beef. I had a Tsingtao beer as well (well, I’m in China, right?). Apparently the chef made noodles in Macao for years, and even knocked up a bowl for the Portuguese president some time ago. Now, this sounds good in theory. But it’s a bit like saying that m fish and chips are great because I cooked them for the Japanese premier once. How is the Portuguese president to tell good noodles from bad? Maybe he does, and I’m doing him a disservice. All I’m saying is that if he had made noodles for the Chinese premier, I’d have been impressed…;-). Anyway, they were good. The couple in front of me took a pic, so I thought I would as well.




Left: Lan Kwai Fong
Far left: Beef Noodles & Beer






Tuesday night I had dinner on the Peak, which was lovely. It’s so much cooler up there than down at sea level, you can see why the rich and famous make their homes in the clouds.

Then, time to come home. And buy duty free at Changi Airport. This is a ritual that all locals (and foreigners who live here) partake of, give that booze is so damn expensive here. The staff at duty free are very helpful (I think they’re on commission), so the whole experience is very easy (and costly, if you buy the regulation 3 bottles of beer, one bottle of spirits, one bottle of wine).

The one thing that strikes you after visiting HK for a few days from Singapore is that you have just used two of the best airports in the world. Seriously. You can tell the organisation and thought that went into them, and their design. The airport train from Lantau Island to Hong Kong Island is wonderful, the airport itself in HK is beautiful – and shopping is not bad either. But Changi is great, with the efficiency that it prides itself on. Which one is better? I’m not sure. But I do know that they are more enjoyable and relaxing than Heathrow!

Colbar

I didn’t get around to posting about one of our new favourite places to go makan – the Wessex Estate and OneNorth in Singapore. The whole estate is very close to the new Biopolis that has been developed in Singapore. Biopolis was developed to attract genetics engineers and scientists to Singapore, and I think that the chap who cloned Dolly the Sheep might even have been here at one point. The whole estate felt very much like the Little Kent area we have visited before – lots of colonial bungalows (many named after outposts of the British Empire, or major battles in the history of the Empire). Some of these bungalows have been converted to allow space for small business to grow, giving the whole estate quite a relaxed and quirky feel. Therew as a lot of redevelopment going on, and it would seem as though the Estate is getting quite a makeover. Nonetheless, there were quite a few classic cars around, lending a feel of Enid Blyton-esque Britishness.

However, the real standout was Colbar. An old bar frequented by expats for years, it was almost pulled down for good recently, when a new highway was built. However, a petition was gathered, and the bar was actually relocated (brick by brick) to its current location. The food here is absolutely fabulous (think old English pub foods, real brown sauce & ketchup, and vinegar…), and there is even a bring and borrow library there as well. You’ll see from the pics that I had the fish n chips – best on the Island. The bar also sold other pub favourites (sausage & chips, burger & chips - you get the idea), and pickled eggs. Not sure how popular they were, but there they were on the counter. The bar also stocked a decent selection of British real ales in the chiller. All in all, a great place.



Far Left: Bungalow with suitably exotic name
Left: Me on Woking Rd









Far Left: Research Lab
Left: Colbar





Colbar
9A Whitchurch Road, Wessex Estate Tel: 6779-4859
Opening hours: 11am-10pm; closed on Mondays

Batman!

Okay, weak pun. Again. I've only just got around to posting this, but a few months ago we were regularly visited by a bat. He hung around outside the house, and on one occasion ventured inside, hanging on the light. I prodded and poked, but he was quite happy where he was. Eventually he got the message, and went to find Robin. We get lots of animals around the house, including a few geckos (my favourite has been called Gordon), who entertain themselves watching us watch them.

We get a lot of bats here in Singapore, and it seems as though there are more than when I first came here a few years ago. Mostly fruit bats, you can hear them call at night, and they swoop over your heads like the Red Baron if you are out walking in the evening, conducting guano bombing raids.

It's raining again...

This week seems to herald the coming of the wet season in Singapore. It’s been building up over the last few weeks but it appears as though the rains are here. How do I know this? I walked out for my lunch, and half way to the food court felt the pitter patter of raindrops – 15 yards later and it was the not so faint clap of thunder, 10 yards further and I was drenched. I waited an hour for the rains to subside but to no avail. No choice left, I ran.

The Rainy season is characterised by sudden and thunderous rain. You can be walking along in bright sunshine one minute, the next you are looking for a life raft. Waiting it out is futile – the rains can go on for days. The only solution is to carry an umbrella with you wherever you go.

It is important here to distinguish between British rain (“is it raining? Not sure, let’s try”), and South-East Asian tropical rains (“Why didn’t we buy a house on stilts? Is that my car floating away…”). Rain in Singapore and the region is ferocious, never giving you a minutes respite. Whereas (ordinarily) British rain spreads out the water over a three hour period, South-East Asian rain gives it to you in about 10 minutes, throwing rain down with force.

Except in the rainy season, where it rains for days, months even.

I'm back!

Okay, okay, okay, so I know you all got a little scared there. I asked if anyone actually read the blog, and only two people replied. I know for sure that I have one full time reader (hi mum), so I shall rekindle the flames of writing creativity, and bang out some more posts. Later.

But for now, here's a blog that states what's pretty much obvious to almost anyone I studies with recently "...pretty much anything else is more absorbing than writing a 400-page Ph.D. thesis". It's true. PhD students will feign interest (to others, or themselves) in most thing in order to put off writing that concluding section that ties together the chapter. Or write that damn introduction that is on v1.17.

Hubris

It would appear that hubris, like energy, cannot be created or destroyed. Six months ago the world's financial markets were incredibly easy places to make money - anyone could throw a dart at the board and enjoy the upside. Many investors who did so told the rest of the world as much. Now, as markets slide, it's the slow and cautious tortoise (or the squirrels depending on you choice of fable) that are having the last laugh.

Maybe there is a lesson here, that excessive hubris coupled with an unfortunate turn of events is often accompanied by proportionate amounts of schadenfreude.

Happy Birthday...

Happy Birthday to my blog...

I was going to write the lyrics for the whole song that we all know and love, but it appears that the are, as it has been rumoured, copyrighted. Technically, whenever you sing that song, you should pay royalties.

So I am not going to.

Anyhow, my blog is one year old. I promised in my first post that this might be the first of many - I have thus far posted 67 times. An overage of over one a week. Should I continue? Does anyone read it? Comments please...

Template

Blogger asked me to update my template, so I did - and promptly lost me all of my previous settings and links et cetera. I had to do a quick rescue and pull together what I could remember. I've altered the font and the link colours slightly, but hopefully it looks okay.

Revision is going okay, I have been trying to crack Econs this week. In a good way, the CFA has forced me to actually learn a lot of the stuff I skipped during my U/G studies. I never really mastered mid-point elasticities; I knew they existed, and could broadly explain them, and that was enough. However, I now have to do worked examples, and I suddenly realise that there was quite a lot of stuff I had not really mastered at U/G level that I need to know now.

Next week comes a personal favourite (not) - comparative advantage in the terms of trade. I never really knew that one, it was much like magicians trick to me. However, I have to crack it so no choice.

On a separate note, we tried to watch the Simpsons movie last night, but could not get a seat that did not involve detaching out head to see the screen, so we stayed in and watched Syriana. We did manage to watch Harry Potter last week - who would have thought that the order of the phoenix was two Lamb Bhunas and an onion bhaji? Maybe he should try something a little less spicy, and then he won't keep catching fire...

Back to the grind...

The dust is settling following the wedding (and so is my stomach after all that food!), and things are getting back to normal. We had a wonderful Brazilian dinner last night with a few friends from the wedding that helped us during the day, and our wedding photographer was in attendance to capture some of the happy moments. Too much meat has left me feeling slightly peaky today, but I should be right as rain tomorrow.

As for the CFA study, I am in week two now, having looked at Ethics last week. Ethics provide to be a little tricky, but not too challenging. Most seemed to be almost common sense, but there are parts where a candidate needs to learn to think like the CFA Institute wants you to, not as you might intuitively think. Nonetheless, Ethics accounts for quite a large chunk of Level I, and I need to make sure I get it licked to stand any chance of passing the exam.

I started on quants yesterday, only to find that my shiny new calculator kept giving me rather odd answers. The Stalla guide is fairly idiot-proof, and I was following the key strokes to calculate annuity payment, but was getting vastly different answers to those that the book was suggesting. Them, I just got a few error messages. So, quick as a flash, I switched to Economics (micro) to make the bets use if the remaining day. I sat the mock exam I have on CD, thinking that, given that I used to LECTURE micro-economics, I should be okay.

No such luck.

No study or revision, and I managed a measly 57% on the multiple choice. But several of the questions were fairly ambiguous, and given that my calculator wasn’t working I estimated many calculations involving elasticity and marginal product/revenue/cost et cetera. I’ll hit the books again tonight, and try to remember some of the formulas for elasticity.

Just as a final sign-off, if you need a laugh on a Monday, tale a look at this article. I should stress that the subject matter is not funny – but look at the author of the piece…

As a final note, I see that we are under 5 months from Christmas.

CFA briefing cum Information Session

So, my parents and extended family are here, ready for Saturday’s big day. That doesn’t stop the clock as far as the CFA goes, and on Friday evening I attended a CFA briefing cum Information Session, run by CFA Singapore. The evening was interesting inasmuch as I found that many members at the session seemed to be university students. Others were I guess drawn from a large cross-section of the usual suspects (I-Banking, consulting et cetera). We also learnt that the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation is the largest employer of CFA charter-holders in Singapore. GIC employs 89, whilst the next employer - Citigroup – employs 72). Finally, we also learnt that Singapore has the largest amount of CFA charter-holders per capita in the world.

Unsurprising, given that even the CFA brochure recounts that, in relation to one charter-holder “… the head of the Government Investment Corp. (GIC) in Singapore, whom she highly respected, strongly recommended the CFA Program to her. “I felt that if I could be anywhere near as successful as he is I had to get myself a CFA [charter].” You go girl.

But we did learn some interesting stuff as well. Like the fact that whilst the pass rate is kept secret these days, it sued to be 70% of the top percentile. So if the top dog gets 100%, the pass rate is 70% and so on. Yikes! Well, the CFA is essentially an American certificate, and that is a very American way of grading. At University you often hear rumours of Harvard et al. failing the bottom 10%, and giving distinctions to those in the top 10%.

The exam day itself is two 3 hour exams (one in the morning, and one in the afternoon), and we should get the results 6 weeks after the exam.

This looks tougher than anything I’ve done before, and I do wish I’d paid more attention to Financial Analysis at Uni (youthful exuberance and a devotion to qualitative methods…)

We'll, they're not that worried, are they?

The BBC reports today that:

"Australia has already started a wider A$40 defence procurement programme, amid concerns about growing instability in the Asia-Pacific region."

What are they doing, shopping on eBay?

How much?

So Singapore is the 14th most expensive place on earth to live (up from 17th last year). Mercer's Worldwide Cost of Living Survey for 2007 has shown that Moscow is the most expensive city, and Algiers (in Algeria) is the cheapest. I could have told you that. How do I know? Well, paying anything like what we do for booze is unseemly. But, interestingly, there are comparisons of objects that are seemingly incomparable.

One such ranking is for coffee. The Mercer survey tells us that a cup of coffee in London had an average price of £2. £2!?! And what exactly do they mean by an average cup? Do they man a cup that is neither good nor bad, decidedly average in fact, will cost you £2? Or do they mean that the mean cost of a cup of coffee (taking into account all cups of coffee available in London) is £2?

Moreover, how valid is this as a comparator? Are they comparing Lattes from Starbucks globally (probably not, given the £2 quote for London), which in any case might not be comparable? Or are they comparing different types of coffee from different outlets of different chains?

Nonetheless, here are the coffee shorts (espresso facts, if you like):

Moscow: £3.14
Tokyo £2.33
Copenhagen: £2.55
Dublin: £2.00
New York: £1.93
Beijing: £2.32
Sydney: £1.41
Vancouver: £1.42
Johannesburg: £0.98
Buenos Aires: £0.91

Source: Mercer Human Resource Consulting

All well and good, but is the coffee in Buenos Aires any good?

CFA

Okay, so I have signed up to the CFA. It was a big decision, not least in terms of cost. Cost in a financial sense, and also opportunity cost of studying. The enrolment for the Level I exam (for fees received on or before 15 August 2007) is US$390, whilst the one-off registration is US$455, making a grand total of US$845 up front moolah. The opportunity cost comes in when you consider that the advised study is 250 hours, (around 10 hours per week) for the Level I exam. So, all in all, a big commitment. However, the RoI of the CFA is large, and is a pre-requisite for most jobs in fund management. It's possible to see why when you look at the curriculum:

Ethics

Quantitative Methods

Prelim readings for Economics

Quantitative Methods

Micro Economic Analysis

Macro Economic Analysis

Global Economic Analysis

Corporate Finance

Prelim readings for Accounting

Financial Statement Analysis: Basics, Cash Flow Analysis and IASB GAAP

Financial Statement Analysis: Ratios & EPS

Financial Statement Analysis: Inventories, Long term Assets

Financial Statement Analysis: Deferred Taxes, Off Balance Sheet Debt

Securities Markets & Equities

Derivatives

Debt Investments

Alt Investments/ Portfolio Management

What to do? Well, suck it up, hit the books, and keep fingers and other extremities crossed. CFA Singapore has a study timetable for the December exam (December 2nd, by the way), and although I won't be joining, I do know that I should be starting Ethics on June 30th, and finishing with Alternative Investments/Portfolio Management on November 3rd.

I would hope that Econs will be okay, given that I used to lecture Econs, but the rest I haven't really touched since my Masters degree. And the one stand-out is Quants - a subject that I hated at Uni. So much so, that my PhD was quals-based. Suddenly, doing a quants-based PhD looks more attractive!!

Anyway, I've got the books, and I've got the schedule. The rest, as they say, is up to me.