Homework for Christmas

After some silence RSM announced itself today with a loud “bang”. A hefty package was received containing most of the materials required for the first term. From the included class schedule, case work, etc one can conclude that time is going to be in high demand. Personal Leadership (PLD), Management Accounting (MA1), Management Sciences (MS1) and Business Methods (BM1) make up the programme for the first term. In preparation, one has to start reading up on case work and text books.

Next to text books also software was handed out, all software is used within the Management Sciences classes, which are based around making sense out of data. The software package consists of SPSS, StatTools, @RISK, BestFit and PrecisionTree.

It will be a challenge to make everything come together next year, family, work, studies, etc. That however is also part of the learning process.

Time and motivation are ticking away

Time is slowly ticking away before the EMBA starts on the 12th of Jan 2008. The hectic end-of-year period has started where everybody brushes up on their good behaviour as the end-of-year reviews are just around the corner. My projects and performance over the year sofar don’t give me any reason to be ‘worried’. Thoughts if I want to continue my career in finance still keep lingering on, hopefully the EMBA tour will shed some light on my future career in terms of domain. Currently busy with the nth cash management design for a corporate cash management solution (supporting cash balances, cash forecast for all possible transaction types, IRS, CDS, etc) and a design for a new NAV based unit administration system. Bla bla bla … it just doesn’t tickle me anymore as it used to do

Just wondering though that most MBA blogs I read have students wanting to get into the investment business, albeit, Investment Bank, Pension Funds, Hedge Fund, Private Equity, etc having worked for over a decade in this domain I wonder what the appeal is. After a while, everything becomes the same and its plays like a broken record, the nth M&A deal, the nth implementation of ‘new’/'exotic’ instruments, the nth new market-data interface, the nth trading platform … the nth of nth of the same.

Back to the EMBA, I noticed that strong emphasis is placed on good math skills*, for many of us EMBA’s doing hard-core maths is a while ago, the last time I calculated an integral is more than a decade ago . Fear not, I found this nifty little video, which explain how to do complex multiplication (we have to start small ) calculations without a calculator.

Watch …

Entering Math trick as search criteria on Youtube will give you more Math-Goodies

* Many Beta mathematicians would argue if the (Alpha) Math in Finance is really math or just a lot of statistics and probability calculations, if so I would like to point them to the “Financial Engineering” concepts used for risk/return/strategy analysis of financial instruments.

Career ..!?

I have started to reach a mid-life crisis in terms of my career. After having spent +12 years in the financial industry I wonder if it gets any better ..? Better in what, you may ask. Better position on the career ladder, better company, better, better? I currently am VP of Enterprise Architecture in a sizable investment house, AUM = +€200 Billion, so bigger, better, higher is not the issue.

One just gets frustrated that we as an investment industry make it ourselves so difficult in terms of business and technology alignment not to mention regulatory requirements. I believe most investment companies could get by with half of the IT systems they actually need to do business, a green field design would compromise of fewer systems and fewer ‘core’ processes. Driven by ‘enforced’ incompatibilities (who is the leader of the standards pack?), ‘not invented here’ syndrome, and the increase of complex instruments, the industry is sliding of into managing complexity instead of doing business. Trading platforms, Algo-trading, etc will only bring so much relief by wrapping complexity behind facades … Old problems, with new faces, meaning doing the same concepts over and over again.

Is it time for a change ..? Will things eventually get better ..?