Logical Eccentricity

There is a lovely little sign up next to the elevators in my building, it says: “Water has been cut to the street. I have no idea when it will be back.”

This is absolutely wonderful, what’s even better… when the water does come back, its going to run brown for a good bit while the tank refills and all the sediments settle down. I just hope the water is back by the morning so I can take a shower.

Two great things this morning. One, the water is back on now… (see last night’s post for an explanation). And two, my laptop has been shipped! UPS has it now, and it is In Transit from Hong Kong. Lets see when it will get here.

I’ve been a little slow in writing posts on my blog, been busy all of last week. Hmm… what did I do? I finished reading Patriot Games by Tom Clancy. This is the second time I’ve read this book, and I must say I really enjoyed it much more than last time. When I last read it, I was back in High School or maybe even Middle School, and I skimmed a lot of the boring parts. This time, I actually read the whole thing through, and got a lot more out of it. One of the lines that really struck me, and stayed with me is the following: Jack Ryan says this to his father in law who is a very rich and senior level investment banker.

“If I’d done what you wanted. I’d be working with you every day, moving money from Column A to Column B and pretending it was important, like all the other Wall Street wimps — and hating it, and turning into another miserable bastard in the financial world. I proved that I could do that as well as you, but I made my pile, and so now I do something I like. At least we’re trying to make the world a better place instead of trying to take it over with leveraged buyouts. It’s not my fault that you don’t understand that”

I think this stuck with me simply because so many of my friends are going into investment banking, and I was planning to as well. I might return this quote at a later point for a deeper analysis, but I thought it was interesting, and worth sharing with people.

On a side note, like I said before, I’m sitting in Professor Damodaran’s classes. Since I’m planning on doing the work for the classes, I’m going to end up valuing at least three companies this semester. Two for his classes, and one for my IAG presentation later on. For the Corp Fin class I am looking at Amgen, a bio-tech company similar to Genentech which I presented last semester. For the Investment’s class I’m looking at Tata Consultancy, an Indian company which should be interesting to value using the local currency.

Finally, I’m going to start using the Rosetta Stone again. Tonight, I’m planning on going through as much of the Hindi one as I can before I go to sleep. So that’s all for now, and time to learn more languages.

Last week marked the start of my final semester at NYU Stern, and while I’m only taking 6 credits, it has been a busy week. I’ve got three main classes (Corp Fin, Ethics, and an Independent Study), other than that I’m sitting in Professor Damodaran’s Corp Fin and Investments class. Also, I’m rushing a fraternity, I should get a bid from them. But, I’m enjoying this semester to the fullest extent. Its going to be fun.

So, as a part of the six credits I am taking this semester, one of them is for an Independent Study in Information Systems. My project for this class is going to be to create a new portfolio tracker for the IAG website. I want to create a program that will allow us to track all the trades made, so we can have a page that shows the most recent trades made. This along with a couple of other features that I haven’t fulled worked out yet. But, as a part of this class, I’m going to be blogging about my progress here; I’ll give this project its own category to make it easy. So, along with the start of this, I also put in a request with Stern IT to get a MySQL account, all the trades and the portfolios will be tracked in a database. So that is a quick update on what I’ve done so far.