Something Beautiful

Something beautiful for your entertainment.

"Performing has been Angelica's life dream since her debut on fixed trapeze as the youngest circus performer in the L.A. Circus at the age of 7.

Angelica has a strong dance background (ballet, modern, contemporary, jazz, and African dance) and has done workshops with companies including Diavolo Dance Theater and Ledges and Bones.

Angelica attended Ecole nationale de cirque, starting as an aerialist, but soon falling in love with the Cyr wheel. She also has numbers ready to perform on dance trapeze and tissu.

Highlights include La Vie est une Cirque, Generating Company's "No Sweat", and festival Sol y Circo in Sylt, Germany where she won 2nd place, audience award, and Cirque Eloize engagement award."

Capitalism is not the problem or the answer (Hint: People)

Personally I think that capitalism is the right way. Of course my opinion is an opinion of a someone who wants to make his living by the financial markets. Still I prefer CAPITALISM. I don't want you to think it too strictly. I'm Finnish and here socialism isn't such a nasty word as compared to the States. I see nothing wrong in having some socialism in my capitalism. Combining good ideas should never be forbidden.

 In theory capitalism is great and in theory Soviet Union could have become this days U.S.A. Problem is that nothing is perfect and you must allow things to adapt to find better solutions. Capitalistic system allows fastest change when needed. Problems with every system are slow decision making and adaptation by law-makers and in every system smarter and greedier will find ways to get more. 

I think capitalism would be perfect world religion is people were able to think about others and forget their selfish ambitions which only provide positive results to them and take something away from someone else. Christianity  (as an example among many others) would be a great religion if people ACTUALLY DID AS THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO by the rules of their own  f****ng religion. Failure to actually do what you believe in leads to misery around you. Economics always teaches us how the world will go to a better direction because companies always choose the most productive and efficient projects to go through. Too often this isn't true because especially finance teaches us that companies must do their best to maximise shareholder value. It is great in theory but when laws and supervision are weak these companies will go outside those known limits of good moral behavior and do what they are "allowed" to do.

Causes behind our last financial crises were greedy people who didn't believe in the chance of failure. They ended up taking huge risk and failed to have a proper portfolio where those massively risky investments wouldn't have been too strong to hurt them. It doesn't matter if during the time those were considered to be risky or safe investments because in finance nothing is certain until it has actually happened. Building a good and solid portfolio is taught to every finance student the day he/she is born! Ignorance and god complex are steps on the stairway to damnation.

About few people acquiring most of the wealth.. Smart/greedy/hard working people will always acquire more wealth than others, and they should! That is deserved when it isn't obtained by illegal/greedy/evil behavior. I am not saying that they should hold on to something like 3 billion dollars. Most people would be happy for the rest of their lives if they had one million dollars. There is no use in having a billion dollars sitting in your bank account. Most useful way is to spread it out as investments and contributions so it will spread happiness to others and it might bring back more money than you gave out. So the wheel keeps turning.

Unfortunately too many people are greedy and selfish d**ks. It doesn't get better by the fact that most people who go after power and money are sociopaths/psychopaths and so on. They don't care to do good business, they only wish to make business that is good for them. So regulations and laws are needed and important. If regulators are asleep at the switch.. Then we are on the mercy of those who know what they want and will do everything they can to get it.

A hint to all those people camping in Wall Street. YOU ARE ACHIEVING NOTHING. Only real change can come through politicians who care to do their work properly. Next time you vote, vote for someone who cares and knows what the f*ck he/she is doing. Most of those guys currently sitting in the shit hill don't care about you and are totally unable to do the job that is presented to them. 

Democracy+Capitalism is sweet like chocolate but it requires smart and unselfish people to work.

Listening to Queens of the Stone Age

Later on I will surely write more about behavioral finance since I find that area to be very important and extremely interesting. This video by UCBerkeleyHaas was just published and I thought I´ll share it with you as well. How fear can affect people's behavior with their stocks. Does fear affect your decision making? If you really want to know more about how fear affects people's decision making then you should read their paper about the subject to better understand it. This video just summarizes their work and findings.

Like I said I find behavioral finance to be very interesting and important. I´ll be reading books of the area for a long time into the future and videos are always great help to speed up the learning process. I´m sure the paper behind the video will be much more explanatory as here he just tells the basics. It is still enough to raise your interest and wonder how fear actually affect everything that happens around us.

How Fear Impacts Stock Market Decisions

                                      

"Watching a horror movie can scare you into selling your stocks earlier than you would have otherwise. That's the frightening evidence shown in a series of studies by Associate Professor Eduardo and Chan Jean Lee, a PhD candidate, both in the Haas Marketing Group. Lee and Andrade are the co-authors of "Fear, Social Projection, and Financial Decision Making," forthcoming in a special issue on consumers' financial decision making in the Journal of Marketing Research, November 2011.

The article explains that the scared investor's early decision to sell stocks happens through "social projection"—people's tendency to heavily rely on their own current feelings and inclinations when they estimate others' state of mind and preferences. As a result of social projection, an investor who is scared assumes that other investors are also scared and that their fear will consequently drive the stock price down, prompting the one investor to sell early before the price sinks."

Most important video you´ll ever see!

"2 million views for an old codger giving a lecture about arithmetic? What's going on? You'll just have to watch to see what's so damn amazing about what he (Albert Bartlett) has to say.

I introduce this video to my students as "Perhaps the most boring video you'll ever see, and definitely the most important." But then again, after watching it most said that if you followed along with what the presenter (a professor emeritus of Physics at Univ of Colorado-Boulder) is saying, it's quite easy to pay attention, because it is so damn compelling."

This is part one and rest you can find from here. I find him to be very interesting and although he makes his most important point at the beginning it is still very worthwhile for you to watch all eight videos.

PS. A quote from the video comments:
my dick exponentially grows :D

Lets assume that your penis does indeed have a doubling time. To make it easy to analyse, we'll give it a doubling time of 1 minute, and an initial size of only one inch (tee hee).

at 1 minute: 2 inchs.

2 minutes: 4 inches.

27 minutes: ~6371km (3982 miles) - diameter of the earth)

59 minutes: 10,000 light-years (diameter of our galaxy)

78 minutes: 10,000,000,000 light-years (size of visible universe)

tl,dr: see a doctor.

Fisherman vs. Businessman

Purpose of this blog post is to help you understand what you wish to achieve in your life and how you'd like to do it. Maybe you have heard about this story as it's quite well known. I love it and it gives me a smile every time I read it. It's all about doing what you want in life and being happy. Enjoy!

A boat docked in a tiny village. An American tourist complimented the local fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took him to catch them.

“Not very long,” answered the man.

“But then, why didn't you stay out longer and catch more?” asked the American.

The man explained that his small catch was sufficient to meet his needs and those of his family.

The American asked, “But what do you do with the rest of your time?”

“I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, and take a siesta with my wife. In the evenings I go into the village to see my friends, dance a little, drink a bit, and sing a few songs. I have a full life.”

The American interrupted, “I have an MBA from Harvard and I can help you. You should start by fishing longer every day. You can then sell the extra fish you catch. With the revenue, you can buy a bigger boat.

With the extra money the larger boat will bring, you can buy a second one and a third one and so on until you have an entire fleet of trawlers. Instead of selling your fish to a middleman, you can negotiate directly with the processing plants and maybe even open your own plant.

You can then leave this little village and move to Athens, London or even New York City! From there you can direct your huge enterprise.”

“How long would that take?” asked the man.

“Twenty, perhaps twenty-five years,” replied the American.

“And, after that? Afterwards?”

“That’s when it gets really interesting,” answered the American, laughing. “When your business gets really big, you can start selling stocks and make millions!”

“Millions? Really? And after that?”

“After that you’ll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, sleep late, play with your grandchildren, catch a few fish, take a siesta with your wife, and spend your evenings singing, dancing, playing and drinking with your friends…”

One thing you must learn

There is at least one thing that everyone should understand even if they do not care or follow finance at all. Interest rates are important to understand if you ever take debt or loan money. Surprisingly many people do not actually understand interest rates and therefore especially compounded interest rate can be very dangerous to their wealth. 

If I can get even one person to learn something new with this then I have done something useful! Please, watch these two videos provided by Khan Academy. If you have a friend who isn't very good with managing his finance then make him or her watch these as well ;) Take care!

Part 1

Part 2

Who and missä/where?

So.. As my first blog: Who? An introduction.

Mhm so I am a bachelor student of finance and accounting and I've also started my master's studies in finance. I have known that I want to study something business related for almost 10 years. For a long time finance wasn't my goal, it was either management or marketing but when came the time to choose I again remembered what basic things I actually love to do. Mainly it was football manager games. I used to love LMA Manager (last LMA version I think), all those little adjustments and handling money and watching charts. I was able to spend hours looking and charts and figuring out what players I will try to buy for my team. Now I know that I will go for a career in the financial markets and I love to study the markets and learn to understand them.

I´m 23 years old and Finnish born, also still living and studying in Finland. I could blog in Finnish but because I aim to find an international career I will write mainly in English and perhaps sometimes in Finnish. I study in a Finnish university and currently I have been working in a bank for six months. It started as a summer job and they continued my contract because they needed helping hands and I needed more experience. They would have liked to have me there till the end of this year but I need to get back to my studies after this month. 

What will I write about... :

My texts will mostly be about something investing related. I might write about anything between stocks and cow futures. Anything that I can personally invest in and find interesting is a potential topic. Usual topics will probably  be stocks, companies behind them and ETFs for commodities and metals. As a Finn my speciality of course is Nordic stocks and what might, or as an investing possibility should, be interesting to other people is the chance of me writing about more local investing possibilities that are quite unknown to most people who do not get much information from this part of the world.

What kind of an investor am I?

I consider myself to be very fearless to risk taking. I think about the markets from more typical like CAPM perspective and also from behavioral perspective etc. I will hold some companies for years, some for short periods or sell some short and also I might bet that metal prices are going down. My portfolio is still very small but eventually it will be quite versatile as I gain more money and experience.

What I hope to gain by blogging:

I decided to start this to gain a new level with myself. I really try to learn new ways to see the world and improve myself by learning something new and learning to understand my own behavior. I´m also trying to learn to think and argue better. That is a challenge that I am not getting enough in my normal life so feedback and counterarguments through this can be very useful for my development. Also possibility of gaining new interesting contacts interests me.

As I now start this.. I might blog about my ideas and turns of life for many years from now. Hopefully I will be able to teach someone something new and interesting so we can all learn to see the world in a different light and enjoy what it has to offer :) More stuff later. Be free to send me comments and questions!

P.S. While I´m finishing this text I´m listening to Fatboy Slim (Right Here, Right Now) which makes me feel quite happy ;)

-M.C.