Mind Block

12 hours of spreadsheet clicking, dragging and dropping, interspersed with some keyboard short cuts squeezes the brain out of its juices. My brain is more or less fried noodles when I step out the door, breathe the fresh air and catch some real life sights and sounds. After that, I can't really do much but look for expensive ways to get rid of the money I just earned, or shut off entirely in front of the idiot box. If I've exercised upto 10% of my brain some time or the other, my rather mundane/routine deskjob doesn't even need a quarter of that.

There is a lot of information at our finger tips now, the issue is: how do you organize and present it. That's where many of us come in. We would have been without work if it weren't for the MS Office suite of products. We work with the data and make it simple to understand and effective to reach conclusions with. So, we basically beat raw data to extract a little info from it. After a while, all data seems the same, I just make sure the beating process is done right.

Imagine doing this 60-70 hours a week. In a couple months, the mind drags/drops data even during sleep. In such circumstances, it becomes difficult to contribute to a blog that requires writing a few hundred words mostly conjured out of thin air. It would probably be easier if write my diary by just copy-pasting lines from related text searches on the web.

The Orient and The Money Trail

I am 2 weeks shy of winding up a fine internship. The Orient has been good to me. But let me start by giving you my 2 cents about banking.

Banking is all about information leverage. Banking (sell-side: M&A, IPOs etc) is a service oriented industry. An I-banker's output is simply excel sheets and power point slides. Period. The rest is about building relationships, an impression, trust and ultimately clinching the deal. I was surprised by the sort of data that's available in public domain: see Capital IQ (from Dow Jones), Bloomberg, FactSet etc. See MergerMarket specifically for M&A. These research organizations gather, organize and format data for consumption by bankers and consultants. Bankers have a team of Analysts and Associates, essentially number crunchers and graphic designers in their responsibilities who put together consistent, exhaustive and technically foolproof presentations to convince their clients to move in certain directions. Their job might seem parasitic in nature, but actually they provide an important service. They keep the markets competitive by 'M&A'ing firms globally, they value firms and accordingly raise capital, they drive investment in firms which have a bright future, etc. I-bankers have an expansive, maybe even global, view of the industry they concentrate on. They might not understand a business in depth, but they can use historical/current analogies to demonstrate how they perceive a given business will perform in certain prevalent conditions and what some possibilities can lead them to. Hence, the money trail, with money comes business and with business comes money, using certain mathematical models (rather simplistic in nature) I-bankers understand how much a business is truly worth and how much it can improve its worth to, after performing certain actions.

I don't know what's stopping organizations like Google or NSA from entering the arena. They have the ability to sift terabytes of data, make sense of it, extract relevant information from it, and apply advanced algorithms to assess and predict the profit & loss, cash-flow and equity.

So much for an introduction into a profession that I learnt about quite late in life. Now, my appreciation about the Orient. Hong Kong is a cosmopolitan place, with good work ethic, and cheaper than its Western counterparts. It's flowing with Chinese money. It's a Chinese London with weather that's more moderate. Life is convenient, basically a necessity to make efficient citizens who contribute optimally to the economy. Knowing Cantonese is good, but life moves fine with English. You can have cuisines from around the world. It's up all night but if you start day early there are many green places to hang around. It's attracting talent from the developed world, now that the economies there have slowed down and Asia is seeing more action. It's a gateway to tomorrow's superpower, where it's easy to enter, do business in and exit. I hope to come here again.