flawed work of art.
Saturday, September 08, 2007 @ 7:16 am
dragged to a talk on 'making the most of your investments' by my dad. it was immediately after work and I was knackered, but he didn't have time to dump me at home so that's how I ended in one of the mini ballrooms in Taat House.
the first guy was a Cambridge graduate accountant who talked about subprime, subprime, subprime. if you're stock market savvy, you'd know that the Asian market didn't do so well last month, cos' financial institutions with subprime had to sell off Asian stocks that were doing well in order to recover. I won't go into detail, but I jotted down notes here and there while he was talking so that
A) I wouldn't fall asleep.
B) I wouldn't freeze to death from the full-blast air-conditioning.

so there he was aided by his powerpoint slides, reminding me so much of my Hayes' (hey) day Econs lessons. (ok, that was a bad pun. told you I lost my flair in writing..) the China effect cropped up too, of course, how can you talk about the Asian markets without putting in at least a word or two on China.. also, recently the Chinese market has opened up to allow Chinese individuals to invest in HK, which is good news to buyers as HK shares are cheaper than the A shares in Shenzhen. ok, now I'm blabbering and have probably lost you already. let's move on...

... to the next speaker, a dynamic Chinese-accented female with a short stature but a loud voice. she highlighted on M'sian markets and how badly (or not) affected was it by subprime. the good news was no, it wasn't. and it was because of this piece of bad news - the more sophisticated a country's banking system is, the more vulnerable they were to subprime. so in a nutshell, M'sia does NOT have a sophisticated banking system. surprise surprise, huh? that doesn't mean we weren't affected at all, it just means that we weren't directly hit by it. so, yeah, while she was going on and on, I was listening to the steady rhythmic snoring of the dude behind me and handphone tones going off. were they just ignorant or do the middle-aged older generation not know what buttons to press to put their phones on silent mode? you tell me.

anyway, she created quite a controversy afterwards when this Indian white-haired lawyer (it's always the lawyers who have to have the last word, don't they?) who pointed out that M'sia wasn't doing as well as the rosy picture she painted. you see, she said that the Ringgit was gaining in strength, which didn't necessarily mean that exporters were making losses. for example, M'sian exporter buys the raw material at a cheaper price and sells it for the same price, so he could in fact be making a bigger profit. all in all, she said that the M'sian market was volatile in the short-term, but looked positive in the long-term, using the metaphor of mum's home-cooked soup, which takes a long time to cook, but it tastes better than the 3-minute express Campbell ones. the lawyer was quick to point out that his thosai seller has to close shop by 8 as he has no business and his mee goreng aunty or something used to sell 80 plates, but now only 20, so perhaps, it wasn't true that the M'sians had nothing to worry about. the poor lady just smiled and said, 'I just explained all this through figures. maybe one region is doing very much better than the other, I dunno, I'm just saying in general.' well, at this point in time, a lot of people had already vacated their seats and zoomed in for the food. (typical Asian habit) oh well. food before anything else, I suppose.

I didn't know much about bonds, so when she explained about the M'sian bond market, I was trying very hard to focus on what she was going on about. all I managed to gather was that the stock markets and bonds had a somewhat inverse relationship. when one's doing well, the other isn't. or something like that.

ok, and that's all for my extremely boring blog entry, where I got to recall on my Economics notes, not very successfully, by the way.

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