Personal Archives - Page 8 of 17

Akin goes to school

Akin goes to school is a legendary Nigerian novel read by all in the 70s and 80s. It told the story of a young lad who went to school and became successful despite the hardship of life.

The biggest lesson for me wasn’t how he overcame his adversity but the importance of education. Sometimes when you think you ‘ve had it all, it is time you rebooted.

I’ve worked for 9 years since I hung up my lab coat as an engineer, counting beans for 4 different financial institutions and at this time, all I want to do is kick back my chair and experience the thrill of learning again. I’m going back to my engineering roots to probably stick my fingers in some live wires and let some sparks fly. Ok, maybe something not as dangerous but let’s see what happens.

So I’m off work for 12 months and I’m going to let my hair grow long and wild. Gosh, freedom from the suit feels so great.

Questions for Brian Greene

I recently bought the Elegant Universe, a great book by Brian Greene. He tried his very best to distil String Theory and other mad cap science into what an average Joe could understand. I understand (well, I think I do) what he wrote but I have more questions than answers so I did what should be the right thing, I wrote him an email:

Dear Brian,

I recently read your book, The Elegant Universe and I must say, with the few things I learned, even if they dont really resonate with me, I can spend a dinner with a bunch of physicists without falling asleep from boredom. However, I would be happy if I could get answers to some nagging questions:

Based on the big bang theory, if the universe started from the big bang about 15billion years ago, and has been expanding since (with some theories about its contraction happening after, but then both of us would have been long gone, it is not an event that I look forward to), what was the state of the universe a year before the big bang? Or a billion before then? Where did all those matter come from?
If for about 300 years, the classical physicists felt they were right and then Einstein blew them off and then string theory is stringing Einstein up, do you think String theory could hold up forever?
Is it possible that there could be a form of life inside the sub particles?
Is it possible that the components of the whole universe are like sub particles? May be we are the makeup of a giant body!

I would love your take on those questions.

Best regards,

Behavioral finance and the science of voodoo

I just had some argument with a PhD researcher about the value of behavioral models over the up-till-now traditional financial modeling. You see, behavioral finance is a growing field of financial science and came into prominence after the last catastrophic implosion of the global financial market. Obviously some greedy folks went berserk and all the fancy market models developed to understand them were obviously on vacation (read Fama, French, Sharpe, Markowitz, Merton Miller and a bunch of others. I can’t even imagine that some people actually got a Nobel for this type of rubbish. In a world where Obama can get a Nobel for Peace in anticipation of peace, anything can happen!).

From the behavioral finance people’s point of view, financial and capital models are crap and can’t model how the financial world will behave as it is based on what is called the rational model (players will behave according to expectation) but can’t understand the primordial human instincts (greed, fear, ego, etc.) which ultimately always upturn things.

This is actual bone of contention. We both agreed that the current models are capital BS but I believe that the financial and capital behavior can be modeled. What we don’t have now is enough attributes to put into the model to factor things in. Another thing is to redefine what a rational attribute is. Purchasing an equity based on PE ratio is a rational behavior but it doesn’t even rank as much as buying because of fear! Or why would the experts spend so much time wondering that the Weekend Effect is all about?

This is what luxury good purveyors have known for centuries, people don’t buy because a purchase makes sense, they buy for all manners of reasons and that is what we modeler need to figure out.

Can fear be modeled? Yeah! Same for herd behavior, for greed, for revenge, etc. What I dont know is if a smart dude is going to figure it out in a year, decade or century but I can put my bet on 2 decades out there. What do you think we are going to use all those powerful computers to do? Turn them into Precogs while the world reenact Minority Report. So between now and then, I will advice my fancy research to go find another job; behavioral finance career is about to hit a dead end.

The economy of enforcement

Lagos is a mad place. Chaos incorporated. Although that isn’t enough to make me do the Andrew Method (run away) . Apart from security and electricity, traffic is the biggest problem we have. It takes X number of hours to move from point A to B. I know that LASTMA was created to solve this problem but they are more interested in shafting drivers than resolving the road logjam. But that is a story for another day or symposium like Abami Eda would say.

Another tangent to this post is that all tiers of government are broke, my dear Lagos inclusive. Fashola is rolling out tax laws faster than Usain Bolt could complete a 100m dash. That itself hasn’t worked well.

Talking about the traffic palaver, even though we have bad roads, 80% (don’t ask for the source of data!) of the gridlock is caused by bad drivers: Danfo drivers picking passengers; vehicles moving against traffic; impatient drivers not giving way at junctions, etc.

It came to me that government could augment its income with loads of law breakers roaming the street. I know LASTMA has gotten away with not doing much because government wasn’t expecting much from them. But say LASTMA has a target of catching 5,000 offenders a day with average fine of 10,000. That is some 50M per day and almost a billion in one month. Well, maybe that is an exaggeration but come on, if LASTMA can generate enough fines to pay for its officers, what is wrong with that? When people know that the cost of breaking a traffic offence is so much, they start behaving and then traffic is better and ultimately there is going to be need for fewer LASTMA officers.

Same crooked (smile) idea could be applied to building codes (those converted shops cause more evils that you can imagine) and to companies messing up the environment. Think of the glee of fining offices that block drainages with N100K or the premises get locked down. When it becomes so expensive to break the law, the government can spend less money unblocking those drainages.

And hopefully, they would have more money to pave the road and a smooth road makes it easier to escape LASTMA in case I get caught. Now, I think you get the point.

Synch your Outlook Contacts with Facebook

Just like every other person, almost all my phone contacts are on Facebook, with constantly changing profiles. However, keeping track of who has changed picture or who has a new number is hell. Obviously, the dudes at Developing Trends shared my pain. So they came up with Fonebook, a nifty application that synchronizes your Microsoft Outlook contacts with their Facebook profiles. One caveat though, it doesn’t synchronize numbers and emails as it is against Facebook security policy.

You can download it from this link.