Blogs I read

nevblog.com

Here is a blog I really enjoy reading of a young entrepreneur of South Asian origin. He works out of Austin, Texas and does everything from eCommerce (his forte) to investing (buy and hold type).


kirkreport.com

Here is a day trading guru who lives for day trading. Has some really in depth research. Interestingly, was never formally trained in this!

Lucky on Not Having PBR Yet

I think my strategy of waiting till Nov/Dec is paying off and not having joined the bottom callers in the past few months. I might even push it back further to the very end of December. Meanwhile, am also considering buying SBS - another Brazilian company into water and sewage. I think this could be a good buy given the climate. 

Okay So Petrobras is Down and Out below $30

But I did say I'll wait till November / December which pretty much saved me some serious heartache. I think it will be fun to see where it is headed. I am tempted to buy it now but I want to stick to my original plans and buy it in November / December.

The valuation is crazy and its probably pricing in the Brazilian government taking serious steps to get to all that oil. Also, Oil prices of course! But I think that oil prices will get back to about $100 pretty fast. This is because demand for oil today is extremely diverse and developing nations are increasingly more important, particularly in their numerical strength. Stock market bubbles will not effect them too adversely and Asian economies as well as Latin American economies are bound to grow. I think though that Asian economies are likely to have a far harder time given their export orientation. I think its important for them to find their own market and trade between themselves more as their consumer base matures. If they can do this, they will be fine, if they can't then they'll go to the dogs. I am not taking that risk until I see improvement in those numbers.

I think I might look more closely into GE as a ballast for PBR in my portfolio.

Petrobras Explained

My take on Petrobras is this - the stock is fundamentally undervalued. Presently oil prices are falling, the Brazilian government is sending mixed signals about ownership of oil and the large investors are selling and selling fast - partially because of the end of year effect.

Bottom line for me is that Petrobras is a great buy, and $40 is an insane price from a valuation perspective. However, it is now all a matter of timing, and we all know what happens when you try to time the market. Nevertheless, I'll buy, but not now - November/December sounds like ideal for me.

Nostalgic About Bangladesh

I was just thinking about all the different food I used to eat. Like the long palm-tree like tree that you cut into and got to juice of - don't know what its called in English. And the green coconut juice with the soft white middle. The jackfruit and later you could cook the seeds inside them. And all of this from our home in Shantinagar. Also, let me not forget the guava trees which is the best possible wood to make sling-shots out of!

PBR Being sold off by major institutional investors

I believe that the sell off will continue for for the next few months and only a major turn around after christmas. I think this period, particularly november - december might be a good time to buy in.

New Direction for My Blog

I have been neglecting my blog for sometime but want to come back to it now albeit changing directions. I am not doing a lot of IT stuff anymore, rather, working as a Financial Analyst in commercial real estate. I spend the little spare time I have thinking about cars. However, I do plan to keep at least the entrepreneurship component to me. As such, I plan to look at sectors I can invest in, local businesses I find interesting and anything else that comes up in my random searches.

How Useful is Methodology?

I often wonder how useful methodology is. Often there you have companies that spend a great deal of resources in a methodology and then find that their staff barely implement it. Then suddenly they run to a light methodology worked around Agile (some latest fashion) and it seems that this takes away the whole systems engineering approach out of it.

For me, all this conflict over methodology is decadent. I agree with Ivar Jacobson and feel that the source of the problem stems from the so-called conflict between software engineering approaches as one approach, compared with Agile methods. Jacobson writes in his blog that this conflict is unnecessary and that the ideas are in fact complementary. I wish him good luck to explaining that to all the consulting gurus and book writing gurus.

Definitely, his blog is one that I have been reading for sometime now and it brings out whole hosts of perspective and insight about the issues. Have UML and RUP really lost their momentum? In the East Coast financial domain it certainly has not! But we are laggards so perhaps the trend will be thus here as well over the next 2 years or so. But we definitely need far more documentation than the lightweight Agile!

I must confess I don't instinctively grasp it as well as I grasp RUP, or didn't and am only beginning to understand it. The aspect I was having trouble with is understanding what Jacobson calls the social engineering part of Agile. For me this takes us into management theory and away from the systems engineering core methodology. But then, maybe they are complements. Maybe like Scientific Management was replaced by Fordism, an increasingly social aspect is coming into software development methodologies. Which brings us to the question of whether this development is a pendulum swing and essentially circular, or if its linear. I personally feel that the essence of RUP will always remain, as will the essence of Agile. If we see the development of management theory over the years, the beginnings of Scientific Management were very "systems engineering" and the evolution over time moved towards increasingly behavioral methodologies.

Can this be the fate of our paradigm? I believe it is possible, and I give as proof the profusion of gurus in both fields!

Bloomberg Terminal Design

I personally think that the Bloomberg terminal would be better with a light background and dark text, but that's just me.

From Portfolio.com

In the unglamorous world of financial data and business news, Bloomberg is the closest thing to an Apple or a Google—an eccentric innovator that plays by its own rules, bringing imaginative and useful products to market.

But with those products can come features that exasperate even the most devoted customers. For owners of the sleek and addictive iPod, for example, that means having to use a proprietary cable to download music or charge the device. If you lose that cable, you’re stuck—at least until you can make it to an Apple store or order one from Apple’s website. Users of Google’s fast and functional email service had to wait almost two years for the search-engine giant to add a Delete button. And people who rely on Bloomberg’s data terminals have to deal with an interface that’s a throwback to MS-DOS.

Dreamed up by the current mayor of New York, Mike Bloomberg, after he got booted from Salomon Brothers in 1981, the Bloomberg terminal is used by traders, analysts, government officials—even the Vatican—to get real-time information on everything from plain old stocks and bonds to currencies and derivative products. The system also allows users to chart historical prices, read news, and communicate with other Bloomberg users around the world. More than 300,000 people use the terminals, which are so distinctive that the 2004 model, created by Antenna Design, even made it into the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. That souped-up black box—available only to customers who subscribe to the Bloomberg Professional Service, which costs up to $1,800 per month—has adjustable monitors, a fingerprint scanner, and a microphone for speaking to other users.

But, oh, those screens.

“It’s a great machine, in that it has information you can’t get elsewhere, but it hasn’t improved its interface in the past five years,” says a private equity associate in Chicago who regularly uses a terminal to check interest rates and historical prices. “It’s hideous.”

The main problem is its use of color, says Elliott Malkin, an information architect in the design group at NYTimes.com. The Bloomberg system is customizable, so no setup is the same. But a typical screen teems with charts and tables drawn in blue, yellow, and orange on a black background, creating a certain nightmarish quality. “The color should be used to make the screens easy to parse,” Malkin says, “to help the user break the screen up into digestible compartments of information.”

What’s a little beauty when millions of dollars are at stake? A well-designed interface can improve productivity, says Jakob Nielsen, co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group, a research firm in Fremont, California. A 2003 study he conducted found that when websites were redesigned to make them easier to use, their companies’ sales increased by 100 percent and productivity went up by 161 percent. While website and terminal design are not perfectly analogous, the results hint that Bloomberg has everything to gain from revamping its terminal’s look and feel.

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