Financial Technologies

I was just browsing in the internet and stuck upon this company called Financial Technologies (India).

This company is in the back ground of many of the known brand names such as National Spot Exchange, MCX, IEX etc.  They have their presence in almost every domain of a financial market.  They are not into lending and recovering, though!  Mostly, they cater to the financial infra structure services like exchanges, financial training, brokerage, capital market information and research, consultancy etc.

It is a listed company and not owned by a single promoter or a business family.

Education

Came across a good article on education scenario in India, now in Business World.

http://www.businessworld.in/bw/2010_07_24_Case_Study_The_Education_TeeterTotter.html?offset=0&max=1

Some excerpts from the above article:

The numeric is only an eligibility quotient for the job; for doing one of those jobs. But it does not indicate preparedness for life! 
Examples abound: a) High scores to enter Wharton but zero EQ to know you do not drive after a drink, or even hit and run away; b) High CAT scores, but low on EQ to know that insider trading is just sophisticated thievery; c) High scores to pass the IPS and become a top-notch police officer, but zero EQ when he chooses to molest a child; d) High scores to enter a top- notch MNC, but no EI to understand that reclassifying your products to get a lower slab of excise is cheating; that paying excise is not a penalty but a means to fund the government's efforts in public administration!

What  said about engineers is, in fact, a 'comfort behind the machine' syndrome  —  a function of either shyness or fear of admitting 'I did not understand'. Those who are comfortable dealing with people and new territories are the best of the crop from the premier institutes where placement is as much a function of background as education qualifications!

Suffice it to say, your CAT, or GMAT or PGDM is not an index of your 'education'! It is a score for passing. Will it prevent rapes, frauds and neglectful governance? No. It simply means that you scored X and you are now a master in administrating businesses. You have been fitted with a software, without an operating system. It is not 'education'.

We are entering the knowledge era and in this era, knowledge of managing money and machines and products will be less important. This era will demand not academic prowess but thinking prowess. This era will demand a values quotient from its participants — skills in giving, sharing, enabling, respecting, taking responsibility, inclusiveness — none of which can be converted into an index!  Then the educator will return and the academic will be laid to rest.

Deal or No-Deal

I happened to watch this program called "Deal aa - No Deal aa" in Sun TV today, for the first time.  It is celebrating its 100th show next week, is an extra info!

This is a game show purely based on random numbers.  The contestant is given with 26 boxes worth values ranging from Re 1 to Rs 50,00,000.  Out of that, the contestant has to select one box and keep it aside, the one marked as his box for him to be taken home.  Now he opens the remaining boxes in various rounds in order to know the  value of the box that he had selected and kept aside for him.  In Round 1, he opens 6 boxes and gets to know what all those 6 values that he cannot take home. In Round 2 - five boxes, Round 3 - four boxes, Round 4 - three boxes and so on. At the end of each round he is offered a particular value which he can choose to take, ditch his marked box and quit the game. Or, he can proceed to next round and get to open more boxes.  The offer price at the end of each round increases or decreases based on the values in the hidden boxes (including the one marked for the contestant, and kept aside)

It is a pure fun game, not much knowledge or creativity required on part of contestant, except to answer some very basic GK type questions at the end of each round, to continue the game.

One interesting thing is the offer price at the end of each round.  The Offer price is not the expected value of the hidden boxes.  It is some percentage (<100) of the expected value. It starts as low as 8% in the episode that I saw today and went up to 74% at the end of round 5.  This gives a natural inclination (though, he may be unaware of this fact) for the contestant to go for the further rounds in the initial stages and to restrict himself in the later stages of the game, which is a good design!

This spreadsheet gives a detailed analysis of the same.  For any episode, the expected value of the game is Rs 3.95 lacs and the offer value will be lesser than that in the further rounds. Further, the game designer previously knows what is there in the marked box which was chosen first.  So, accordingly he can play around with the offer price. 

Deal or No Deal?  Not-So-Fair Deal!

Peter Principle

QUOTE

Peter pointed out that a class, or caste (social stratification) system is more efficient at avoiding incompetence. Lower-level competent workers will not be promoted above their level of competence as the higher jobs are reserved for members of a higher class. "The prospect of starting near the top of the pyramid will attract to the hierarchy a group of brilliant [higher class] employees who would never have come there at all if they had been forced to start at the bottom". Thus the hierarchies "are more efficient than those of a classless or egalitarian society".

UNQUOTE

This was taken from the wikipedia page on Peter Principle 

I was actually surprised at such a thought!  But if one digs a little further, possibly there could be truth behind what was argued by Dr. Peter.  May be, that's why they used to have such kind of hierarchies in the olden days.  But the problem occurred when someone was confined to the class he was born in irrespective of displaying potential to be worthy of doing higher level work.

I just added the book "Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong" in my wish list.  I shall give an update once I finish reading.

Happy New Year 2010

I know this is November already!  But this is my first post of this year!

I cannot blame anyone else other than my laziness for why it took so long for me write my first post this year.  A lot has changed in these 10 months of my blog-dormant state.

In these 10 months, I graduated from IIM Lucknow and took a nice 2 month vacation which I used to set-up and do the interiors for the newly bought house of my parents.  Wrote CFA L2 and flunked.  Joined a finance company, got new friends and colleagues. Now, I am based in Chennai, working my way to go around in the traffic and pollution.  Traffic has increased a lot from the time I left Chennai in December 2004. 

Last year, by this time I was touring the European cities and now I am touring the towns and villages in Tamil nadu as a part of my site visits on behalf of the organisation that I am working for!  I made first-time visits to some of the cities like Madurai, Tirunelveli, Tuticorin etc.

And most importantly, I found the friend and partner of my life. We got engaged and now, soon to be married!

Hope I blog often!