Wall Street Analyst moves to India

Came across this interesting article in the Integrity Research Associates site. The articles basically talks about how the Equity Research jobs are moving to India.

People here(in india) are covering companies just like an analyst would do in Wall Street. These folks at captive centres or the third party research centres are not only producing great research reports for companies already being covered but are also helping analysts cover more companies. One of my friend at one of these captive told me what he does.

There is an initiative which goes by the name Distressed portfolio management - here the team is given 8 - 10 companies and is asked to model the company and write the investment thesis for it. The team is scrutinised on every assumption that they have made from the onshore analyst team. After the onshore analyst is satisfied with the model he picks up a company, he thinks has best prospects and includes in his coverage universe.

In the process significantly lowering his research costs and increasing coverage of stock.

PS: The analyst would ideally pick up the company with best prospects and I have also seen analysts dropping coverage for companies that are not doing well consistently. I think this says something about why we dont have many sell ratings - Analysts would ideally like to cover a company for which he sees good prospects.

Financial Modelling

Going forward i plan to list problems that i face while making valuation models - can be related to excel, financial concepts, industry- or company-specific issues. I also plan to upload some model in future... since most of my work is client-specific, i can't really upload my actual work here but may be i will make a simple model and upload or may be in work-in-progress stages .. i dont know ... keep coming : )

MS Excel

Most of my work involves making/maintaining financial models and thus working on MS Excel... and ofcourse some MS Word and occassional powerpoint.
I have seen lots of people (including myself) write in their resume MS Office as 'Computer skills' just because 'I wrote that essay in word' or ' Excel!!!- hey, you punch numbers...do some addition, subtraction, .... blah blah its so much like a calculator...wats there to learn in it' ....

i was taking an interview for a junior position the other day and the candidate had written MS Office as 'Computer skill'. I asked the person what is the most complex thing he has done on MS Excel...' i maintain my (accounts) books on Excel' ...he seemed to be quite impressed with Excel - 'I change one entry and can see the effect on the next sheet' ... whereas he might not be required to use more excel than that in his present profile ...to do financial modelling, you need much more than that ...

You can finds lots of websites that provide you with examples and can get you started. some newgroups would also help you with your specific questions. get used to using the F1 key - you may not always find the answer here but i m sure you will definitely end up learning a new Excel function (or to better use the Excel function) here. Goes without saying the best way to learn is to dirty your hands. So you can randomly pick a website once in a while and practice some of the examples or may be buy a book or something.




Then you have you these kung fu strong MS Excel pros who would help you with your specific questions( yeah, free !!!) on their websites or various groups (i can give you the link, but why dont you try to find it yourself - anyways you waste so much of your time googling irrelevant things : ) ...

(PS: you can always write in to me to ask for the links...just show me you tried)

Songs Lyrics and meanings

a lot of times while listening to music (almost always English) i wonder what these lyrics might be meaning ... so obviously i google and try to find out - what do these lyrics mean and if under some particular context these songs were written...the info is not available for many songs except for a couple ... and hey its not just me who is looking for such information or may be doesnot understand, there are a handful of them (m sure yourself included ) ...

now i was looking for one of these songs 'yellow' by coldplay - one of my favorite songs , and what i find out - some people say the singer is talking about sunrise, some say he is talkingabout dope, some say its love and and ...all kinds of stuff. now i didnt expect that for a song as touching and popular as yellow ... anyways ...back to lyrics meanings two songs (explained)that would most likely comne across consistently would be 'American pie' and 'We didnt start the fire' - see under the context these songs were written and end up increasing your GK !!!

Heres one link for 'We didnt start the fire' that am sure you gonna enjoy
http://home.uchicago.edu/~yli5/Flash/Fire.html
and here my WIP (essentially an aggregation and utilising!!! some free time in office)
http://www.geocities.com/jauney/Billy_Joel_Project.xls
(also please tell me how can i upload files on blogger????)

New blogger on the block

... writing my post(phew, finally) ...have made quite a coupla usernames/blog ids in the past on various blogging sites ... m sorry if one those ids was sought by you and now youare not able to get just bcos i took it ... i dont remember which login ids i had made and apparently the blogsites have also never reminded me to update/create them ... anyways m sure they will get expired soon ...so keep on trying