Kilimanjaro, Serengeti and onwards

Apologies for the tardiness in postings from the great beyond. Life has been a bit busier than usual, although I took just one Advanced Finance elective this Fall trimester in addition to a block week on Corporate Turnarounds. The courses had both highs and lows, but all in all I like the block week format – one week, one elective, done! In the meanwhile, I interviewed with Morgan Stanley and had an invite to speak with Credit Suisse, but they way things were going, I decided to sign with Nomura. Additionally, a fellow LBS'er and I will be doing our 2^nd year project with PE firm Warburg Pincus.

On the life front, I spent a few rejuvenating days in Boston for Thanksgiving, met up with old friends, walked my two favorite dogs, had roast duck instead of turkey for T'day dinner and went to a Celtics game. I'm almost through every past season of the Simpsons. On the books front, I'm reading Guns, Germs and Steel (which I should have read eons ago) – it's a fantastic treatise on why history evolved in the way it has. Most people point to the Renaissance and subsequent colonialization as being the root-causes for the way the world has turned out today, development-wise. They flippantly ascribe the ascendancy of the west to a suite of reasons that are easy to rationalize. But the truth is more complex than this.

Tomorrow, I leave for Tanzania with eight other LBS'ers – we're climbing Kilimanjaro – a 7-day semi-ordeal along the Machame Trail and then going on Safari in the Serengeti for a few days. Then onwards to Mumbai for me, where I'll see the extended fam. I will blog more about the climb on return. In the meanwhile, here is what's on my reading list (courtesy of James Montier). I doubt I'll get through all the books on the list by July.

Investment 101 -The classics

‘Security Analysis’ by Ben Graham and David Dodd (The sixth edition)

Chapter 12 of ‘The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money’ by John Maynard Keynes

‘Theory of Investment Value’ by John Burr Williams

‘Manias, Panics and Crashes’ by Charles Kindelbeger

‘Reminiscences of a Stock Operator’ by Edwin Lefevre

Investment 201

‘Fooling some of the People, All of the Time’ by David Einhorn

‘The Fundamental Index’ by Rob Arnott et al

‘The Investor's Dilemma’ by Louis Lowenstein

‘Financial Shenanigans’ by Howard Schilit

‘Creative Cash Flow Reporting’ by Charles Mulford and Eugene Comiskey

Modern wonders

‘The Little Book That Beats the Market’ by Joel Greenblatt

‘The Little Book of Value Investing’ by Chris Browne

‘Fooled by Randomness’ by Nassim Taleb

‘Contrarian Investment Strategies’ by David Dreman

‘Speculative Contagion’ by Frank Martin

Psychological

‘Robots Rebellion’ by Keith Stanovich

‘Strangers to Ourselves’ by Tim Wilson

How We Know What Isn't So’ by Tom Gilovich

‘The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis’ by Richard Heuer Jnr

‘Predictably Irrational’ by Dan Ariely

‘Mistakes Were Made, But Not by Me’ by Carol Travis and Elliot Aronson

‘Mindset’ by Carol Dweck

Hidden gems

‘Halo Effect’ by Phil Rosenzweig

‘Mindless Eating’ by Brian Wansink

‘The Inefficient Stock Market’ by Robert Haugen

‘The Margin of Safety’ by Seth Klarman

‘Your Money and Your Brain’ by Jason Zweig

‘Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance’ by Atul Gawande

‘Why Smart Executives Fail’ by Sydney Finkelstein

How to feel like a Morlock among other things….

Hi y'all! I've been living under a rock – and daily, the dramatic and vivacious gets squeezed out of me, as I turn into an investment banking simulacrum. Its not as bad as I make it out to be – its just a different ballgame, and different rules apply, and it promises to be interesting, and worthwhile as things evolve. Here is a list of projects I've been working on:

• LBOs - German tech/services company; a French industrials company; an automotive services company
  
• A Nordic telecom restructuring
  
• A UK tech acquisition and,
  
• A UK gaming/betting financing situation
  

Not much to report on other things, for good reason! I sometimes do not even have time to go to the bathroom at work, let alone read anything interesting, including say the WSJ or the FT which in itself is strange. I did get a positive mid-term review, which perked me up. Fingers crossed for a full-time offer.

Then again, I was leaving work at 8 PM on Friday, when my staffer told me that I was over the weekend on a middle-eastern telecom situation and a covenant reset scenario. So between working and conference calls at 10 AM on a Sunday, I moved flats – an act which returned me to civilization, at long last. The new flat has a crescent fountain below, which is kinda nice – I have a thing for water/water-bodies. I also bought some bamboo plants which immediately fixed the chi in the flat. And, I like having a gym/pool/sauna within the complex.

The other bit of interesting news is that I may be in Geneva for my second internship – working with a non-profit affiliated with the WHO (the UN org, not the band) on patent pooling and sourcing strategies for low-cost drugs for HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, for deployment in third-world countries through orgs like the Red Cross.

I promise to be more interesting and fun the next time I blog – until then enjoy the comedic stylings of Omid Djalili.

On being quoted in BusinessWeek….

I was quoted in BusinessWeek. Its sort of a rite of passage, methinks! Long ago, I used to read the B-school blogs and articles on BusinessWeek which got me interested in the B-school concept. Funny, that life should come full-circle this way!

Here is the link to the article. Summer Reading List: The B-School Edition: Looking for a little light reading to while away the hours? These books might be just the ticket, by Francesca Di Meglio

……Business lessons can continue long after the classroom doors are closed for the summer. That's why BusinessWeek asked professors and students at top business schools to share the five books they'd put at the top of their personal summer reading lists. Titles ranged from the classic novel to contemporary nonfiction, but when read together create an encyclopedia of leadership, just the thing to productively while away a summer as the financial crisis continues. A rundown of the most popular picks follows. For the complete list, visit "Summer 2009 Books: MBA Reading List" on the Getting In blog……….

It is 12:01 AM and I just returned home from the bank. I have to admit that even though taking the customary black Mercedes or BMW back home after late nights on the job sounds sexy, often the Jubilee Line is much faster than London traffic. This city never sleeps and its streets are not the grid that MannyHanny is - so it takes way longer driving through the London maze than the quick zip up to the Upper East/West side from mid-town or Wall Street.

IBD has been everything they promised and then some – the 14-15 hour days, the modeling, the powerpoint jockeying (although much less jockeying than I was used to in consulting), and the intern 15 (a la the freshman 15 – I need to get to the gym on the 7^th floor). I'm working in Lev Fin, rumors of whose death, as it turns out, were highly exaggerated. I finished a week of training and Deal Maven exercises, while preparing a pitch for a Private Equity firm trying to acquire a French company. And I discovered debt! Equity i.e. stock occupies a much more outsize space in the public psyche than it warrants, thanks to IPOs of yore – so much so that debt, and the beauty of its intricacies are lost in the white noise. Simply said, debt, especially high yield, mezz and leveraged debt is fantastic! And sitting on a call with a PE sponsor makes one feel small, so small. Its beautiful watching how this gargantuan belching pump called Lev Fin, sucks in debt at one end and spits out equity at the other end with a gurgling chuga-chuga-chuga! And covenants – ah covenants, so Biblical and evocative of Aaronic burnt-offerings of heifers and turtle-doves – covenants are so dynamic, and with so many moving parts. The entire picture is an exercise in pointillism, you focus on the details, but then you have to step back to enjoy the whole picture. I could go on and on!

My favorite (and arguably the most famous) pointillist painting)

Seurat's "Sunday on La Grande Jatte". See the original at the Art Institute of Chicago

Private Equity & Ellis's Irrational Thoughts

Today was D-day of sorts. I helped a Principal pitch our service offering to PE firm. Can't give you too many details for confidentiality sake, but suffice it to say I was on pins and needles of a different sort. My audience was an MD and a Principal from the PE firm, both with immaculate pedigrees and years of PE/Consulting experience. I stuttered a few times trying to 'add value' to the conversation.....made me kick myself later.

I did learn some useful jargon. From now on I'm going to use sentences like, "This service offering is certainly within our box. While it is not in our sweet spot, its definitely down our power alley. Let me scope the landscape and get back to you on whether we have the bandwidth to do this."

Albert Ellis, in his Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) identified eleven dysfunctional beliefs that people often hold. To all you fellow B-school applicants out there suffering feelings of rejection I offer three of Ellis's Irrational Belief's:

1. It is a dire necessity for adult humans to be loved or approved by virtually every significant other person (or B-school) in their community.

2. One absolutely must be competent, adequate and achieving in all important respects or else one is an inadequate, worthless person (who shouldn't have applied to any B-school in the first place).

3. It is awful and terrible when things are not the way one would very much like them to be (and you don't get an interview call within a week of submiting your app).