Stockmarkets (Profit Summary)

In my prediction from my Blog-post on Thursday, January 28, 2010 "Stockmarket on the Rise" I predicted short term (1-3 months) positive growth of about 6% to 5600 (for the FTSE) and potential gains of 10% for more mid-term holding periods.

It turns out this prediction was spot on right, and looking back a good deal of money could have been made on this recovery push on FTSE index futures of ETFs.

Currently this is where we are price-wise on the FTSE index (source: yahoo finance)



In fact, let's look at what would have happened if we'd traded long (buying / speculating on an up-move in the market) over the period, which is the trade you'd do given my brief analysis from 28th January.

Bought at the non-optimal price of 5142.2 and sold at the common price over last days and not quite high of 5820. The transaction size being the smallest allowed with most brokers of only 3 pounds-per-point, then the profit generated would have been a respectable £1'800 and bagging in a 12% profit. This would be even higher would it not be for the daily financing costs of the trade. Table below summarises such a trade:

Selected for PiP Challenge

So I've been selected to take part in the 'Portfolio in Peril' Morgan Stanley challenge. This is a competition of various university teams competing against each other within an investment management role. The idea is that as a team of 8 we will have to manage a multi asset portfolio over a simulated period of 4 years. The various asset prices and news and macroeconomics will be generated over 8 decision periods.

Its next week and all expenses paid, down at Morgan Stanley's London offices. Even thought an element of luck will certainly be involved... It's going to be fun :-)!

MSc Courseworks

I have now finished teaching the MSc module at Loughborough, so I thought it would be fitting to write about my impressions on the blog. As always teaching can be intimidating at first but in my case I felt very much at ease having taught the BSc class last semester. Rightly so, lets compare the BSc with my MSc experience:

MSc. vs. BSc.

• BSc. class was huge (150 students) compared to 16 students in my MSc class. The great thing is that I could build a more personal relationship with the individual students. You can actually remember their names and very soon you get a good idea how good every individual is.


• Since the group was much smaller I found that; the dynamics in the class were less formal (Students asked more questions and I encouraged them to). It was a small and enjoyable class to teach.


• In a way I hate to say this but the MSc students were certainly brighter and hence the material could be covered at the lightning speed of 2 weeks. When you have bright students it's a pleasure to teach. On the other hand I should say many of my BSc students were also pretty decent and I did have lecture time to cover XSS and all kinds of funky JavaScript, including some JQuery.


• Big negative with the MSc class. There's just too little time to cover everything to my unilateral ideal of great learning in 2 weeks that is alloted for a fat-module. Then again I can't fight the system and the class was supposed to teach strong foundations but it wasn't meant to make superstar programmers out of my students in 2 weeks, but of-course I would have loved that challenge!

The assessment for the MSc course consisted of a 40 minute in-class test on paper and an programming coursework (over a week). The coursework was to build a sudoku JavaScript board game skeleton that allows a player to load puzzles (81 long integers) and play on the 9x9 board with the basic 3 sudoku rules enforced. In addition the possible numbers for board elements had to be suggested.

A number of solutions were done very well to the specification and showed good understanding of my students. Here is an example coursework by Tomas Kavaliauskas.