PwC in pictures

Photos here are, as usual, not mine. They belong to Diong, Adeline and Alison.

Today was my last day at work. Before I show you some photos, I find it necessary to mention the elevators at 1 Sentral.

Every morning, you tag yourself in, punch in the floor you want to go to, and this slab of stone will tell you which lift to go to. That way, everyone headed to the same floor gets grouped together, minimising the number of stops before reaching your floor. There are only 3 buttons in each lift - open, close and emergency. It's amazing! It almost makes coming in to work fun.

So fun, in fact, that I extended my internship by 2 weeks. Here's a snapshot of the Advisory floor:

The glass door rooms lining the wall are where the executive directors and partners sit.

The better half of interns

The lesser half

Razwan getting some love

All in all, I had a great 2.5 months at PwC. Admittedly, I was lucky enough to have had the opportunity to work on a variety of assignments which covered the spectrum of work a typical graduate analyst/associate would encounter - research, report-writing, financial modelling, analysis and presentation. Better still, I was offered work that spanned different industries and environments, which kept it fresh and stimulating, and did wonders for my general knowledge.

I know the unfortunate few who spent their internship doing solely data entry, filing or research will beg to differ, so I'm glad and thankful it worked out for me the way it did.

Anyway, that's all from me for now. Happy Valentine's!

Of hunger and ambition

Here I am, off work again thanks to a brand new public holiday (Thaipusam) in KL. This one, while unexpected, was certainly not surprising in light of the upcoming elections and recent political going-ons.

Time then, to take stock of where I am and where I will be going. My 2 month stint at PricewaterhouseCoopers KL is drawing to an end. I'm quite reluctant to leave, despite having substituted my entire holiday for work, as I've really enjoyed this internship. My colleagues, both fellow interns and permanent staff, are an awesome bunch. While the scene in Tax and Assurance may be bleaker (so I've heard), my time at Advisory - Corporate Finance/Infrastructure, Government & Utilities has been extremely rewarding. I've worked on a number of projects now, and the opportunity and ability to make real contributions to their work is something I find very fulfilling.

Post-internship, I will have a 2 week break for general relaxing and of course, CNY. Then it's back to Melbourne on the 15th Feb. This coming semester will be hectic, and if things go according to plan, my final semester at university will be even more so. At this stage, it looks very likely that I will finish off my final semester at Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania. There is no expressing just how much I want this.

Why I say 'likely' is because there are two stages to the exchange application process. The first and biggest hurdle is obtaining the Faculty endorsement, which is based solely on results (so they say). Once Melbourne Abroad receives this endorsement, it will then nominate you for a place at your host institution. This, I think is based on the number of spots available any given year. I've never been so fixated on a goal, so hungry for something ever in my life as I have been with Wharton. Getting in was my sole and all-consuming motivation throughout the exams. While my Sem 2 results came in weaker than I'd hoped for, I somehow scraped through the selection. I feel a bit like I snuck in the back door illegally, but I may well have overestimated the competition. Either way, the picture Faculty advisers and Wharton return students painted prior to my application had not been a rosy one.

Anyhow, that's over and in my favour. I'm overwhelmingly relieved and 12 kinds of happy. I'm now waiting for the host institution papers, which may take up to 12 weeks. What this means for Sem 1 is that I will now have to complete the four prerequisite subjects for an honours year in Finance all in one go. To have a realistic bid at an honours year, I will need straight mid-to-high H1s in all four subjects - a feat I've not been able to pull off to date. But it's doable - I've quit competitive frisbee, minimised other commitments - it's just that failing is not an option.

I have no doubt that the States will be everything I've dreamed of and more. I just need to make sure I get there - that place, that stepping stone midway between Washington D.C. and New York City.

Somehow, I'm not impressed.

The University of Melbourne
No. 22 in the World, No. 10 in Social Sciences
World University Rankings 2006 published by the Times Higher Educational Supplement, UK, October, 2006

Seen as a signature on one of the outgoing uni emails. Clearly, putting up bright blue signs saying the same thing along the Swanston St side of campus is not enough. My knee-jerk reaction upon seeing this was - The University of Melbourne, No. 1 Championer of Mediocrity. But we all knew that already. Is 'championer' even a word?

There's been a fair flurry of activity these few months, mainly involving me working, organising things and looking forward to returning to the home away from home in Melbourne, for more reasons than one.

Work finishes in two days; that is very good news. Admittedly, this 1 month plus stint has offered me excellent and highly relevant exposure to the working world and to the equities market, but I think that's enough for one holiday. For those interested, the Malaysian stock market is bullish at the moment following strong buying interest from foreign institutional investors. Of course, when the market reopens later at 2.30pm, your guess is no better than mine which way it will go.

It really presents a futility of sorts to the work I do, and the work I see people doing here at the research dept. Every morning, the technical analyst will prepare technical reports of the KLCI and every morning, I come in and read the day's predictions of the market's movements, only to have it rendered irrelevant within 5 minutes (okay, maybe half an hour) of the start of trade. Unlike predicting the weather, where there's a science to it, trying to predict the stock market's movements, especially using theory and models, requires you to eat your words a lot of the time. Either that, or make the sort of analysis at a level of vagueness to rival the horoscopes.

So let's take a holistic, macro view of things. Yet, one cannot be sure how and how much each of the variables affect the market, at the same time, unpredictable irrational behaviour must not be underestimated. One day, I read news reporting that anticipation of an interest rate hike by the Bank of Japan helped pushed bank stocks and thusly, the Nikkei up to close in the green. Next day, the Nikkei closes lower, allegedly after certain reports questioned the likelihood of an interest rate rise. While it is likely that interest rates weren't the only variables these two days, it just seems that the writers are just arbitrarily picking any explanation that can justify how the Nikkei moved, and whether or not these explanations are really significant, it's hard to know.

Even with work like company reports, stock recommendations and earnings forecasts, analysts are forever revising their estimates everytime a material event occurs, which to some extent, defeats the purpose of their work. It's never much help until what they forecast happens, and when it does happen, it's too late. It's a bit of a catch-22. Yet, we go through the motions, day after day.

In my view, any real use this research department can offer are fundamental analyses of companies - prepare reports that probe into the foundations, dig behind the creative accounting and sum up the management of a firm for the purpose of long-term investment. Short-term participation in the stock market is just short of a gamble, and has far less use for such information than a genuine mid-to-long term investment plan.

I suppose I'm taking a rather harsh and cynical view of this research and analysis work. One thing to consider as well, is that the firm I'm at is a small one, whose clients are mainly retail investors who don't really care nor understand the figures in the reports. They're mainly interested in the bold BUY/SELL/HOLD recommendation at the top of the page. Working for the bigger players like JPMorgan would be somewhat different, I'd imagine, perhaps a little more meaningful. I'd like to find out, someday. :)

With that I shall end my little spiel. On a lighter note, here's quote I found highly amusing. I think it was CJ who first told it to me - "Investment is speculation gone wrong."