Being Boring » meta

thoughts on finance

najja — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 04:59:44 +0000

Maybe I find studying finance confusing because I am used to the air-tight field of engineering and science. Finance doesn't have a theory of its own. Stochastic calculus might be the closest but it is sometimes as good as guessing. Because the wild human psychology accounts for a major part in finance, it is very, very unpredictable. Besides, you cannot set a controlled experiment in finance because history occurs only once. The signal-to-noise in this field is as low as possible. See the current scene on chinese stock market ?

More meta thoughts

najja — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 04:59:17 +0000

Call me silly, but I am surprised that project management is basically the same thing as software engineering which I learned back in college. It is so far the most boring course I've ever taken. It's all about methodology to gradually achieve a massive software development project. You can take either the spiral or waterfall approach, or even the rapid development approach with quick prototyping. I didn't understand all the different approach because of lack of hands-on experience. However, they start to make sense after I work in the field of BD and project management (and after I start to read DILBERT, hehe). It is so very odd, the thing called understanding: Though the professor explain it in full, I only have a vague feeling about what it is; the idea isn't formed until I participate the whole process from beginning to end. Yet still I am incapable of expressing all I understand in words. It is simply ineffable! How could it be? There must be a better way to transcribe understanding to make others understand easily. We just don't know it.

learning: a meta analysis

najja — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 04:58:45 +0000

I am a click-and-get-it person, meaning that I only need to get the big picture and key concept to understand a huge complicated matter. But I always feel that I have never got my learning methodology quite right. Something, some key point is lacking here. It holds me back all these years as a student and throttles my ability.

To learn is to associate. Associate old stuff already learnt with new stuff to be learnt and distinguish between the two. Fit the new concept into a big picture. That's all. I believe my problem is that I am lost in trivialities and therefore, slow in grasping the whole picture. Ahhhh, all these small details in my charter financial test material are killing me now. It is NOTHING difficult. The mathematics is no-brainer. The financial statement analysis is easy to understand. Yet all the details about cash flow and tax and acounting conventions are unnecessarily troublesome and irritating. I am now in urgent need of a rock-solid concept that underlies the whole finance thing, providing the foundation that I can build my system on.