The FM test...

A blog for a test??

Surely you must be crazy Mr. Aggarwal... Well, it was no ordinary test... It was the test of FM.

Background:

FM is one of those subjects, where you miss one class and you are lost throughout the term. Well, that’s what happened... In the first class, we started portfolio management with the Markowitz Model. I got lost in the first three slides (Damn the Greek... Damn Mathematicians... can’t they use X and Y... why do alpha, beta, sigma come in... And those summation signs mean “THE EnD”)... And the whole class was a blur. Everything was based on the first few moments and I missed it.

Now the "Preparation":

For two hours, I pondered over where to start. I finally thought, a big-fat book, it must have something... Decided... The book shall be starting line...

1. I looked at the book. Known script... Good... Alien Language... (Dead end)
2. I looked at the ppt... “Wasn’t this the same thing with those alien characters... What I cudn’t get then, how can I get now??” (Dead end)
3. Repeat One... Get anything?? No...
4. Repeat Two... Get anything?? No...
5. Go to pidgin (fancy program as sub for gtalk)... See if anyone else is getting anything... 
   
   “Na... not started... will do tom”
   
   “U nerd...”
   
   “Plsssssss”
   
   “Shut up. Me and FM...”
   
   “Joking???”
   
6. Repeat 3, 4,5 till u get something... 
   
   (the loop continued for a while)
   
7. Get up next morning...
8. Roomy knows something... My great roomy... Tells me basics... Confidence up.
9. Read Markowitz model ppt... Lost again... (Dead end)
10. Repeat 3,4... Already post-noon. Need to do something. Resolve. Start reading chapter 7. Not so alien after all... On to chapter 8. Lost again!!!
11. Roomy Zindabad... Confidence up.
12. Read Markowitz model again... yippee... makes sense... remember later... go on now... on a roll...
13. Read CAPM ppt. Wow... lost again... Sleep.
14. Get up. Read the notes everyone is studying... (if comps can reach human efficiencies, I dunno... but humans (some... or is it just one???) sure have mastered the art of converting speech to text)
15. Go to test.

The test:

Not bad at all... think hard... Generally, I am in the first batch to get up and leave... today is different... think hard... think of various possibilities... not bad at all... I do know some FM (ok at least the stuff in the paper)

Post Mortem: Ya right... my answers are probably wrong given the extra-thinking I did...

Moral of the story: It doesn’t pay to think extra. Efficient market hypothesis is anyways not always applied by all people... its best to go with what most ppl think is true...

MMM