When I woke up this morning it did not feel like a Friday, but as I am listening to everyone talk and wrapping up all of my work for my internship, it feels like a Friday. I kept hearing Mark Moskowitz’s theory that Friday’s stock market has a different ‘feeling’ and it is the reversal day. You can tell he is right by just listening to all of the traders and executive principals talking about and acting upon the market today over the Webinar. For the time that I have been here, I mostly worked on researching stats for companies and dealing with the transition to the new website. It is not really the same side as the traders see while working at the desk, especially while the market is open. During the first day or two, I looked at the website’s education section and wrote down key things that I thought I would need to know. I continued to write some major key things that I heard over the Webinar throughout the days, including: “do the trades that make money…lean on green,” “you must have more shares when you are right and fewer shares when you are wrong,” and “be flexible – feel the market to determine the direction.” These are not necessarily the most important key phrases or covering all the main ideas, but I was able to start to get a grasp of what things meant in the simplest of terms. Sometimes when you go into something without knowing too much about it in the first place, you have to be open minded and do what you are asked in terms of working and learning. I can say that I learned something out of this experience, but it would take a much longer time here and more closely watches over a shoulder of one of the traders to start to fully understand the basics of all areas that hedge funds and Hedge Fund Live cover.
Mackenzie O. - Intern
India finally gets a symbol
Whether it is in the beginning or the end of the day, I always find time to go on the Internet to check some news. My regular stops are AOL (sports, top news, entertainment, and sometimes the business news which I am a little afraid to admit), Time.com’s homepage, and sometimes Yahoo! News. You always know what is the most important of the news when the same story containing the exact same material (metaphorically) is on all the news sites. As Mel G. gets his own light – you know, a star has this really bad habit, whether having a serious problem with cheating on your wife or starting to be known as an Anti-Semitic, alcoholic racist always gets the center of attention for weeks straight –, you would think that the fact that India’s rupee has finally gotten a symbol would be on all the news sites, but it’s not. I understand that it might not be the gossip on Hollywood Boulevard – and I do like to hear what new bad things stars are getting themselves into – but the rupee getting a symbol is like yet another country adopting the Euro as its currency. I admit that I do not necessarily look at mostly business news websites, but it should be part of the top news.
The rupee symbol now is based off the letter R or as the Indian government will say the ancient, traditional Devanagari script. The symbol is a backwards R without the ‘I’ part of it and there are two slashes through the top part like the Euro symbol. With the new design of the symbol, there is already some controversy. Many Indians say that there is too much Western influence with new symbol and others say that the designer, D. Udaya Kumar, did not follow the restrictions of the contest. (There was a contest for the design, with the winning award of 250,000 rupees.) However, before this new symbol is adopted, the Unicode Consortium needs to approve the symbol.
Google’s Blackle
Have you ever heard of Blackle? It is the same thing as Google and gives you the same results as Google, but you trying to do something more when you search on Blackle instead of Google. My friend told me about it awhile ago and I had totally forgot about it up until this week and now I have been trying to use it as my go-to search engine. Blackle was created by Help Media to save energy when a blog posted “Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year”. Currently, (as of 7/14/2010 4:49:50 PM) Blackle has saved 1,961,483.246 Watt hours since it started in 2007. It is the little steps that help. So, I encourage you to use blackle.com as your new search engine. Save it as your new home page and refer it to your friends. Little things count too!
Seriously, how many social networking sites can there be on the web?
For this week, I am working on social media, SEO, off-page optimization, etc. It has always been obvious and just a fact on how many sites and web-programs that are so similar. Also, I knew in the back of my mind on how many social networking sites there are, specifically on the web, but once registering for a program called Onlywire, I got an idea of just some of the social networking sites that are available through the web. Some of them with the weirdest names, some with no point, and some with nothing that separates them against other social networking sites (which is about most of them) – all of which are just a fab, some more popularly known than others. Not sure if this is the worst part of it, but some big companies with an existing social networking portion also have other small social networking sites that seem to have the same theme as the mother company. And these daughter companies are so similar to other sites that there is no point of these daughter ‘companies’ in the first place. For the most part, most social networking sites do not charge anyone and there is nothing that separates these social networking sites besides the fight to add as many as possible fun, stupid and pointless, outsource connections. Take Delicious, a daughter ‘company’ of Yahoo, and Connotea have the features – able to bookmark and share URLS, videos, and pictures that others on that site can internally search based on the tags of the post. Just to point out, there is something called Open ID that you can use the same username and password for a bunch of different sites, specifically social networking sites. I mean only the people who cannot handle all of the ‘social networking’ they think they want to be involved have an Open ID. Besides the point, how many possible social networking sites can a person handle if they do not want to turn themselves as someone who is completely and solely obsessed with the outside world of gossip and possibly everything someone is doing? (And P.S. – that someone is not the obsessed social networking person, but rather someone who is not even close to him/her, whether physically or mentally.)
IMAX - better or worse
07/12/10
Last week I did a lot of work relating to IMAX, from researching to putting together a chart representation. This morning I heard over the radio that movie theatres were not doing as well as compared to last year’s income. I looked backed into IMAX’s income, this year is almost doubling than last year. However, with two strong movies out, how come it isn’t doing as well as April-May? “How to Train Your Dragon” and “Iron Man 2” were out, but it was reported that they did not do as well in general compared to what was the expected outcome. Now with Toy Story 3 and Twilight Saga: Eclipse out, you would think that would range from a high dynamic group of people. It seems that right after Twilight Saga: Eclipse came out, IMAX was reportedly doing worse. Now that’s not good when IMAX was hoping for Eclipse to be a huge money maker. So what’s next and what is the next movie that IMAX is hoping to rely on in order to do better than last summer?
The First Week
07/09/10
As a rising junior in high school and taking an internship at a hedge fund, you are not really sure what to expect. I had already took an internship at a work place that I had already had relations with (and still am in constant contact with), so I was not quite sure what to expect on the first day at TFG. I had come in around 8:30 in the morning and it was apparent that everyone else had been here long before I had arrived. In the center of things, to put things in boundaries, was a table filled with a bunch of computer screens – at least two screens per person. I got my Webinar working and was surprised at what came out of the headphones. Everyone was talking to each other and commenting on the market, personal lives, and on each other. It is clear by just listening to the Webinar and also by being in the office, work is very important to all members, but there is a fun, interesting, and somewhat abstract side of the employees.
I was reading through the website – the education section, the blogs, etc. – and finally noticed how much information and knowledge it takes to be a trader for the TFG and to be successful. I thought that I had got the minimum by going through the entire education section and rereading all my notes several times, but listening to everyone talk over the Webinar, it was clear that I didn’t know all that much. With one more week, I question whether or not I will grasp even the minimum depth of TFG.
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