Investment Analysis & Financial Mgmt Seminar at Monash U Malaysia

8:30am, breakfast. I didn't know breakfast is to be provided. Ate 2 pao at home.


9:00am, welcome address by Prof Ron Edwards, the head of School of Biz of Monash U M'sia.


9:10am: first talk by Dr Robert H. Terpstra on the topic of Behavioural Finance: Implications for the Global Financial Crisis.

An eye-opener topic, contrary to the "Traditional Finance". Traditional finance is the paradigm that built on beautiful people and beautiful markets. Beautiful people are agents who update their beliefs in accordance with Bayes Law and always behave rationally. Beautiful markets are perfect, liquid and complete markets. In contrary, Behavioural Finance focuses on the fact that investors don't behave with any kind of statistical orderliness suggested by the Traditionalists.

Think about this: if you wanna speculate who would win the Miss Universe beauty pageant, do you make decision based on who is the most beautiful contestant? Or do you bet on the judges' thinking on who's the most beautiful? (coz the judges are judging the decision of who's the most beautiful) Ah...hah... see the point?

Traditional Finance has been around since the late 1950s; whereas Behavioural Finance emerged in the 1980s, led by a group of financial economists including Robert Shiller and Werner DeBrondt, who were meeting regularly with psychologists including Daniel Kahneman and Amost Tversky.

Dr Robert H. Terpstra graduated from the U of Michigan and further obtained his DBA from the U of Florida. He has been teaching in HK for many years and hence he knows the inside out of the Chinese market. Alas, my dying Nikon camera failed to capture Dr Robert's appearance.

10:40am, tea break. Nice egg tarts and not-so nice vietnamese spring roll. Hm... probably, I haven't recovered from spring roll phobia after the Hanoi trip.

11:10am, after the tea-break, the second speaker was Mr Bose Dasan, a tax consultant/investment advisor.

This is an exciting talk, expressed in layman's terms, touching layman's concern in understanding personal financial statements. Of course, criticizing M'sian gov is part and parcel of the delivery. To me, it's more to political campaigning.

12:00pm, The Need for Increased Financial Literacy in Institutions of Higher Learning by Dr Ravindra Narayanan. He's an academician, thus the tone of expression was unlike Mr Bose Dasan, the previous speaker. In his 1-hour talk, the one and only message my antenna managed to decode is: students are very good at calculating numbers to generate right answers in the endless exams; but, do the students know how to calculate their own wealth, put their money in good use and hence plan for the future?

Good point... good point. Exam questions always say: let risk-free rate = 5%, assume no transaction cost, assume this, assume that... In real life, I haven't bought a single stock on the share market. Sigh... shame on me.

1:00pm, lunch: fried rice, chicken in curry kurma, vege. Not that tasty.

2:00pm, Global Economic Crisis and Failure of Financial Regulation by Dr Thillainathan. To me, he was unprepared. I was expecting something about the M'sian econ or the SEA econ or the Asian econ. But, it's all about US econs and it's nothing new. We can read all those on the Internet.

I was late for my 3pm class.