Friend Portfolio?

Yesterday I was sitting around with a couple of my friends and we just joking around like normal when someone made an interesting comment, which at first was just a joke. I think everyone else, except for me, passed it off as a joke, but for some reason it stuck with me. I am not sure who said it, hell; it might have been me, but the more I thought about it the more it became interesting.

Most of my friends are finance geeks, and we invariability always apply finance logic to everything. It could be anything from using derivative terminology to inappropriately describe the female members of our society, or it could be to justify some stupid thing. This time it was on the subject of friends.

So what was the exact comment? Well someone said something along the lines of "your always trying to rebalance your friend portfolio"

Well what does that mean? For those of you who don't know finance or portfolio theory , I won't go into. The basic idea in rebalancing a portfolio is to minimize risk you take and maximize return you get. Or another way put, you want to get the most for your money with the least amount of uncertainty. So if you have 10 stocks, how do you allocate your money so you get the most out of it? So how does this apply to friends. Well the reason I am fascinated with the idea is, how many of us actually sit back and think how to efficiently allocate our time (investment) amongest our friends (return). If you think about it, it really is the same problem that thousands of finance people are trying to solve everyday, but instead of stocks or bonds, it with people.

So think of it like this, you have 10 friends and you end up spending all your time with 3 of them, even though you end up getting very little out of the friendship. You would like to spend more time with the other 7 people since you get more out of it, but for whatever reason it just doesn't end up happening since you might have known these 3 people much longer or they live somewhere else or something. I mean I know I am not logical when I spend time with people or my friends, I kind of just go with the flow. I mean naturally you want to spend more time with people you have more fun with right?

More I think about it, more I realize, that I have no rhythm or reason behind what I do in terms of social aspects. Sometimes I feel I am in friendships that are kind of not going anywhere. I mean, I don't know, are friendships supposed to go somewhere? Am I wasting time with people that are obviously a bad investment?

Basically, the real question is, is my friend portfolio currently optimal. I can say with no uncertainty that its not. I mean it can't be, it hasn't been rebalanced in ages really. At work people rebalance client portfolios daily, or maybe even hourly. How long is the cycle time for friends? Weeks? Months? Years? I am not sure, perhaps you can shed some insight into that.

So what is the conclusion of all of this, well basically, I need to find need assets, friends, to add to my portfolio, or reinvest/ reallocate current time investment in current assets (friends) that are mutually beneficial for all. Maybe I'll make an excel spreadsheet and figure out who is a waste of my time and just cut them out of my life

Grey Hair

Well thats it, its the end of the line for me. I found a grey hair. Actually thats not true, it was stark white! I mean that has to be worst, compared to just grey. It was only a matter of time, but i guess my age has caught up with me, im going to be greying soon. I mean if you can't hide it you might as well embrace it, so believe me it's not easy.

So I did some research and according to the Mayo Clinic, (yeah I had to bring out the big guns for this) :
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Hair typically turns gray as a result of aging. Pigment in the hair shaft comes from special cells at the root (base) of the hair. These cells are genetically programmed to make a certain amount of pigment (melanin) at specific ages. At some point in the aging process, these cells make less and less pigment until the hair has very little pigment. White hair has no pigment, and gray hair has some but not as much as a red, black or brown hair.

Not all hairs respond in the same way or at the same time. So the graying process usually is gradual. You can't prevent graying. Some people start graying in their 30s, and some not until their 60s. Genetics likely play a strong role in graying.

People rarely go gray overnight. If they do, it's typically due to alopecia areata. This condition causes the thicker, darker hairs to stop growing before it affects the growth of gray hairs — giving the impression of graying overnight. Alopecia areata eventually causes roundish patches of hair loss or complete loss of hair on the head or body. Its cause isn't known.

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Well thats a load of crap, im in my early 20's and i am greyings, i am some sort of super aging freak! You know, I really need some help. A regular doctor couldn't even help me. I need to go to like Vienna or something. You know what I mean? I need to get involved at the University level. Like where Freud studied and have all those people looking at me and checking up on me That's the kind of help I need. Not the once a week for eighty bucks. No. I need a team. A team of Doc's working round the clock thinking about me, having conferences, observing me, like the way they did with the Elephant Man. That's what I'm talking about because that's the only wayI am going to get better. Souce: Seinfield

Bride and Prejudice

As most of you probably don't know, a little movie staring Aishwarya Rai, opened in the US this past weekend. I saw a few weeks ago, and I didn't think it was great, i mean it wasn't bad, but it wasn't really awesome either. I guess it was an okay film.

Well the point really is, that for the first weekend, it ranked 20, with $385, 848*, far behind the number one film, Hitch which had $43,142,214* in sales. So I guess your thinking whats the point. I think the point is, even though most of you haven't heard of this film and it ranked 20th on the weekend gross, it did much better than what you think at first glance. Being banking you just start to think about everything in terms of ratios. Granted this isn't EV/EBITDA, but if you take Weekend Gross / # number of theaters, you can get a much better picture of what really is going on. I mean after you normalize weekend gross by number of theaters, you see Hitched came in at $12,067.8 per theater and Bride and Prejudice came in at $12,057.8 per theater. (3575* theaters for Hitched and 32* for Bride and Prejudice)

(*source : http://movies.yahoo.com/boxoffice/latest/rank.html)

Anyways, there is exactly a $10 difference. But I will now proceed to prove that this difference is statistically insignificant. We will have to implementing a two dementional t-test to test the significance between the two means.

t=[(x_1 bar - x_2 bar) - (Mu_1 - MU_2) ]/ [s_p^2 / n_1 + s_p^2/n_2]
where s_p^2 =[ (n_1 - 1)* s_1^2 + (n_2 - 1)* s_2^2]/(n_1 + n_2 -2)

Since we don't know the variance of the sample, lets just hold that constant as a variable and will address it in a bit. Let us also assume that the variances are the same for both samples. I think in the context of this framework it is realistic to assume this.

s_p^2 = 3605 S /3605 = S.
t =[ (12,067.8-12,057.8) - (0) ]/ ( .17757 * s )
t = 10/.17757*s
t=56.317/s

degrees of freedom = 3575 + 32 -2 = 3605. We can now look this all up in a t table.
Since we don't know the variance, we can back in to it depending on the significance level.
At the
.1 significance t = 1.282,
.05 significance t = 1.645,
.025 significance t = 1.96,
.01 significance t=2.326,
.005 significance t = 2.576.

So lets just test at the .005 level, to see what the implied standard deviation.
2.576= 56.317/s ; s = 21.86
2.326=56.317/s; s = 24.21
1.96 =56.317/s; s= 28.73

So clearly based on this we see that even at the .005 significance level, the standard deviation would have to be only 21.86. Which is completely reasonable. Meaning that there is a .5% chance we can reject the null hypothesis which is the means are the same.

So based on this we can clearly determine that Bride and Prejudice and Hitched did just as well.

So what was the point of this whole exercise, well to show that Bride Prejudice did well, that and Aishwarya Rai, is hot. Well i guess i didn't really prove that, but hell, thats the only really thing that matters

This past weekend

Well this past weekend was insane. Friday afternoon my boss tells me that we have to go see this consumer electronics compnay in San Diego. I was more than estatic to go, since you know I live, or I lived in San Diego. I was suppost to fly out on Friday, except I was at work late, I took the first flight on Saturday. I got to poway at 10:00 something and surprised my mom. She was so happy! My dad's first reaction was "I hired people". For those who don't know, my parents own a flower shop in Poway, and the past weekend was v-day. (the busiest time of the year for any florist.

Well anyways, I end up working at the store and chill at home until my meeting on monday morning. I go up and have breakfast with the CEO and the sponser as well as the senior mangement team. They showed up around and we discussed the company. After the meeting I spent rest of the day at the store doing stuff.

I was lucky enough to squeeze in some time to see a good old HS buddy of mine, Marc. We didn't do anything fancy, but grabbed some coffee. (althought I don't drink coffee). I took the red Eye back monday night, and got back to my place this morning at 5:30 and then decided to just go to sleep since I was so beat, even though I was suppost to go to work. Ha, oh well.

All in all, it was a great weekend

Well, I am moving from Xanga, not because Xanga is no good, but I figure Google is just better. I will just have to link to this from my old Xanga. You know what would be a good feature, to be able to port your blog from xanga to Blogger, I wonder where I could submit that idea. I am sure people at Google can figure that one out