Back in Jakarta for about a week more! Reached here on Tuesday and it was raining then, and the flight was very very bumpy (I was actually quite scared). I haven't been doing much the past two days, but I've managed to catch up a bit of my reading, which is good. I'm picking up My Life As A Quant again after I had given up reading it last year, and I'm actually enjoying reading it a lot more now. It's largely because the first part of the book that I had read last year is mostly on the author's earlier experiences when he was still a Physics professor and researcher (which I'm not really interested in), but the second part is about his experience in Wall Street, working for Goldman Sachs (which is obviously much more interesting). It is really eye-opening to read his account and find out a lot more about the field of quantitative finance, which is actually a lot different from banking and trading, because quants deal with a lot more of mathematics and programming in developing models for traders to use. The author went through about an interest rate model he had developed and it was quite tedious to follow the theory in the book, because there are so many terms I haven't come across before and I've forgotten quite a bit of what I have learned, but it is also interesting to read about the thinking process that went behind the model. And looking back, I'm rather glad that I will be doing something in investment banking instead of quantitative analysis or financial modeling because I don't think I will be able to handle the coding and programming part of the field (actually, computational finance majors should ideally be working in quantitative finance haha). On hindsight, I guess it's also better to read the second half of the book now than last year because I don't think I would have quite appreciated the book had I read it last year, given my lack of math finance knowledge then compared to now.
Sharapova was thrashed in the semifinal. Haha. Ah well. But I must say that even though I don't really like the colour of her dress, the dress looks really cute on her. Haha. I'm also hoping that a Nadal-Federer showdown will materialize.
Argh..getting hungry again!! I guess I should sleep before I start snacking. Haha.