The rumors are true. The grainy pictures making the rounds are also genuine. I am back.

After a break of over six months, Arbab and Scheryar finally managed to fix the broken themes and my broken blog. Which was part of the problem. The other part was my travelling lifestyle that clocked more hours in air, airports and hotel rooms than I care to remember.

But all of that is now behind us. Which means that now when I totally lose it on account of bad services provided by my airline, my Telco provider, my newspaper, my vendor, you will be the first to hear about it.

I have missed ranting, venting and generally making a noise. Have also missed all of you out there who have dropped by for a visit. Stay tuned, there should be some activity here starting this weekend.

Imagine a world where you are extremely unhappy with your broadband service and you disconnect it. The service provider confirms that it has been done. You receive an email confirming that your request has been received. You hear nothing for the next few weeks.

In August you find out that the service provider has been taken over for PTCL. Actually the transaction happened a few months ago which immediately explains why their service went down so dramatically.

Later that month you receive a bill from PTCL requiring you to pay for your disconnected service. You go over to the exchange and you are told that since you are now going to deal directly with PTCL there is no hope or chance of an appeal. They will keep on charging you for it. Plus you haven’t returned the modem. You return the modem and request them to kindly shut off the service since you are no longer using it and can no longer use it without the modem. PTCL tells you that No! since they are PTCL and they are a monopoly they can do whatever they want and they will keep on charging you for the service till you pay all past dues for service which was disconnected in July for which the modem was returned in August.

Calling Competition Commission of Pakistan and Pakistan Telecommunication Authority! Can you please drum since into these guys in Islamabad.

Do you like to travel to exotic location with strange people? Do you like to write and take pictures and record videos? Can you move social media with a flick of your pen? Make founders and geeks clamor for your attention? If you fit the bill, take at look at the P@SHA Making History Project. Free ticket, boarding and food in Thailand for 5 days and a permanent job offer as the social media guru for the rest of you life at the P@SHA secretariat in Karachi. Are you up for it?

http://jehanara.wordpress.com/2011/10/13/become-a-part-of-the-psha-making-history-project/

Here is the abbreviated pitch for Toffeetv.com and a short note to my friend Salman and his team.

The market

There are 7 million expat Pakistanis outside Pakistan. This number does not include the second or third generation or extended families and is limited to current NICOP and Passport holders. If you include Pakistani origin individuals and families the number jumps to about 35 million individuals outside Pakistan who at some level are interested in staying in touch with their original identity. A large part of this identity is our mutual heritage including language. For kids the earliest introduction to language is through lullabies and nursery rhymes. One big challenge that our expats face is exposing their children to the Urdu language at an early age where the child is already speaking a different primary language such as English. In addition to the expat there are about four million English speaking households in Pakistan where the language spoken at home is not Urdu. Finally within our rural areas as well as urban centers there are many communities where we have a cell phone network but no access to schools.

By creating a portfolio of animated nursery rhymes and stories and making them available not just on the web but also through our smart phone applications we hope to reach out to these distinct groups using a phased approach. Phased because by the time we build up our content library, smart phone would become cheap enough to be affordable for a home or garage school in some of the poorest tehsils in Pakistan. Our hope is that by doing so we can help teach kids our language in a fun and interesting way and also contribute to preserving our heritage and identity.

The opportunity and the business model

While the website includes free content, our smart phone applications would use the common .99 cents per additional story purchased model. By focusing on expat customers to pay for a library of stories on a regular basis we expect to subsidize the same content for rural and low income urban communities. With an initial launch aimed at North America, Europe and Middle East we expect to ramp up product to about 10 new releases every month with an end state of over 500 hundred lullabies, nursery rhymes and stories that young children can use to teach themselves Urdu all across the world. Our revenue share from cell phone sales will range between 30% to 65% of gross receipts depending on the cell phone platform used. The expected growth for this model allows us to reach 5 – 10 million US$ a year in annual revenues within 18 months of the point where we start charging for new stories and content. Promotional packages have also been designed where parents can buy package of 10, 15 and 20 stories at steep discounts. Given our focus on young children and expat professionals and the absence of similar animated content in Urdu and the need for this community to stay in touch with their roots once we do a formal launch with the right marketing we expect to see a very reasonable rate of conversion. A large part of these proceeds can then be utilized to reach out to under privileged children and teach them how to read Urdu as well as English back home here in Pakistan.

Standards

Teaching children a new language and a new concept is both an art and a science. Making it playful and fun is a completely different story. We have looked at a range of similar projects in other languages and one common theme that we use is to work with translating the existing library of nursery rhymes in English so children outside Pakistan are already familiar with the context and the content and only have to identify and work with the right labels. Our attempt is to create content and build a platform that works equally well on the web and on Nokia, iPhone, iPad, Android and the Windows 7 platforms. We have an in-house animation, design and recording studio that tries to reuse our internal library of resources, frames and soundtrack so that the cost of content production is pushed as low as possible and the quality of the content is maintained at a level where the child can still be engaged.

User requirements and features

We study reactions to our content and future planned release in controlled story telling sessions with children and their parents on a regular basis. This helps us identify additional trick and approaches and give us feedback on what type of content works with young children and what doesn’t.

Special note to my friend Salman and his team

I am not the mighty Jawwad Farid, I am just the Jawwad who has failed a number of time starting up businesses and get annoyed when people pushing transparency as an agenda themselves are not transparent.

My only claim to judge this category is that I have been teaching kids since 1989, undergraduate students since 1995 and graduate students since 2003. I have started two e-learning companies (the first in 1999) and train bankers for a living. Since you have already written me off as biased I am not sure if this is going to go down well.

Here is some sincere advice. You know everything there is to know about me, my views, my biases, my relationships and my failures. But I don’t know who you are. From the looks of it appears that you are pushing the case for the company that you work for that has no information at all about its founders and owners on its about us page. There is nothing wrong with being upset with me as a judge since you are going to miss out on that trip to Thailand. But then be fair to your cause and do full disclosure. Come out and tell us who you are and where you work and why do you care so much about the runner up. We will not hold it against you.

I don’t care about the event. This much should be obvious. I care because when you question the judges and their independence, you take away from all the hard work the winners put in over the years in getting where they are today. You take away from the recognition that they have received and the credibility of both the P@SHA Awards as well as the APICTA ICT Awards. And for what; generating cheap traffic through controversy? Yes you have a right to do that and I respect that right but then let’s do that with civility and poise.

I finally went ahead and did it.

The Pitching for startups: Making winning business plan pitches is now live. I actually went step ahead and even did a Business Plan Pitching Case Studies supplementary course where we put everything we covered in the first course on 4 of my favorite pitches over the years.

There is a background post where I review where the idea and inspiration for the course came from. Yup you guessed it from the infamous Ken Morse elevator pitching session at MITEF BAP. Here is the second post in the series reproduced here on the blog (Pitching Case Studies)

One big benefit of teaching the very bright and loving students at SP Jain has been this underground collection of pitches that I have built up since May 2007 when I first taught the course in Dubai. As we have all learned more about the art of pitching, about what works and what doesn’t we have gone out and made improvements every year in the materials we cover as well as the quality of pitches made by my students.

It was only natural that after doing the Pitching for startup course I would go back to some of my all time favorite pitches, pitched over the last four years and dissect them for the students who enrolled for the Pitching for Startup.

A very warm welcome then to the Pitching for Startup – Case Studies course. A supplementary course that picks up where we stopped with Pitching for Startups. In just under 30 minutes we walk through all the right notes hit by five different real life Exec. MBA and GMBA student pitches covering sectors ranging from Entertainment, Petrochemicals, Demographics, Fashion Accessories and Transportation.

I review the basic premise, product and service idea and the reason why the pitch remained memorable in my mind over the years and what the group got right and how does that fit in what entrepreneurs generally tend to get wrong. The examples that we highlight and dissect that we touch include:

1. Presenting Financials and Business Model effectively
   
2. Presenting Customer Profiles
   
3. Visualizing the pain of the customer
   
4. Increasing the perceived value of your product by the right sequencing
   
5. Combining visual slides and passion to pitch your concept in under 30 seconds.
   

Combined with the materials covered in the Pitching for startup course, the Pitching case study session allows you to actually see the concepts covered in the earlier course at work. My hope is that the combined lessons will allow you to deliver powerful, effective and moving pitches.

The buy now page will be up and running by end of day today. Keep your eyes opened and peeled for the update.

The job – Video transcribers, content editors and content writers

Alchemy Technologies has a client who needs transcription services for a number of English videos. This is an ongoing assignment that will carry well into the next year. In its first phase about 12 hours of videos need to be transcribed in English.  If you are interested and feel that you have the right fit, please drop us a copy of your resume and writing samples from prior work.  

You will be asked to transcribe a sample video of 15 minutes and will be informed within a day about your eligibility for the role.

Who are you?

You love writing, reading and learning about new topics.

You don’t hate finance. In fact you have always been curious about the subject

You took English in your Ordinary and Advance levels and read about 4 books a week from all sort of diverse subjects. 

You are reliable, diligent and extremely hardworking but for personal reasons want to work from home.  You have a computer or a laptop and a high-speed internet connection at home and know how to type.

The requirement:

It will take you no more than 120 minutes to transcribe a 60 minute video and you will be able to turnaround most transcription request within 24 hours of receipt of the assignment.

Payment Terms:

The client will pay Rs. 400 per hour of video transcribed. Payments will be processed within 15 days of completion of the engagement and on completion of an employment and non-disclosure contract.

Next steps

If you are a good fit and are interested, please drop a cover letter, a resume and writing samples to jawwad@alchemya.com

Three new posts at the Finance Training Course portal this week that broke the popularity graph.

Continuing Profession Education (CPE) online learning solutions for actuaries

Stress testing crash course for Board of Directors and Board Risk Committee members

Cross selling treasury products

Two new online video based courses – The Stress Testing, ALM and Capital Adequacy Crash Course and the shorter and more cost effective ALM and Capital Adequacy Crash Course are live and available for purchase.

In over six hours of video based instruction the two courses cover the following topics

The Stress Testing, ALM and Capital Adequacy Crash Course

1. The need for stress testing
2. Stress testing capital
3. Stress testing methodology
   1. Price Risk
   2. Credit Risk
   3. Interest Rate mismatch & ALM
   4. ALM reports and extending them

Annexure and related topics

1. Using Value at Risk – the Value at risk course
2. Understanding Capital
3. Understanding Capital Adequacy
4. Understanding Duration and Convexity

The ALM and Capital Adequacy Crash Course

1. Introduction to ALM
2. Interest Rate mismatch & ALM
3. ALM reports and extensions
4. Evolution of Capital Adequacy requirements
5. A review of ICAAP (Internal Capital Adequacy Assessment Process) and Basel II (III) – Liquidity risk adjustments

Annexure and related topics

1. Using Value at Risk – the Value at risk course
2. Understanding Duration & Convexity

Crazy doesn’t even come close…

Monday morning Jehan reminded me of my two commitments to judge the P@SHA Launch Pad event as well as stumble my way through 2 feet (yup that is how high they stack) of applications received for the P@SHA Social Innovation Fund.

As I dressed and rushed to leave home on our daily 18 kilometer trek to drop our kids to school at 7:30 am, I saw Fawzia waving to me while talking to someone on the phone. “There has been a bomb blast near the school, Kaleem is saying we should take the kids back home”.

For a mad second I thought, it will take more than a blast for CAS to get shut down and kids can’t miss school because of a stupid bomb. Back inside it was TV, Twitter, Face book and cell phones. One look at the breaking news and any thought of making an anti-terror statement by sending our kids to school was dead in the water. An hour later I had given up on TV since the quality of news coverage started eroding immediately after the news broke. We have to figure out how to fix this – a country of 180 million creative people and the best we can do rating wise is Geo and Express News? Big F to the PBA and the twenty odd news channels that are really all doing Ctrl C and Ctrl V with the same content. Twitter and Facebook took over where the media industry failed.

By Monday evening after sitting through a full day of news coverage, I was in a state of rage and drafting my own ten step plan for fixing this country involving politicians, the Arabian Sea, our many so called well wishers, friends, partners, advisors and nuclear weapons. I had to shut down my trusted laptop and disconnect the internet before I wrote something that I would regret later which would get me banned on Facebook and bring a Seal team through my front door, not necessarily in that order. Maroof suggested we should all come out into the streets and bring the government down but I wondered if that was really a solution (coming out in the street, not bringing the government down…)

Tuesday was P@SHA Launchpad and for the first time in my life as a mentor, teacher and trainer I was surprised by the quality of pitches presented at the event. More so since because of the blast and the lives we have started leading there wasn’t any preliminary prep session. While violence still resonated at the back of my mind, the fresh promise and potential of young, itsy, bitsy, teeny, weenie companies and teams that we had been working with gave me hope and direction. Imagine with so much destruction and devastation around us if we could still inspire kids to change the world, where would we be if we could only put Monday behind us. And maybe that is the solution we need: jobs, prosperity and ownership – if we all had jobs, money in our wallets, food in our stomach and a reasonable civil society that would respect our claim to speak, interact and not kill each other, would we still apply for that suicide bombing position on Craiglist.

Wednesday was my newly discovered, slightly used dentist’s appointment. While I dreaded heading towards Awab’s clinic, once I landed at its entrance, all such misgivings disappeared. It felt as if I had left Pakistan and moved to an exotic Far Eastern location. Moss covered red brick facade, old green trees with shade and rather than white antiseptic window less walls, wide open spaces and filtered natural light. Unlike many of the faceless, featureless hospitals I have suffered in my life, this one had 60 years of history and character draped around it. If it wasn’t for the drills and the x-ray machine one could easily confuse it with a herbal wrap spa (how is that for a suggestion Awab). This was obviously before Awab started playing with the cavity in my left incisor, took a look at my x-ray and started laughing. I wasn’t sure if it was dry dental humor or sophisticated civil activism at work.

Thursday my wading through two feet of P@SHA Social Innovation fund applications yielded some results. There were some really crazy kids with really crazy ideas that just might work (and they don’t involve nuclear weapons, Facebook or Seal teams). I sent over my inch thick selection (so about 1/24 selection rate) over to Jehan, went back to pick up a filing at the Alvi Dental Hospital while listening to piped U2 and Springsteen tracks and then headed straight to Sama – the last one of my baby sisters, who tonight will leave this country to settle in Canada.

Is there any other place in the world where you could get such rich and conflicting blend of hope and violence, promise and despair in a given week? And it is not even Friday afternoon.

Here is a list of three posts on the US credit rating downgrade posted earlier on Finance Training Course. The first post is an initial announcement and gut check, while the second reviews analysis published over the last 48 hours in global media supplemented by our opinions and outlook. The third is the first salvo to restrain a volatile shockwave from moving across international markets.

US Credit Rating Downgrade Day One – Commodities Outlook for Monday

US Credit Rating Downgrade End of Day One – Impact on Commodities and Financial Markets – Analysis

US Credit Rating Downgrade: No change in rules or valuation say DTCC, OCC and ICE.

Also see related media coverage below:

The rating roundup: Short lived Bond Sell off

The credit rating roundup: Early market reactions in the Middle East

I had always wondered where traffic to my sites came from. A superficial look at Google Analytics had indicated that search was the primary source of traffic and within search Google was king. By March 2011 it was generating more that 75% of visitors to three topic specific domains I run.

But after being hit by Panda in April, I had started wondering about exploring non-search sources of traffic. My Linkedin network had about 1,000 connections, the Facebook Fan page boosted 240 + 500 friends, Google+ had quickly grown to a network of 300 people and search was obviously search. I had some followers on twitter but am not an active poster and hence the complete absence of twitter in the results below.

In late June I decided to run a small experiment to see what I could do for traffic on my site with social media primarily. I had already run one experiment earlier with targeted mail shot but was not very happy with the conversion results. This exercise though would provide some interesting answers including the one about the efficacy of Google+ as a visitor generating tool.

Here are the results from a 4 week long exercise.

The Social Media – Traffic Generation experiment

The context: Comparing the results of a traffic generation campaign for an e-learning blog focused on Finance.

The motivation: Dissect my traffic patterns and see the primary sources of my traffic.

The question: A Facebook fan page and a Google search engine optimizer had different advice. One swore by Facebook fan pages. The other swore by Google search. Who was right?

The experiment: A fifteen day campaign to post new blog posts links on Facebook, Linkedin, Google+

The medium: Traffic analytics with Google Analytics

The traffic comparison study results: The death of Facebook is greatly exaggerated.

The first analytics snapshot shows the baseline results from 1^st June to 5^th August. A little over 2 months of traffic data from referring sites and includes results from 4 weeks before the experiment was launched and two weeks after the experiment finished. As you can see Google leads the band. The SP Jain referrals are from my students at the EMBA program in SP Jain in Dubai and Singapore.

Then comes the surprising result which I didn’t expect. It is Facebook followed by Linkedin followed by answers.onstartups.com. The other referral sites are subject specific sites that focus on a specific content topic.

Let take a second look and rather than two month we review the actual month when the experiment ran with Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.

While Facebook and Linkedin immediately jump to claim the number 1 and number 2 slot (ignoring SP Jain referrals), Google+ comes in at a below the curve number 15 and is trumped by answers.onstartup.com. The mail.yahoo.net chunk is from a job posting mailshot that was also shipped in the experiment period to see how job posts effect traffic.

A third and final looks reviews the last two weeks of traffic where the frequency of posts slowed down from one post a day to three posts a week. Facebook and Linkedin tie for the 1^st position. Google+ disappears and answers.onstartups.com slides to number 12.

Only one last question is left. Is there a location or geographic bias in these referrals? The answer is yes. Since my primary networks are here in this part of the world, Facebook and Linkedin primarily generate Asian traffic while answers.onstartups.com generates North American traffic.

Atleast based on the crude analysis performed above, it is obvious that Facebook, despite its many challenges is the way to go if you are looking for traffic. Which creates a strong incentive to build Facebook fan pages. Search still dominates as a source of traffic but social media allows you to build a supplementary source that comes with the added benefit of geographic targeting.

Surprising results after two weeks of active participation on http://answers.onstartups.com

A US based client is looking to expand their Java team in Karachi. Currently
receiving applications for Team Leads and Team members.

Based on exceptional performance will process L-1 visa for the US withiin 12 -
18 months. Some travel to the US required.

Client is a well established, well respected, fast growing financial services
solutions provider that has been operating in Pakistan since mid 2000.

For details please see the job posts below:

Java Team Lead

http://financetrainingcourse.com/education/2011/07/java-team-lead-sql-cloud-experience-required-financial-services-application-development/

Java Team Resources

http://financetrainingcourse.com/education/2011/07/java-developers-financial-services-application-development-sql-cloud-experience-required/

If you see a fit, please include a cover letter and a copy of your resume in
your email to jawwad@alchemya.com

Last date for Application submission is Friday 22nd, July 2011. Interviews
starting and scheduled for this week and next.

Every now and then one tends to see something absolutely amazing.

Stuff that you can’t describe in a blog post, work that must be seen with your own eyes.

Welcome to Toffeetv.com. Rabia Garib’s (CIO Pakistan) labor of love for desi kids all across the universe. Growing at the rate of one nursery rhyme a day.

23rd March 2011 was my last blog post.

A number of friends dropped in a line asking if things were ok and where I had disappeared to. Well for one word press broke again and despite my best efforts I wasn’t able to fix the home page (help please). For two between November and now I have clocked about 50,000 kilometers in pitching and marketing for work abroad. For a third after running multiple training workshops across topics, countries, and audiences, there is just not enough left in you to sit down and compose a half way decent post. And this before we start worrying about bank interest and over due liabilities.

Needless to say, word press is still broken after my most recent attempt to fix it this afternoon and the bank liabilities and personal loans are still very much over due. But I thought I would drop in a line to everyone who had asked, things are all right at this end in Karachi. And I will soon be putting up training appearances in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Kula Lumpur. If you are interested in catching up drop me a line.

This March marks the 8^th year I have been teaching entrepreneurship as a subject. In every group of 35 students I teach I come across a handful on fire. The wild, out of control, let me change the world fire, as well as the slow burning, smoldering, I will get through everything fire. All I have to do is to make them see the end goal and they are generally able to figure the rest out.

Over the years in the list of questions that students ask as I help them get their ideas closer to commercial reality the most common, the most troublesome and the most awkward question is:

How do I sell? How do I convince people to say yes? How do I persuade them to give me a chance and a shot?

While you can always direct them to books on marketing, business development and sales, to my knowledge no one ever wrote a book that gave you a roadmap to do all three. Typical text on marketing cover dimensions around marketing decisions (the C’s and P’s) or industrial or retail branding, business development talk about the art of deal making, closing and negotiating and tomes on selling talk about prospecting and lead generation. But there is hardly one book that you can point a student or a dreamer to and say read it and at least you will have a place to start.

For example from Chapter 5 on How to Launch, pick a neat set of tools including

1. Tell a Story. Everyone wants to buy or share your dream, not a number.
2. Present the big choice first. Then the small one (the one you really want)
3. Reduce the number of choices. (Make it simple – thought Guy isn’t sure if it works the other way round also).
4. Sell the salient point.

I have always liked Guy’s way of breaking the Art of the Start down to a science and his admission that it is not science. He first did it with his Art of the Start speech (the California TIECON edition). The speech is now a regular feature on day two of my classes and the framework he presents is what I use with my students to put flesh around the bones of their ideas. For instance in the part where we help students move their concept to the real world we ask them a few qualifying questions.

1. Why do they care about their idea and can they describe it in such a fashion that their audience can feel their passion and energy?
2. Why do their customers care about this product and how would they describe it?
3. How do they create meaning with their work and is it (or would it) be really a worthwhile use of their time, energy and life?

As students stumble around inside themselves trying to find the right answers you can immediately tell who has been on fire and dreaming for how long. For the dreamers and the fire people have it down pat. They know the answers before the question is even asked. For others the questions serve as a sifter that filters dreams from noise, meaning from mindless chatter.

The questions above originated from the Art of the Start. And seeing them at work really give you a lot of respect for Guy’s list of processes and checklists. Which is one way of looking at Enchantment – It’s a book of checklists for dreamers. Not touchy feely, hand waving stuff but things that you can use tonight and see if Guy’s trial by fire approach works for you. Individuals like me like me who are founders and geeks in search of an algorithm to persuade and influence people so that we can go out and change the world by converting others to our cause.

Not sell but convert; not convince but enchant.

A number of friends asked if I could put a post (or a series together) time lining the Finance Training Course adventure. For those of you who have just joined us, Finance Training Course is a business that grew out of a conversation last December with a friend about making money from selling content online. The conversation triggered the experiment which sort of became a text only finance resource site which spawned a store that to the surprise of all of us actually started generating revenue. Not enough for me to go home and retire but certainly enough to keep things interesting.

There were a number of core points this “experiment was supposed to prove”. In another life I also teach a course on entrepreneurship and after running a number of startups into the ground I became a fan of the 3 month sudden death model (aka the Y-Combinator) model. Finance Training Courses was supposed to be the case study that illustrated, proved or disproved a contested and counter intuitive points of the sudden death entrepreneurial model. In simple terms you define life and death decisions for your startup in 3 month milestones. At each milestone you evaluate progress and decided to extend the lease of life or pull the plug.

We decided to take the list of simple questions and see if we could answer them with our so called thought experiment.

1. Starting from zero can you get to revenues in 3 months? The answer is yes.
2. Can you cover your operational expenses in the next 3 months? Once again yes.
3. Can you build an international base of customers with multiple orders a month? Short, yes.
4. Can you redefine your core business around this experiment? Possibly yes, but still trying to figure this one out.
5. Can you grown traffic from zero to 10,000 visitors and 25,000 page views a month in less than 10 months? Yes.
6. Can you monetize and convert some of that traffic to cash? Yes.
7. Can you build all of the above without logistics and supply chain and just deal in electrons? Yes.
8. Can you scale this up in a year? Working on this right now, will know within the next three months.

    

In terms of background I am a computer scientist who lost his way and ended up on the business side. When I first setup the Finance Training Course blog I hadn’t touched serious programming for over 12 years. I didn’t know anything about SEO except some curiosity about how the entire cycle worked. But I had a lot of great help and mentoring. There were three core members who contributed part time to the experiment and three primary advisors that helped when we hit a road block. I discovered a lot of really cool technology, fell in love with WordPress and Google and I am trying to see if I can get the experiment to a level where I can simply quit my day job and do this full time. It has been a great education.

The chronicles are laid out below:

Starting up, motivation and basic Q&A

Building an Online Business – Finance Training Courses – The beginning

What it took for us to rank on some core key words

Building an Online Business – My daily SEO task list

Traffic trends over the year

Building an Online Business – Growing Traffic at Finance Training Courses

Thinking about doing a new product

Building an Online Business – Thinking about Video courses

The Video courses are live – launch email

Building an Online Business – Launching the Video Training Course product

Building the Onlnie Risk Training Niche – Part I

Last week of February 2011 we quitely celebrated the first full year of Finance Training Courses (aka Learning Corporate Finance). A business initially conceived of 11 years ago that spawned a book, the startup crash course and a suprising rebirth selling online risk courses covering video based quant training as well as pdf versions of self paced risk course notes. For those of you who have just joined us here is the original timeline.

May 2001 – Avicena goes under – The original business for selling corporate finance and derivative pricing training online

Jan 2003 – Alchemy takes its first breath as a consulting business

2004 – 2007 – Alchemy risk and pricing consulting and training practice takes off

May 2007 – First conversation with Abbas about doing risk and pricing training online

Aug 2009 – Second conversation with Adnan about quant training online

22^nd Feb 2010 – Learning Corporate Finance site is up

Sep 2010 – Learning Corporate Finance picks up the Runners up slot in PASHA ICT Awards 2010

Nov 2010 – Finance Training Course is the new redirected domain for the online training business.

Dec 2010 – Content Sale and Advertising revenues cross 400 US dollars a month.

26^th Feb 2011 – 54,000 visitors, 124,000 page views, 15 plus new orders a month. Break under 250K in Alexa ranking and sub 500K in Quantcast rankings.

March 2011 – Finance Training Videos is here with the Quant Crash Course and Understanding N(d1)

Finance Training Course – 10,000 visitors and 24,000 pageviews a month, end February 2011. Over 60% growth in traffic and pageviews in 4 months.

Learning Corporate Finance – 6,000 visitors and 15,000 page views a month, mid October 2010. A surge in traffic that starts in end June 2010 levels off in November 2010 as we move domains. Traffic triples in the 4 months starting July and ending October.

But it is not traffic that is up at Finance Training Videos. Pages per visit, bounce rate, ratio of repeat visitors and average time on the site have all picked up in March compared to the October statistics.

1^st March 2011 numbers

End October, 2011 numbers

How ever the most impressive change is where the traffic is originating from after the redirect went into effect. Pre Redirect, the top ten cities contributing traffic to Finance Training Courses were:

The top ten cities in the most recent six weeks show Karachi slipping to the number 3 slot and Lahore and Islamabad knocked out by Dubai and Manila.

Even more importantly 33% of the traffic for the site now originates from the US, 8% from India and United Kingdom, only 6% from Pakistan and the rest divided between Asia Pacific and Middle East.

To be continued…

Taha turned six mashallah in February. We just did an immediate family get together at home and he was happy. While I travel like crazy trying to make numbers work, Fawzia has been holding the fort at home and at work. Yesterday morning she sent me a piece that I think you should also read. There is so much that I want to say here but I think Carter does a much better job than I could do.

To Fawzia, the super mom in Amin, Salwa and Taha’s lives.

From Circle of Mom, A mother’s article on guardianship

“Because no matter how much I know logically all that we have done for our son, it never feels like enough. It’s the endless loop in my head: could’ve, should’ve. After he was first diagnosed, I continually felt as if there were always one more therapy, one more intervention, one more special diet out there to try, that that would be the critical one, the magic, miraculous cure that eluded us, and that if we didn’t try, it meant we weren’t good parents.

The recriminations. What did I do wrong during my pregnancy? Was it that Advil I took the week before I realized I was pregnant? Did I not play with him enough as an infant? Not go to enough conferences, seminars and workshops? Or go to too many that took me away from him? Should we have taken him to see other experts? I should have done more.

But I don’t know what more could have been. Sometimes, in dark moments, I think, I have not been a good enough mother. Because if I had, he wouldn’t be autistic anymore.”

In the summer of 1987, Lotus Symphony was the category killer in the integrated spreadsheet market. It was also my first introduction to the animals called spreadsheets and financial models. While other 16 year olds were doing things that 16 year olds are supposed to do in the summer, yours truly was digging through Symphony help to figure how to link a financial model together. A side lane off Zamzama, sitting on a sunlit desk on the mezzanine floor of an office which is now just a fond memory, one late afternoon I turned a static worksheet into a dynamic thing of beauty.

It would be an understatement to say that the direction my life was supposed to take changed that day. Many a spreadsheets and a few years later I possibly became the fastest teenaged draw with a spreadsheet you could find East of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea (a dubious claim at best). Fate dealt another kind shove and I found myself in an undergraduate program in computer science and for a while my love affair with spreadsheets was put on a hold. Tempted by semaphores and operating systems, compilers and the C language, the Borland IDE and code, I sort of forgot myself for a few years.

Till one fine evening when I opened the second edition of John C. Hull. I wish I could say it was love at first sight but it was more of a love and hate relationship. I loved the fact that I was finally studying Derivative Pricing and Risk Management; I hated the fact that I couldn’t decipher the language or the material. Oh it was plain English but such a torturous variant that it brought tears to my eyes every time I wandered too far off from the numerical examples. Alas Destiny played me for a victim for 5 long and painful year where I read Hull cover to cover 6 times a year, took the Fellowship actuarial exam on the text, failed it and then tried again the next year and the following year and the following year.

Flash forward to 1999, the year I left my internship at Goldman to start at Columbia Business School in New York. Three people helped break the curse of Hull (forgive the pun) and re-ignited the love affair with the sheet. Maria Vassalou, the Continuous Time Finance professor at the business school who allowed me to sit through her PhD elective that dissected the Black Scholes equation; Mark Broadie, the Security pricing Guru in Uris Hall who for the first time showed me the things one could do with spread sheet if one put his mind to it and Howard Corb, the Derivative Trader from Morgan Stanely who amply demonstrated every Tuesday evening how little us lesser mortals knew about the derivative trading desk and the derivative business and why Morgan and every other bank on the street was justified in not giving us the time of the day come recruiting season.

Twelve years later, I would still be embarrassed if I met Maria, Mark or Howard on the street (or for that matter any of my Columbia class mates who work on the street). Hull has finally stopped tormenting me. I am no longer the fastest draw on a spreadsheet, East of the Persian Gulf. But after confusing and tormenting more than 1,500 students in Bangkok, Singapore, Kula Lumpur, Dubai, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, I would like to believe that I now know a little bit more about pricing derivative securities on a spreadsheet. Certainly more compared to the 16 year old who stared dumbfounded at his screen when his summer long effort finally came together that afternoon in July 1987.

Throughout this 24 year journey I wished and searched for something online that would ease the pain of grasping the alien concepts of stochastic calculus, computational finance and risk management. About a year ago with Finance Training Courses I took the first step in creating a resource that another me in an alternate universe could use. By the end of this week, we will hopefully have the second iteration of that resource out. Armed and dangerous with a video and certainly not afraid to use it!

If you have ever been in love with a spreadsheet or a pricing model; or hated your 18^th run of Hull without understanding a word of it; or needed a spiffy answer to a question posed by our beloved Howard Corb, just so that you can make the right impression, the Online Quant Crash Course (for the non Quant?) is for you. Rather than limiting ourselves to PDF and excel files we decided to play with Finance Training Videos, the new home for online video based quantitative training.

Take a look at the Quant Crash Course samples as well as the Quant Training Crash Course pre-course announcement and keep an eye out for the “We are now live” announcement. The announcement should be up latest by this Friday (if not sooner) and we are almost done with the logistics behind the course. And if you like what you see please feel free to drop me a line telling me how I could do a better job. For there is nothing more, that we underappreciated (and occasionally underpaid) authors and trainers like more than a note (abusive or appreciative) from someone we have never met before from a place we have never been to in our lives.

It took two students, over a hundred training engagements in 6 markets and a life working with risk and finance to change my mind.

2007 was a good year in many ways. It was also the year when Abbas Qureshi at SP Jain, Dubai and Adnan Iqbal at Deloitte Consulting, DC asked me the same thing. “Can you please start putting up your training materials online? There are tons of individual out there who would pay good money to let you teach them online.” I wasn’t sure if I was the video guy, if we had the bandwidth or if I really wanted to do this. Two previous attempts to record workshops had worked but with disastrous results.

While Finance Training Courses was a first step in this direction, Adnan and Abbas both felt that something along the lines of Khan Academy would be a lot more useful. There is only so much you can read and a good instructor with a good deck can simply beat plain text hands down. While I wasn’t sure if such a model would ever take off financially, Salman Khan quickly became the inspiration and the guide on the path for putting videos online.

About two months ago we started thinking about putting our slide decks online for the most popular courses on the Finance Training Course portal. The first milestone was investigating WordPress capabilities (you can do about 50 meg per video per post using wordpress), a search on tablets and the tools of choice used by Salman Khan (Wacom Fun Touch Bamboo versus the Genius much cheaper and larger pen only tablet), the software required (Camtasia by Techsmith) for the work Salman has done and we were there.

The first video on liquidity risk management took over a week to plan. While the content had been around for a while, it took me a while to convince myself that I was finally ready to put videos online. Something we had always talked about but never done. The Quant Crash Course took even longer. While the first course on liquidity was just the proof of concept, the second was supposed to be the real thing. This evening we put the first episode of the four part quant crash course online. Hopefully before I head out to Abu Dhabi on Tuesday the whole series will be up and running and available for sale.

Come and see me at the PMI Karachi Chapter monthly event where I will give my reboot chat later this evening at 6:30 pm at the Regent Plaza Hotel. Please see event brochure or the PMI site for more details.

Two ICAAP training workshops, three days, one magical location. Our second set of workshops covering exotic financial topics in breathtaking tropical locations.

A focus on ICAAP – Pillar II risks primarily ALM and Liquidity Risk Capital using Interest Rate Simulations. The two day main event is preceded by a single day foundation workshop on Internal Capital Adequacy with a focus on treasury, market and counterparty risk management. For details, please see the main training workshop pages below.

ICAAP Training Workshop – Treasury, Market and Counterparty Risk Foundation Workshop – 29^th March, 2011

ICAAP Models Training Workshop: ALM, Liquidity and Interest Rate Simulation Workshop – 30^th, 31^st March, 2011

Discount available for early registration and multiple nominations from the same institution. Book online using Google Checkout or directly with LSW in Malaysia. Local discounted rates available for a limited time for participants from Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and existing LSW and Alchemy customers. Please see ICAAP training workshop brochures for more details.

Superbad, superdad. For all those superbad dads out there, if there is one movie you watch this weekend, make sure its Dispicable me.. After going through Tangled (nice), Megamind (not worth it) and Despicable me over the last three weekends, there is only one clear winner… Steve Carrel and the team do a phenomenal job of providing light, heart tugging entertainment that hasn’t been seen since Pixar produced Monsters and we watched Up…

Go get it now..