This Saturday, the main Campus IBA Auditorium was buzzing with activity. It was time for twenty student teams to pitch their ideas for the 5 Plan 9-P@SHA-PITB Incubation seats up for grabs. The format was a short verbal, non visual pitch, followed by judging, followed by a day of mentoring, followed by a second round…
Category: Pakistan
Forecasting the Monetary Policy decisions – will there be a rate cut or not
Forecasting the monetary policy The next monetary policy announcement is due in the last week of May 2010. We attempt to forecast the cut in the policy discount rate by looking at oil prices, the relationship between oil prices and imports, exports, remittances, the current account balance, net foreign assets, credit to the private sector…
Value at Risk, Derivative Products and the Dummies crash course on options
I ran two workshops in Dubai and Abu Dhabi last week on derivatives and treasury risk management. Three new related courses in these two areas have now been uploaded as master classes. They are: Master Class: Calculating Value at Risk – a quick and dirty guide to calculating VaR Master Class: Derivative products…
Treasury one – redux
I had no idea that my treasury one post would generate so much traffic and commentary. On a blog where it is rare to see more than a single comment (given all my anti spam, anti bot, anti social word press defenses) in less than 24 hours 8 comments (ok I confess 4 of them…
Karachi city update
Was at work all day and then went from Baloch Colony bridge to Khayaban-e-Bahria to pick up the kids (5pm) and then took Kalapul, Shahrae-Faisal and Karsaz to head home to Gulshan (5:30 pm). Roads are open, traffic is thin, lots of security being deployed and petrol stations are closed. Two blasts in the city….
Pakistan Macro Economic Update – January 2010
The figures for July- December 2009 are guardedly encouraging as there are some signs that the economy is on the road to recovery. Trade deficit has narrowed due to a decline in imports (because of reduced oil and commodity prices in this period as well as the slowdown in economic activity) which have outweighed the…
The Caltex, PSO, Shell Challenge…
Good petrol pumps (gas stations for my friends from an earlier life) are hard to find in Karachi. Good petrol pumps that will give you consistent mileage weeks after weeks are even harder. After painfully experimenting with almost every brand and every locality I have now built my own list of three pumps that I…
Talent ,Technology, Management
Ages ago for an upcoming PASHA career expo I did a piece on hiring. A few months earlier I had done a presentation on knowledge workers at Zayed University Campus in Abu Dhabi. Today at the Nutshell forum I used ideas from both pieces to do a different take on talent management within the technology…
The Larry Ellison Fix in Karachi…
The first car that I ever wanted to drive was a Honda Accord. Don’t ask me why, there is a long convoluted tale behind that desire that goes all the way back to Abdullah Haroon Road, traffic duties as a prefect and my school days. Twelve years later the car I first learnt how to…
The Reboot presentation at TIECON, Karachi – Revisited
The TIECON 2009, Karachi, 4th November 2009, Reboot presentation was the first time I was able to shrink the story in under 20 minutes. Spent three days putting the presentation together but it will be a while before I am able to get to an editor that will run the presentation and the video coverage…