Friday, July 11, 2008

This Week In Review

This past week has been pretty painful, literally, for me.

I got rid of my lower right wisdom tooth, after its attempt to break free and impacted on my jaw bone. The pain was non-trivial and I was waken up at mid-night and frantically searched the web for "wisdom tooth extraction" in Singapore.

Its attempt was proven futile, but costly, I had the wisdom tooth removed promptly within a few days, and it costed me S$520, inclusive of GST.

After the operation, I was given a 5 day medical leave, and deliberately I only notified a few of the buddies in Singapore. Then I did a clean up of reading materials in my room, starting from the Financial Times I bought from UK, the pile of library books which would be due in a few days time, and the online news sites.

Aside from the time I was drugged to slumber by the almighty painkiller, I kept on reading, reading, and reading.

The first front was on investment. At that time Iran just test-fired some missiles to warn the westerners not to screw with its nuclear programs. I thought crude oil price would shoot through the roof and hit US$150. If this were true, stock prices would take a hefty hit and dropped like a stone. That means a put option on the stock index, or simply put option of any banks would earn me money. However I warned myself not to jump in haste, mainly I made too many mistakes not because I acted too slow, but too fast to the point I didn't think carefully. Hence I did a sand-boxing of the equity I was about to buy. The first day after the test-fire the stock really dipped slightly and the sandbox showed a small profit, but the imaginary profit evaporated in the following few days and now the accumulated loss at the sandbox is around -5%. Note this trend is oscillating, so eventually I could be correct. I will let the sandbox result guide my subsequent decision.

The second front was on my doing an MBA. Now I am kind of convinced getting an MBA won't take me too far. In fact, I am more and more confident keeping my core competency as technical guy would be much more better off. On top of that, an engineer who knows about finance and management will be much more sought-after (and thus valuable), than a manager who knows engineering and technology.

2 comments:

The Soothsayer said...

Sounds painful. My lower wisdom teeth could be impacted as well. Hope I don't have to go for a surgery. Although the taste of blood isn't too bad, what with the slight iron taste and all... ;)

Cuppa Chai said...

During my surgery, there was an instance where I felt a gush of liquid filling my mouth and my tongue told me it was salty. Since it was immediate after the dentist pushed my wisdom tooth hard, I was quite confident it was all of my blood. Tasty or not I have no comment, but hearing the dentist told her assistants for "More suctions more suctions!" to pump out the extra blood wasn't really something encouraging to hear on the surgery table. ;)