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Monday, July 28, 2008

That SEC Fixed Income trading exam thingy, and a free movie ticket

There's this new requirement that all Fixed Income traders/brokers/salespeople have to take an exam with the SEC before they can sell gov't securities. Now everyone in the dealing room has to take it, whether one trades GS or not... simply because one could eventually end up in the GS desk when there's a "rotation".

The exam dates available are in August to September. Heard that other banks, and our brokers, have started studying 3 months ago. Given that our budget dept tends to release checks about a week or sometimes a day before exams ... no matter how you badger them ... and SEC or whatever agency's handling the exam won't release the review CD until one has paid the PHP5,500 (per person) exam fee ... we're freaking doomed to fail.

Rey asked one broker to let us borrow the CD and guess what ... if you printed every document in there, it would consume a ream of paper ... maybe more. The table of contents reads like a syllabus for one subject meant to be taken in a trimester/semester if you are in college. No wonder the other banks' traders have started studying THREE MONTHS AGO. Sheesh! We're sure we could answer the bond questions, but a good number of other items deal with SEC rules and circulars ... most of which we haven't really read of before, much less know about. And I HATE MEMORIZATION... ever since grade school.

Grumble.

Wonder what our dealing room's passing rate will be? On a less serious note, imagine how many reams of paper we would be consuming once we start printing our own copies?

SEC's smart for handing out CDs instead of printed materials. A decent, cheap CD only costs PHP15.00. Burning CDs won't consume much man-hours and electricity, and putting a label and packaging it would probably cost them only PHP20 more. If they had opted to print the content then bind each copy, they would've spent hundreds more. By just handing out CDs, they passed the cost of printing and binding to whoever paid for the exam.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Some counterparties gave out tickets to the Int'l Markets Trading Group for an advanced screening of The Mummy at the SM Mall of Asia Center Stage tomorrow evening. After taking into consideration the tickets they need to have family and/or friends watch the movie with them, there was one left over and Milette gave it to me.

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Front

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Back

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Back of front conver

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I have watched movies at the regular MOA cinemas, but I have no idea what the ticket means by Center Stage, and why it costs PHP400 - an ordinary MOA cinema ticket is worth around PHP130. Wonder if it's different from the Premiere theater or Director's theater-majiggy (i don't watch movies there so I don't remember the name).

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Either the cinema itself costs that much, or the extra money's for the fund raiser.

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And... they don't want anyone bringing cellphones or any recording device OR FOOD inside. Could deal with not bringing food ... but no cellphone? Hmmm... got to stash it DEEP down in my bag so the ushers don't to see it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Our trading room was O.C. enough to count the number of pages of the SEC CD reviewer if you were to print in. That's roughly 650 pages and PHP 466 pesos worth of photocopying expenses in UP's shopping center (aka Xerox Mecca). Good thing it was moved to October! Yihaa!

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