Banking, consulting and....gambling?!

I promised that this time, my blog entry will be more practical (my last post was completely off topic and probably seemed weird, but this is me, when I am into something, I can’t stop). So, I’ll do my best. Last week I took part in 2 different business competitions (this is one of the advantages of the London business school- you can be engaged in different business simulations and case competitions as much as you want to). Here are my key learning points
First event was organized by Morgan Stanley , it was portfolio management simulation, held in their offices at Canary Wharf.
I always had mixed feelings about Canary Wharf, from the one side as an aspiring investment banker I am supposed to be excited by the view of towers in the night sky, from the other side, the atmosphere there reminds me a lot of a movie I Robot . You know, when robots seized the earth and started to exterminate people. One of my fellow students told me yesterday, that this is very particular area of London, where the population is limited by men and women from 20 to 55 –you will never meet a child or an old person there. So all people are dressed in equally expensive black suits, are rushing to equally faceless office cubicles, with equal expression of concern on their faces. Do I really want to join the army?
Anyway, I liked the office a lot, because the building is not tall (I am afraid of heights), people look human and there are even attractive men working for Morgan Stanley. We were split into 15 teams of 7 people and given 1,5 hours to manage 100 mil for 6 consecutive periods of 8 months . During 10-20 minutes we needed to split our money and invest them in equity, fixed income or real estate in Europe, US or Asia, after that we listened to the news, giving microeconomics trends for the last and future periods and were given the return on our investment. Of cause, the winner must have the largest return on the investment. My team had very stable and medium results, that’s why at the last round we decided to gamble and … had the medium result again (in Russia, there is a saying, that if you’re unlucky in gambling, you will be lucky in love – I hope that’s the case with me). The simulation of cause was quite far from the real job of trader, but I think it’s very much fun and actually the group who won was not gambling – they had solid strategy from the very beginning.

The second event – was LEK strategy case competition. We were given a case and had one week to come up with the presentation of the solution. First of my learning – it’s very hard to come up with a good solution, when you’re not interested in the subject. And this is something I really want to change about myself, because, unfortunately, in real life not everything is exciting… So Chinese traditional medicine is not the most exciting subject to me… Then we had very diverse team and each of us had different view on the problem. Instead of discussing everything before the actual presentation, each of us preferred to keep his/her own opinion and to agree to joint solution. Moreover, we decided that only 2 people will be presenting and other 2 will be answering questions. As a result, I think the jury was genuinely puzzled, when we recommended the poor company to do all at once, and answers to questions were completely different to statements from presentations. Just to give an example: Jury, “In presentation you said you want to increase number of stores in China, but they are unprofitable now”, we, “No, actually we want to close our shops in China and go abroad”.., No wonder we were not selected for finals. So, my advise – you really need to have common vision before the presentation and talk to each other actually helps.