When pictures say a thousand words

For many of us wannabe MBAs, especially those interested in finance, the week of Sept 12-Sept 19th was a once-in-a-lifetime joy(?)ride. Call it a black swan, call it the beginning of the end for I-banks, call it a mere blip for the think-long-term advocates, call it whatever you want, but sure as hell this was one unforgettable week (actually this is turning out to be one unforgettable year !!).

If you fell asleep on the 12th. and are just waking up, heres a view of last week's mayhem (via tradermark):



Interestingly inspite of the absolute carnage in the market (driven almost in whole by the financial crisis), on Friday Sept 12th (week before the carnage) the S&P 500 closed at 1251.7 and on Friday Sept 19th it closed at 1251.3. So if you were truly asleep ala Rip-Van-Winkle, you would have woken up a week later, fired up google finance, and said to yourself "Blaaah, what a boring market, the indices havent moved an inch". Is anybody reminded of the Japanese markets of the mid 90s ?

As I get ready for my MBA apps, I wonder how this market will effect the ROI of a 150k+ MBA education. Will it be something like this for us fin wannabes:



In this week's OMG news: I won a seat via an online mega-satellite (1k buy-in) to the Europeon Poker Tour-London No-Limit-Holdem Championship event, starting October 5th at the Victoria Casino, London. By winning the satellite, I get my buy-in (10k pounds) for the tourney waived, free hotel, free food, free air-fare. I only need to get the visa and everything else is pretty much taken care of, EXCEPT of course freaking work. With a bunch of projects being worked on, my manager is going to flip out if I ask for vacation, lets see how things work out. If I cant make it to London, then I can probably keep the value of the seat I won.