Ganesh Swami

I recently came across a strategy for stock trading. I won’t promise to make you rich overnight, but I found this trick to be very interesting. The basic idea is to buy the stocks of ten companies from the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) with the highest dividend yields. Dividend yields are defined as the ratio between the dividends distributed and the stock price. Hold them for a year, and re-evaluate your position after one year. You might have to replace lower performing stocks with newer ones to re-balance your portfolio.

From a modeling perspective, the yield is an inverse indication of the stock’s popularity. High yields typically mean undervalued stocks. Hopefully, by the end of the year, these companies have bounced back increasing stock price and decreasing yield. Of course, as with any investing strategy, the effectiveness scales inversely with the number of people following the strategy. This could explain the decrease in popularity and overall poor performance of this strategy in recent years.

That is all.

Yesterday completed my first week of classes for the Fall 2006 term. I’m taking an interesting mix of classes:

Geometric and Physical Optics (PHYS 355) is an intermediate course on optics. There’s a lot of emphasis on the application of theoretical concepts using models. I didn’t know you could solve polarization problems using matrices.

Mathematical Methods in Physics (PHYS 384) is supposed to be the hardest undergraduate course. This course compresses important math topics into one. Throwing out some of the topics in this course makes your look very smart at parties (integral transforms, green’s functions and membrane vibrations.)

Financial accounting (BUS 251) introduces accounting terminology, reading and understanding financial reports and the time value of money. The instructor is a professional (Certified Management Accountant), and conducts the class as an open discussion. If you want to know what exactly went wrong with WorldCom, this is the course to take. I’m very interested in how C-level executives run public corporations, so this should be an interesting course. I’m sure someone will bring up the recent misgivings by the boards of Apple, Dell and H-P (That someone might be me.)

Microelectronics II (ENSC 325) is my only engineering course this term. This course is about multistage amplifiers, integrated circuits and analog aspects of digital cicrcuits. This course used to be taught by the inventor of the Accelerometer that is in most IBM (Lenovo) laptops.

My hope is that I interact with a highly diverse set of people resulting in an enhanced learning experience.

At a networking event a while back, I was talking to a strategy consultant from the Monitor Group. This guy was hired right out of the engineering undergraduate program at the UofT. The consultant lifestyle includes a lot of travel, long hours of work and interacting with very smart people. Anyways, I’ve done some research and compiled a list of consulting companies (primarily in North America.) Should I be looking for a job, this would be the list I would start with. Hope it’s useful for others as well.

• Accenture
• Bain and Company
• BearingPoint
• Booz Allen Hamilton
• Boston Consulting Group
• Capgemini
• Computer Sciences Corporation
• Convergys Corporation
• Deloitte Consulting
• First Consulting Group
• Gartner
• IBM Global Services
• Infosys
• McKinsey & Company
• Monitor
• Novell
• Tata Consultancy Services
• Unisys Corporation
• Wipro

You can get a more comprehensive list from WetFeet or Wikipedia.

Lifehack has compiled an awesome list of resources for learning/brushing up on economics. Highly recommended.

Day five started out with a visit to the rehab department at Mount Sinai Hospital. One of my previous projects Voiceture used a glove that could be used for rehabilitation purposes as well. The most impressive project was the use of a new kind of polymer that shows an effect opposite of piezoelectricity, ie stretches or compresses based on electric pulses. This could then be hooked onto the nerves to make artificial limbs. Lots of cool ideas to think about.

The second half of the day was spent at the Much Music broadcast station. This building broadcasts about 50 television and radio stations. Lots of cool technology being used here.

All of day six was spent at a biomimicry session. I’ll make a separate post on this later.

Day seven was time to pack up and go home. By this time, my brain was being overloaded with information. That is all.