Just saw this unconventional “Recession Index” on NY Magazine’s Intelligencer. Some of the more interesting YOY figures:

• # of people spending $2k+ per night @ Marquee: -50% (bottle sales down 10%)
• Average daily late-night subway ridership, midnight to 6 am: +4% (people still fighting for black car vouchers?)
• Average rent for studio apartment in Murray Hill doorman building: -7% (anyone remember the last time rent decreased in NYC?)
• Cost of a standard room at Glassy New Cooper Square Hotel: -35% (also everywhere else, kind of nice for traveling actually)

I wonder what the correlation of these figures and S&P 500 is? Perhaps we need yet another niche ETF…

But apparently “Wall Street” won’t surrender on bonuses despite the meltdown as there will be at least $20b+ to go around this Season.

So, bottle?

NY Magazine via BankersBall

First Dow Kim, head of GMI, now Stan O’Neal, CEO, Merrill Lynch is dismissing its top execs left and right. I’ve been a big fan of both, especially O’Neal, being the first non-caucasian CEO of a bulge-bracket and his drastic changes when he took the lead at Merrill in 2002. He was one of the top reasons I chose the firm to start my career.

But that’s not the end of the story: layoffs are happening everywhere, bulge-bracket or not, thanks to subprime. I don’t have any friends affected yet. Best of luck to those that are.

• Before the flight:
  • Cheapest tickets can be found on Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday mornings
  • Book 2 weeks (ideally a month) in advance so you can get cheap tickets, even for holidays
  • Use sites like Expedia/Travelocity to find best prices, but book with airline websites to avoid $5~$10 booking fees (this is in the process of being eliminated)
  • Pack light, don’t bring liquids over 3 onces, check in online a day ahead, then you can avoid the long check-in lines and go straight to the security checkpoint (free/paper tickets cannot be checked in online)
  • If possible, wear comfy clothes (e.g. sweatpants); if you have to bring a suit, wear it so it doesn’t get wrinkled in luggage
  • If your flight gets delayed/canceled, there’s probably a long line at customer service at the airport with angry flyers; call the airline 1-800 number instead to get quicker service (although if you want to get on a different airline’s flight you’ll have to take to someone at the airport)
  • Get aisle seats if you want to get up often, get window seats if you want to sleep
  • If you want free WIFI and airport doesn’t offer any, ask another flyer that looks like a business traveler with a laptop to create an ad-hoc laptop-to-laptop network with internet sharing so you can mooch off his company-sponsored EVDO/EDGE wireless internet; takes 2 minutes
• During the flight:
  • Ever noticed all the people standing on the back of the plane just chilling? They aren’t weirdos, but rather may have back/leg problems; walk around often if you do
  • Don’t drink things with sugar and eat the salted peanuts, always ask for water instead to stay hydrated
  • You can use your ipod headphones for satellite radio/TV (found on AirTran, JetBlue, etc.), they sound MUCH better and helps to save the environment
  • If there aren’t many flyers and you flirt with the flight attendant you may get a business-class seat for free, or at least get a whole row for yourself to sleep on

Cheat sheet is mainly geared towards investment banking and financial services interviews. It also includes links to some good articles (will feature more in future). Cheat sheet will be periodically updated but please feel free to email me with suggestions.

Interviewee’s.Cheat.Sheet-Ray.Shan.doc

I’ve always had a keen interest in marketing, thanks to Dr. Lutz and his great marketing class at University of Florida (in fact he’s a favorite professor of BusinessWeek and featured in the article Not the Usual Drill). I’ve recently stumbled accross brandchannel.com, an independent weekly magazine for branding produced by Interbrand. They just published their online study of the top global brands in 2006, and the results are quite interesting. Here are the top 5:

1. Google
2. Apple
3. YouTube (!)
4. Wikipedia (!!!)
5. Starbucks

Surprising isn’t it? Jump to see more details and thoughts.

It’s pretty interesting to see that Web 2.0 companies/organizations made the global top 10, and not making just 1 spot, but a wopping 4! I do have a feel doubts about the results though: the sample population of the study isn’t large, and it’s really hard to believe that Wikipedia scored higher than Starbucks. Unfortunally, most people around me still do not know what Wikipedia is. However I do believe that this “opensourceness” (am I the first one to coin that word?), or the collaborative way of sharing knowledge is going to be THE top trend in 2007 and beyond. After all, YouTube went from a small internet startup to a huge household name in 18 months and was sold to Google for 1.8+ billion dollars.

Below we have the regional top 5 breakdown. One can draw some pretty interestings conclusions based on the data above. Latin America and their drinks, what’s up with that? I remember seeing a beer contest where straight Corona was voted the wost beer but Corona with lime was voted the best. Maybe lime should be #1. And HSBC in Asia, after all they do run the Hang Seng. I still have memories of growing up near Hong Kong and looking up to the HSBC skyscraper there. Europeans seem to be very big on Skype and athletic clothing. I bet it’s tough on the phone bills when majority of your friends live in 7 different countries. And lastly, with iPod sales surging 50+% year-over-year in North America, it’s hard for Apple not to reign the supereme.

Besides YouTube and Wikipedia, what else is new? I put together the below table and highlighted the companies that only appeared once within top 10 rankings over the past 6 years. As you can see, Toyota did great last year at the expense of GM and Ford losing over $5 billion a quarter. Firefox 1.0 debuted in Nov. 04, making it a huge hit in 2005 as it continues to gain traction in the broswer market. Most people aren’t familiar with Al Jazeera. It is an Arabic television network specializing in news and current affairs. And finally, I did a Google News Archive search on Samsung (1, 2), and seems like their major accomplishments in 2003 are soaring profits due to flash memory chips and taking over cellphone sales from Nokia.

Here’s another table that shows the most frequently appeared top-10 brands over the past 6 years based on the data above. I have to agree to Brandchannel.com’s conclusion “Bow to Your Google”. I always wonder about this nowaday: how did we live w/o Google 10 years ago?

Here’s more for the information-hungry:

Giant list of rankings since 2001

Charts of votes per brand per region per year

Brandchannel.com’s analysis of top 5 per region

Reuters: YouTube, Wikipedia storm to top brand ranking

Top photo courtesy of Flickr

“A PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.”

Now I am a big fan of short, to-the-point presentations, even presentations without slides. Bloated slides take audience’s attention away from the presenter, and thus defeating the whole point of making a presentation - it’s not a reading session, but a time for you to showcase your subject matter expertise and/or convenience the audience to take the next action step, not that you can put together some PPTs.

Link to article

U.S. Existing Home Sales Rose 0.6% in November to 6.28 Mln Rate - Bloomberg

Conclusion: I’m bullish as I always was.

Check out the article here: HTML with discussions, PDF

*Update 2, fund up: RWX*

Here’s a snap shot of my updated Global Markets Notes/Outlook regarding real estate. Yes, everyone’s saying how the “bubble” (if there really is one) is bursting, but commercial real estate is a completely different ballgame and is more attractive than ever. I’m eager to see the first international real estate ETF go live soon.

• Real Estate
• • Real estate did not and is unlikely to rise/fall with equity/FI market
  • Localization
  • Bloomberg REIT index up 20%+ YTD (11-20-06)
  • ‘07 forecast: 50/50 (11-20-06)
  • Residential (11-26-06)
  • • Housing market will be affected by seasonality
    • Residential RE constructions down 17.4% Q3, most since 1991
    • Existing home sales down 12.7% Q3 YOY
    • Foreclosures up 42% since Oct. 05
    • Prices down 1.2% - NAR - underestimated
    • Rising income/cheaper fuel offset declining home values
    • Volume down but prices up in coastal areas
  • Commercial (11-06)
  • • Not highly correlated w/ residential RE: rental/leasing up when construction/new home sales down
    • Rising rents & tighter vacancy rates in future due to:
    • • White-collar jobs are growing
      • Institutional investors’ demand growing for higher return than treasury & lower volatility than equity
    • Blackstone LBO of Zell’s $20B trust (11-20-06)
    • • Largest takeover of RE company
      • More M&A to follow as Blackstone reserves $13B for real estate (11-26-06)
      • Zell accepted 8.5% premium, eager to sell
    • CMBS (11-9-06)
    • • Started in early 90s & currently in high growth mode w/ deals up to $2B
      • High growth & preferred financing structure in South Africa w/ $0.5B underwriting within last 12 months by Growthpoint (11-06)
      • Not highly regulated industry
      • Delinquencies declined Q1~Q3 ‘06, largest drop in hotels (61%) due to improved sector health