The business world, it is all about personal skills, learning to work in a team, relating to people, being open minded, listening, collaborating, separating roles, taking informed desitions. This might seem like I am blabbering a bunch of ideas into the same page but it is all because of frustration. One of the most important skills to have is also handling frustration, sometimes it is better to step behind, breath and get your act together. Sometimes, silence is better in a situation of stress, letting things cool down is vital. Why am I talking about this? Broker #2, my team has very strong personalities and our passion towards the subject set us between taking a really risky, volatile investment in the mining stocks from Peru against a Mutual fund or an ETF. After presenting the idea to Mr. Fitspatrick, an ex broker manager with 12 years of experience he declined the idea completely. Yes, accepting that your idea is wrong might be hard to take but THAT is the business world. This experience was harsh but extremely REAL. I saw how people will not be soft, specially when you are working FOR them. I also learned that it is important to remain positive because in the real world if I were to loose my attitude or turn against a team mate in front of the boss, I, would be fired. The idea of giving value to your audience from the past media unit re-apeared today given that our different proposals were very distinct and had valid points towards success but what would define our desition had to be based deffenetely in the client's needs, time range of investment and how much he wanted to earn (10% or more). | From the meeting, I can say I gained lots of knowledge. First I learned what a penny fee is (less than a dollar charge). Mr. Fitz made it clear that he, as a client would never invest in a penny fee because it is easy to buy but extremely hard to sell because people are not willing to take the risk, specially when the stock has a meaningful drop. I also learned how the ticker of a company does not tell you much just by looking at the trend but by analyzing why it has increased/ decreased in the past. Having an expert talk to us also opened my eyes to other indicators of growth that I had not been conscious about before. Why did their employes start receiving lower payments? Did the companies' CEO change? What are their investing plans for the future? What's the PE ratio? THIS are all questions one must make before investing their money in a company's stock. With a $3000 dollar investment plan and a two year lapse we would have to know a range of vocabulary we had not necessarily dived into deep enough in order to comprehend for what situations ETF's, mutual funds and stocks would be more convenient. We also decided that the stocks, as I mentioned before where a risky bet, specially for one same sector in the economy (mining). We recognized the importance of betting in companies that people trusted and believed in. Coming back to our client, Mr. Topf, he constantly repeated when he was presenting the project: I would invest on Trello because I believe it is a great idea. I am not saying that we will be investing on Trello but this proofed to me that knowing about the societies' opinion and amount of faith in the company or sector does impact the it's progression and can help us to predict if their stock will increase or drop down. A factor that came up as well, was the opportunity of diversifying our portfolio. With mutual funds and ETF's we would be able to invest in different sectors and company's with smaller amounts of money in each. In this way; if one started falling in the market, not all the money would be at sake (Safer bet). < The ticker of stocks can come handy when comparing performance's. This two random example graphics demonstrate the trends of different companies, one which's stocks are lower through time and the other which is incrementing (percentages included). |
As you can see, TONS of new information was introduced today but I am actually not stressed about it. This is all part of the learning process. Deffenetely, our group is in critical state, we can either (like a stock) keep on dropping or boost up! As a team, we have to be better collaborators and LEARNERS. Instead of taking this broker project as a competition we have to start being curious about everything we find with an open-mind. For this reason, I can confidently say I enjoyed being F R U S T R A T E D today… because by stepping aside and looking at the big picture; it helped me realize what I needed to work on, pushed me forward and lead for me to discover more about the highly tense but wonderful limitless world of finance and business… LETS GET TO WORK.
1 Comment
Pedro Sanchez
9/26/2013 10:41:04 am
We all feel frustrated after today. :( Every group made at least one mistake, but we're learning!! I really enjoyed your blog; it made me feel better at my mistakes. :)
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Daniela Delgado"If you don't build your dreams, someone else will hire you to build theirs" Categories
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