Intermission

I'm heading to Kyoto tomorrow straight after work for the weekend so there will be no more posts probably until Monday night.

I've been embracing my inner (and outer...) nerd over the past few days working with the quants. Today I finished my two pricing models! They both price a call option - one analytically, using the Black-Scholes model and the other using Monte Carlo simulations. I designed and programmed wee interfaces as well that you type the parameters into (stock price, strike, risk free rate, time to maturity, etc), then press a big button that says "RUN" and it spits out the result. Everybody was very impressed and I'm very proud that I managed to go from having no programming knowledge to designing pricing models in C# in the space of three days! God, I'm a geek... Next thing you know I'll start wearing a pocket protector.

This week has been very different from the last few as the quants have very British work ethics. As in they rock up at 9am, take three coffee breaks a day (that involve leaving the building and walking to insanely posh coffee shops), have a two-hour lunch break (in very posh restaurants) and then head home at about 6.30. I think I've managed to fit in quite well :)

Today's lunch was very tasty - spicy tuna donburi:



Went out for dinner and drinks with Stephen and Zach after work. Ate things on sticks while stading up and then went to a bar where all the drinks were £2. Definitely a good night.

Reasons why I love Tokyo

AKA Reasons why I'm not coming home. Ever.

In no particular order:

The shops are fantastic and so eclectically mental.
People are so polite all the time, even if I'm being an annoying gaijin and getting in their way/not understanding them.
The food is delicious and very reasonably priced. And you don't need to tip.
The overground and underground train systems are super-efficient all over Tokyo and the surrounding areas; there are underground stations on every block and trains every couple of minutes.
All the trains and most of the stations are fully air-conditioned (why can't the London tube be like that...).
You get full 3G mobile reception everywhere, including the underground stations and on the trains (even while they're moving through the tunnels!).
You also get wifi in most stations and trains and they have mobile WiMAX here already.
It's the safest city I've ever been to. And the most convenient.
It's so easy to get away from it all by going to one of the beautiful shrines or heading to the countryside.
Everybody holds lift doors open for people when they get on and off.
All women always use the 'toilet flush sound effect' so you don't hear them pee (I do it too now, so I don't get nasty looks when I come out the cubicle).
If a person has a cold, they wear a surgical mask so that nobody else catches it from them.
There are cartoon characters on everything and everywhere and it is completely socially acceptable to buy things with cartoon characters on them, regardless of your age/sex/occupation.
The posters and adverts are often hilarious.
You will never be thirsty as there are vending machines every 20 yards or so.
So many things are open so late - shops until 10pm, restaurants until midnight and cinemas, bars and internet cafes often all night.
The people who I work with have restored my faith in financial industries and are all so lovely, kind and very down to earth. As far as I can see, RBS Tokyo is not one of the bad guys (they blame everyone at the other RBSs...).
Everybody from Tokyo is slim, looks fantastic and dresses impecably stylishly.
I must be the only female over the age of 16 who doesn't wear stilletoes everyday (how do they manage?!).
Everything is newer than brand new.

The last point was further highlighted when I nipped to the local electronics store after dinner today (a massive 8 floor extravaganza). I needed to buy an external hard drive to store all my millions of photos on! I ended up getting a new flash drive too, as I keep breaking freebie ones I get from career fairs. Check out the 4GB one I bought:


Huge, isn't it? The bit on the left is only the lid! The actual drive is only that 5mm black bit at the top! And it was only £10 - technology is so far advanced here, it's unbelievable. When I was paying for my cool stuff, I saw this TV and instantly wanted to win the lottery so that I could buy it.


It's a 103 inch high definition plasma screen and probably one of most impressive pieces of kit I have ever seen. It costs about £40,000. Yikes...

Work today was really good fun actually and it's going to sound really sad when I tell you what I found enjoyable - today was my first day of learning C#; a computer programming language. I feel so cool right now... Thing is, learning a bit of programming is massively useful for me right now and also completely applicable to what I'm studying at uni next year as well as what I'm doing at work just now. So it's win win for me! I was so proud of my day's achievements - I made a few wee programmes that estimated the value of pi using truncated infinite sums and then Monte Carlo simulations. NERD ALERT. I also used some graphics to display the results and calculation time with buttons and progress bars. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to go into more detail about the maths behind more complicated Monte Carlo simulations and make a programme that will price trades.

Remember folks: it's hip to be square.

My first day as a quant

I woke up this morning to discover that mosquitoes found one of my legs very tasty yesterday - I've got really itchy bites all around my ankle, the only part of skin that was exposed, and two on my leg that mean they must have bitten through my leggings!

I'm spending this week with the quantative developers, or 'quants' as they're called in the business. These are the guys (I don't think they have female quants...) who write all the programmes, spreadsheets and other bits of software for the traders and sales people. Basically, if you need to calculate the risk, volatilty or price of a particular trade or portfolio, you ask a quant and they will come up with an awfully clever way of doing it using a computer.

The three guys who work at RBS Tokyo all come from similar backgrounds to mine - two did engineering degrees and the other has a degree and PhD in physics. It seems to me that many of the scientists who go into finance end up as quants or in research. Quants are the nerds of the financial world, so it makes sense I suppose... The plan for this week is for me to learn some C# programming language and write a programme that will shift data sets around and send them to a pre-programmed Excel spreadsheet. I'm more than happy to get some programming experience as, surprisingly, I don't get taught any coding languages as part of my uni course. I'm hoping that this experience will look good on my application to CERN next year :)

Today was another day of good food. I'm probably going to come home the size of the Buddha at Daibutsu... We went out for lunch at a brilliant Japanese restaurant in my building that specialises in grilled chicken and fish. I opted for the chicken set and was not disappointed:


I got this immaculately presented plate of various grilled and fried bits of chicken, a bowl of rice, pickles, endless cups of tea and a huge bowl of miso that was more like a stew because it had so much extra stuff in it. All in a stunningly decorated restaurant and for £10. Yum yum yum yum... Later on, a colleague came over with ridiculously posh cakes that he had been given by his broker. I couldn't say no to his kind offer and chose this delicious blueberry layered mousse:


For my tea, I got a big bao tze and a giant Thai chicken salad from Daimaru's foodhall. Also on the way home, I stopped at a wee shop that sells bean-paste filled waffle-type-things in the shape of fish.


This is a sweet that is traditionaly from the area of Tokyo that I'm staying in (Nihombashi, I can't remember what the sweet is called though...) and they make them freshly for you.