It's matsuri time!

I spent Thursday and Frday with the structures desk again, this time looking at the products in more detail. I spent a lot of time working out how to make different pay-out structures using combinations of simple put and call options and then establishing the range of delta and gamma for different moves in the spot price. This was really interesting or me to practice doing and it made it a lot easier to understand the whole process of hedging individual trades by analysing these so-called 'Greeks'.

Unfortunately, I found out on Friday morning that I failed my JSDA exam. I felt pretty crap about this for a while (I've got over it now) as I had worked quite hard for it, was doing well in the past papers and thought that I'd answered enough correctly on the day to pass it. Oh well... It's all still good experience and will be making an appearance on my CV.

After work on Friday, me and the guys on the structures desk headed over to Azubu Juban to check out the 10-bang matsuri (no idea why it's called that, but 'ju' is 10 in Japanese, so it sounds kind of like Juban, and matsuri is just a word for a festival). It was really cool - loads of stalls selling different food and drink and also a few with the usual funfair games. The food was great, especially the stuff on sticks:



In the main sqaure, there was a stage set up with a samba band and lots of dancers from the local samba school. The music was good and the costumes were brilliant:


All in all, I thouroughly enjoyed my first matsuri. I only wish that I lived in Tokyo so I could go to more - each district throws its own every summer.