DEATH METAL PARROT AND ROOSTER

BEING THERE

Julia has once again successfully helped process a Critical Illness claim for one of her clients this month, May 2010. Although the immediate lump sum amount of S$ 150,000 handed to the insured wasn't much, it provided the much needed liquity to replace the loss of income to help out with expenses without having to trouble those around him financially. This client is also covered for medical insurance to help out in medical bills which, at point of writing is above S$ 100,000 so far. Julia's planning included life coverage to that whole package and the client's wife was really glad that her husband listened to Julia, to plan for such unexpected events 5 years ago.


To plan for your financial future too, please call Julia at 9836-5892 or if you want to join her in her organisation and make a difference to people's lives please drop her your resume to her email at juliatch@aia.com.sg.
Julia Tan is an Associate Agency Leader and a Chartered Financial Consultant

BEING THERE

HealthShield Gold Plan A (English)

HealthShield Gold Plan A (Chinese)

The hidden influence of social networks

We're all embedded in vast social networks of friends, family, co-workers and more. Nicholas Christakis tracks how a wide variety of traits -- from happiness to obesity -- can spread from person to person, showing how your location in the network might impact your life in ways you don't even know.

About Nicholas Christakis

Nicholas Christakis explores how the large-scale, face-to-face social networks in which we are embedded affect our lives, and what we can do to take advantage of this fact

Marshmallow challenge

Build a tower, build a team

Attendees of the SP.Ace Monday Tech session engaged in the “Marshmallow Challenge” came out of the exercise understanding why teamwork is important when given a task to be completed successfully within a limited time frame.

10-May-10 Hort Park Walk

Birthday Moment - May

Birthday of May: De Beers and Jennifer

Sales Techniques: Use "If" Questions

— Interview with Keith Rosen, AllBusiness.com's Sales Advisor

Paul at HaiKou

- Sheraton Hotel - HaiKou

-Paul chilling out at the beach after a day of brainstorming at the ALBM in HaiKou

Become the master of your day

— Keith Rosen explains how being successful all starts with time management.



rgteddie Measure and write down how long it takes to perform common tasks. I used to think signing up a new customer took 5 minutes, but the average is actually closer to 20! On the other hand, "A task expands to fill the allotted time" - if you take 20 minutes to perform a 7 minute task, that means you're getting off task.

Focus on Process -- Not Results

Interview with Keith Rosen, AllBusiness.com's Sales Advisor


TheTatmandu Now that was a very worthwhile and insightful 210 seconds! As with life, one must be in the moment and master and enjoy the process. Again, as with life, a well though out plan or process will help one achieve goals

How Time Travel Is Possible

Stephen Hawking, best known for once beating me in a battle of the brains by an incredibly narrow margin (I dominated him in an arm-wrestling rematch), has taken to explaining how humans might be able to time travel into the future. It sounds difficult. Plus expensive (read: it's never gonna happen).

Hawking says it would be possible if you could build a gigantic spacecraft, "a truly enormous machine," carrying a huge amount of fuel, enough to accelerate it for six years at full power. That would bring it to a velocity almost as fast as the speed of light.

"At this speed, a single day on board is a whole year of Earth time. Our ship would be truly flying into the future. The slowing of time has another benefit. It means we could, in theory, travel extraordinary distances within one lifetime. A trip to the edge of the galaxy would take just 80 years."

Car Of The Future

Want to impress your friends and possibly score a girlfriend? How about purchasing this sweet-ass "Fastlane" car of the future? You can "Buy It Now" on eBay for a cool $15,000. But before you push the button: It's not really a car. It's a shell designed to fit on top of a Pontiac Fiero. Which is not included in the auction. So, yeah. It was designed for Universal Pictures by concept car maker Trans FX for use in a movie or something. I know it can't actually go anywhere, but I still think I want it. I'll just use a flatbed trailer to tote it to the bar and then slide it off into a parking spot. Then I'll proceed to get some lucky lady extremely drunk and ask if she wants to see my fancy sports car from the future. Hopefully she won't notice there's not a goddamn thing inside and will still make out with me while we're sitting on the pavement inside. What, where's my sense? I'll throw a tarp down. I may even add a boombox for some makeout tunage.

Five more pictures after the jump, including one of what you'd see during a makeout session.

switch on to risks of portfolio transition

The financial crisis has been a "brutal awakening" for Asian asset owners, who have belatedly learned the importance of good transition management, according to panel members at a Asia Risk transition management forum in Hong Kong this week.

Institutional investors and pension plan sponsors are now paying far more attention to how their transition managers are mitigating portfolio risks during the transition, and how this affects financial results after the transition is completed, they say.


Before the crisis, "their perception of risks – whether [the transition managers] were using value at risk or other methodologies – were decoupled from their financial results or performance of their portfolio during that period. There was a disintegration of risk modelling and risk outcome in real life," said Justin Balogh, State Street's senior managing director, global markets, based in Tokyo.


But since the crisis, clients have become far more attentive to risk management issues, and are seeking greater use of derivatives to hedge portfolio risk.


For example, in Asia excluding Japan, Balogh said, the bulk of institutions are fixed-income investors, and have focused on how transition managers are handling duration risks involved in shifting out of one asset portfolio into another, and how the manager handles the risks associated with trading fixed-income instruments.


Meanwhile, Kal Bassily, global division head of ConvergEx Group, an agency brokerage under BNY Mellon that provides proprietary electronic trading tools to financial institutions, said the drive towards more transparency will also mean a demand for more detailed cost-benefit analysis of derivatives trades.


"While we do not see many people in the region asking us to share the specifics of our risk models with them, going forward we would see more and more [especially] when it comes to use of derivatives," he said, adding that clients would increasingly "bring their preference to the table".


For example, they would ask for basis risk analysis of a proposed futures overlay, or pre-trade analysis of the effects of different historical volatility measures, he added.


Richard Surrency, Morgan Stanley's transition management executive director in Singapore, said increased concern about counterparty risk had changed the way transition managers worked. While, historically, a transition manager could take physical control of the underlying assets in transition, their team would now prefer to segregate assets instead to keep them off the bank's books.


"As a transition manager we want to execute on [clients'] behalf, but not necessarily end up with rehypothecation processes as owner of the underlying securities," he said.


Financial regulators around the world identified rehypothecation as one of the main drivers of contagion of the financial crisis following the collapse of Lehman Brothers. As clients' collateral was not preserved in segregated customer accounts, these clients became unsecured creditors in Lehman's bankruptcy, endangering them as their assets were trapped in the insolvency.

Thai Insurance CM - Very Touching

Very touching ad from Thai Life Insurance. Thx angelaaaaa for translation ^^.




ktawut i hardly cry for any holywood movies. This one cracks me up just under 2 minutes ... shit T__T