Second Week of March! =)

Good morning people! I'm awake now and it's wayyyyy too early for a weekend! The malfunction of my alarm clock has definitely trained me well to rely not on him, but rather my most reliable biological clock! I'm lazy to change the battery, or buy a new battery, cause this has never came across my mind recently! Too busy with study. Wait, really? These few days I woke up everyday automatically at 6.15 - 6.20am, with the first thing in mind is... trial is coming in less than 3 weeks! Stressful. =(

I praise God for waking me up, take shower and prepare myself for class commencing at 8am every weekday. My breakfast has been the same too, for this whole week; yet I enjoy eating it so far; 2 bananas, 3 slices of wholemeal bread with peanut butter spread, 2 eggs and a cup of low fat milk. This can last me for another 4 hours before my break time at 11am.

This week I spent quite a considerable number of hours teaching my juniors too, mainly on applied maths (mechanics and statistics). By teaching them, I'm actually revising the syllabus myself and in a way it's good for the preparation for trial exam too! I found myself understand the topics more when I was teaching them, since I myself need to fully comprehend the question before teaching the right way to think and solve it. New interest lies in teaching line, I guess. Haha! xD

I also bumped into this course named Quantitative Finance, which I often overlook in the past but found it rather interesting and captivating with its tough challenges now. Check it out if you're interested, too! Bank Negara does offer this course for postgraduate degree and that attracts me towards it even further. It's basically pricing and hedging derivatives (forwards, futures, options), bonds, currencies, equities etc by applying high density of various statistical methods and mathematical tools (for instance, stochastic calculus), which can be called as mathematical finance, and often overlap with financial engineering and computational finance too. The person who perform quantitative finance is called quantitative analyst, or in short 'quant'.

Now I'm wondering whether I can be both qualified actuary and at the same time be a quant! I do realise that albeit actuarial science and quantitative finance are both quite distinctive, they share some resemblances in their foundation and I think foundation is very important for a person to achieve further in related career. Their discrepancy mainly lies within their fields of applications, where actuarial science is generally applied more in insurance, pension and investment; and quantitative finance is concerned more with investment management, risk management and derivatives pricing.

Both subjects are very numerical inclined, and typically those who are studying quantitative finance come from physics, engineering or maths background rather than economics background. What about actuarial science background, since it's also very mathematical inclined? I personally think Actuarial Science degree is more rigorous than typical Engineering degree, but slightly less than Maths and Physics. So people from actuarial science background should do fairly well too in the study of quantitative finance.

Sounds very interesting, no? It's okay to dream high, cause most high achievers are dreamers, too! =)

Alright, that's all for now! Will update more later! =)