Finance Workshop

The Finance workshop – Unleash the Investor in You – was organized by the AIESEC Finance Department at NUS Business School from 9 am to 12 pm. The objective of the workshop was to impart some basic knowledge about investing and providing a start off point for those uninitiated in finance. The workshop began with a short introduction speech by Sherina, MCVP Finance, and was followed by Ivy, who talked about the Stock terminology, since the focus of the workshop was stocks and funds. This section was really useful, since most of us do not have any background in finance.

The external speakers were Lee Xin Hong and Joel Boh from SMU EyE, the SMU Investment club. Xin Hong explained the concept of risk and Business- Like investing, factors that we should take into account while deciding which stocks to buy such as – products of the company, debts and whether the company has any competitive advantage or not. He also explained about valuation of stocks and margin of safety by using the example of Food Empire.

Xin Hong and Joel from SMU

Joel talked about different types of asset classes – stocks, bonds, real estate, options, derivatives, commodities etc. and focused on Index Funds (e.g. STI, S&P 500, MSCI etc.) and why index funds are a better to invest in than mutual funds especially for novice investors. He also stressed that it is important to start investing young, since compounding increases the wealth in the long run.

Finally, Sharon talked about how we can link all this to AIESEC. This is just a starting point, and we should follow up on this by doing learning circles, PBoXes, making this workshop an annual event, having an international finance workshop etc. AIESEC has a finance learning network, and we can learn more about it by joining the Global Learning Networks Community on aiesec.net. A lot of information and resources are available on the community.

The OC, minus Imran and adds Su Sheng ^.0

On the whole, the speakers, OC, and the audience did a good job in making this event a success! And a big round of applause goes out to the Finance dept for taking an initiative to organize such an event for the first time.

Summary:

• Keep the long term benefits in mind while investing.
• Do your research before buying a stock.
• Buy the stock not depending on the market, but on the business.
• Market fluctuations do not mean you will go bankrupt.
• Index Funds are good for us and we should start investing ASAP to benefit from the power of compounding and higher returns.
• And of course, make the maximum use of this opportunity and link all this back to AIESEC in various ways!

The rocking NTU @ers...and Imran always wants to join us *wakakaka

By Mayas, LCVP OGX, MCVP elect for OGX 07/08