wintheplanet.com launched!

I have just launched along with a friend www.wintheplanet.com - The first online not-for-profit global lottery dedicated to sustainability.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Last few months....

Have been quite eventfull for me. Even though it has to be said that as I get older the length of time between major events in my life seems to be getting longer and longer. Maybe this is called maturity?

Anyways, things have happened:

- The business that Vlad and I started back in April now has another partner. I have had the pleasure of knowing Javier  and working with him back in the Dominican Republic and I thought of him as the person that can bring a lot of things to our team and to the project. As such he is now equal partner with us and it turns out that we are all working very nicely together

-Connected with the entrepreneurial side but also the friends side, Vlad managed to find a job as a trainee in Dexia Kommunalkredit bank so he moved back to Vienna. And to make things better, he moved in to an apartment that is withing 10 minutes walking distance from us. I am sure this change is a very good thing for him and it will be also a great thing for our venture.

-Alexandra has now a project of her own (along with Olivia and the Emersense team) and it involves doing a pilot project on 'teen education with Aflatoun. I am very happy for her as I knew she needs to have something like this to help her focus better and channel her energies in a constructive and productive manner.

-The Hub is now officially open in Vienna. We attended last Friday the kick-off event and I must say that the location has a lot of potential. Hinnerk and Matthias (the guys from the Emersense team that own this project) estimate that they might be ready in the next three month so I just can't wait to have my The Hub entry card :)

-Visited both Brussels and London this past months and I can say that both are very nice cities, but Vienna still remains the city of my dreams (now for an even larger array of reasons).

(On the stairs of the European Parliament in Brussels, I am the first one from the bottom)

-Masters. The nostalgia of finishing university made me want to go back to studying and so I started a Masters in Online Marketing. Well, not really :)
I just thought that it is a good time for me to also do this step, as we say in Romania "just to have it there". Even though I am not really sure on the value of having it, I will certainly enjoy my Januaries and Julies for the next two years :/

-Training, an aspect of my life in which I am making constant and noticeable progress.
I have bought a triathlon-specific bike with all the addition kit (indoor trainer, shoes, cleats, saddle, etc), finished integrating all the discipline in my weekely training schedule (here you can see my progress) and also finished setting the objectives for 2010.

>March- Half Marathon Vienna (21.1kms)
>April- Marathon Vienna (42.2 kms)
>May- Sprint Triathlon Vienna (750m swim, 20km bike, 5km run)
>June- Olympic Triathlon Salzburgerland (1.5km swim, 40km bike, 10km run)
>August- Olympic Triathlon Krems (this is the most important, A priority)

Connected with the competition side, in October  I ran the Wolfgangsee 27km which was planning to finish in 2:30. That was until I saw the huge 2km climb of almost 400m somewhere at the beginning of the course, and then plans changed :)
At the end I finished it in 2:57, but I am still very happy with how I planned (clothing, nutrition, hydration, pacing) and raced this event.

(I am the one on the right, and Alexandra behind me)

Another news on the triathlon side is that I got accepted as a volunteer at IronMan Austria 2010.
I was assigned to the team at the Finish that helps the athletes to the finishers tent, and I will also be joined by Emil, Vlad and Morut.

-Settled in at my job with Kraft Foods as Financial Analyst in the Financial Planning and Analysis Department. More about this in the future, but let's just say for now that there are "mixed feelings".


 That's about it on the updates side for me.
As the usage of my time is growing more and more "agenda-driven" also my blogging frequency will decrease but I will keep posting things every once in a while.

University: DONE!

I cannot believe it, but it is true.
Finally, after 5 years of pain, sorrow and countless stressful hours, I have presented my final paper (which was graded at 9.16 out of 10).

It is really a well deserved ending, taking a huge weight out of my mind.


Phd, here I come :P

Waiting for the plane

Long time no post :)

Mainly because a lot of things happened, during which I had no internet connection.

All that in a future post.

Right now just waiting in the airport for the plane which is late 1h.

It seems that our happy times of flying with SkyEurope to Romania cheap and fast are gone, along with the company.

SkyEurope is dead, long live Austrian Airlines :/

Weekend pictures

 

Old style subway station- Vienna

Man walking in Museums Quartier- Vienna

Statue in front of the Naturhistoriches Museum- Vienna

Naschmarkt (oldest flea market) on a sunny Saturday- Vienna

ACI Dealing Diploma....finally

The latest update for me, now in the eve of Easter, is that I took the ACI (www.aciforex.com) exam and passed :)

I am very happy as it is something I wanted to do ever since I was in Citibank and it is really important for me to have my basic knowledges in Treasury related operations certified.

On the job side, after three interviews and over 250 applications so far, nothing has come up.
But, as I saw Slumdog Millionaire....it is written :)

An evening of classical music

A friend of a friend, who is a student at Konservatorium Wien, invited us to a Classic Guitar performance by some of the students.

It was a marvelous one hour and a half, with performances from Daniel Krajl and Diana Moraru at Classical Guitar and Mari-Liis Uibo at the Violin.

 

Also, it was the first time I heard a live violin playing, and I can say it was fabulous :)

And so it begins

Yesterday, Sunday the 1st of March 2009 I have finally arrived in Vienna.
My moving is now almost done, and I am very happy to be here at last.

I wish you all a very beautiful Spring, and especially to the girls for "Martisor"  :)

Article about investing

Here is an article I wrote as part of the recruitment process for a certain position.
Hope you will enjoy it.

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“Managed futures”
-another name for something a few people really understand-


You are a human being. And as such, are fundamentally driven by a few basic needs (people like Maslow have succeeded in showcasing this poignantly).
You knew that of course. So what?

Well, as day-to-day life goes by, you tend to forget it and get caught up.
Let’s take investing as an example.



When you want to invest your money, being your petty monthly savings or the millions you might have under management from the pension fund that employs you, the choices facing you are bewildering.
Try to go in a Turkish bazaar to buy “food”, having before you hundreds of items that perfectly fit that description, and you will begin to grasp the difficulty faced by someone wanting to invest money.
Beginning with the scope, size and objective of your wish, and ending with “tailor-made” investment solutions, you have to take into consideration countless advantages and disadvantages that are laid before you by “professional” people.
Here comes difficulty number one.

The same as in the bazaar where you rarely get to meet the actual producers of the things you buy, in the investment world you rarely get to meet the people that actually create, manage and direct the investment instruments.
You just deal with intermediaries, people that in many cases know as much as you (if not less) about the things they are selling.
Thus the first trap is getting past the “sales speech” and finding out all the small print.

Let’s say you managed to escape (pun intended) with your funds intact from that first wild encounter.

You still want to invest.
To do that, you begin to realize very fast that those people that studied finance and have years of experience in the field are actually useful.
They can tell head from tail of these “aliens” with such esoteric names as derivatives, margining, zero-cost hedging or portfolio stability. 
Whichever your decision, you get in headfirst and the outcome may be full of surprises.


Why?
Because it all revolves around two of those basic needs: greed and fear.

You want to win, big time if possible, and lose preferably nothing. It’s normal, and we all act the same. The same as all those in the OTC markets (a fancy name for largely unregulated player-to-player transactions) act and behave. You put money in, set your risk limit, and hope for the best.

But “no” you will say, “its not true”.
My investment manager is an experienced professional, knowing exactly when and how to get in and how to get out. He demonstrated this to me, with detailed reward-to-risk diagrams and historical performance charts detailing his XXX% yearly cumulated profits.
He does not rely on such trivial things as luck and hope.

Well, what can I say? it may be so.

Or maybe you should, before trying to make soup, read the recipe. You might still mess it up, but at least it was educated guessing.
In the case of the “investment soup” things are the same. It is true that big bucks can be made.
As true as the saying “you cannot win big without risking big”.

If by this point I still do not have you convinced to pay attention to those hot-shot fancy name funds, maybe you should go buy a lottery ticket. Maybe you really are lucky.

Now, about those “managed futures” in the title of my article.

Basically, they are speculative investment funds that concentrates on trading futures on multiple markets. No matter the complicated terms they use, the basics are the same, and it’s all about the “underlying”.

What is that? Well, that is the “thing” that you are trading the “future” of. It’s the actual instrument, like for example currencies, pork bellies or gold.
Depending on how the price of the instrument moves, and if you guessed the direction right, you either win or lose.
This is pure trading. No middle ground. Either hell or heaven.

So why the “confidence-giving” names you might ask. What is so special about the managed futures? Nothing really.
Apart from a smarter money management policy, the secret of success remains the same for a managed futures fund as with every other fund.
How fast it gets the information’s, how prompt is the execution, how intelligent and in control of his emotions is the trader, and how big of an axe can it wield (to read funds under management) these have been the secret of success for speculators ever since the early commodity-based markets of the medieval world.

Of course, open one of their websites and you will read statements like “By diversifying across a wide range of different markets which largely perform independently from each other” (and mark the wisely placed “largely”), “Sound managed futures funds like X are based on proprietary, fully automated technical trading systems” and  “a vast range of technical indicators and historical prices are analyzed by the computerized trading systems to automatically generate buy and sell signals”.
If I were new to this, I would just wet my pants in amazement, filling my heart with confidence over the superiority of those amazing “fully automated technical trading systems”. Plug them in, and out come rivers of money.

Now, any person with a minimum amount of common sense would take a step back and think for a moment. Sadly, these persons are fast becoming extinct, and along with them the increase of the bank accounts and credit lines of funds like the one above.

History repeats itself (e.g LCTM in the 1990s and over leveraging in the 2000s), and it will continue to.

In the humble opinion of the author, you should first make sure that you understand and accept the risks and benefits of what you are getting yourself into, weather you invest in the volatility of GBP/USD or managed futures.
Money have and will always be made either by hard working people putting blood and sweat in producing value for society (be it good or bad value), or by smart guys taking advantage of the complexity inherent to the financial system, speculating on those two fundamental needs we all have: greed and fear.
To start, you could read Nassim Taleb’s “The Black Swan” or Jack Schwager’s fabulous “Market Wizards”.
This is knowledge that will benefit you no matter how “smart” or “professional” you are, and it might potentially make you a lot of money. And if not, at least it will help you save some of them.

Here was a free advice, without management fees or 20% cut from the profits.
Can your money manager beat that?

Alexandru Ragalie, February 2009
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Current reality

At this point I am still in Bucharest, Romania, my home town.
First because of the fact that I need to create my degree paper and present it to my guiding professor at the Academy (ASE), and second to spend some time with my family before going again (1st of March will be the day to move for good to Vienna).


My main activity during the day is learning.

The other important one is looking for a job.
This experience proves to be a challenging one for me, mainly because of my age (23), years of working experience (6) and the fact that I do not yet know German at an acceptable level, do not have working permit for Austria and am not yet graduated (July 2009).
But as any good challenge, I take it with a positive mindset and a smile.


Other than these, meeting with friends and running with my dog are favorite past-times.


A relaxed start to the year, for which I have to admit I am grateful :)

Links

my current project
what I did before coming to Vienna
a professional profile
TED- something that offers perspective on life

About me

Hello, and welcome :)

As probably most of you know, this blog comes as a natural continuation to my Caribbean Dreams.
Six months spent at the Tropics, literally on the other side of the world, a period in time that proved itself to be a turning point for me.

Considering the success of that blog amongst friends and people that know me, I decided to continue the blogging habit.
That is why you are here now.

In terms of objectives for posting, there aren't any clear ones yet.
What I will post, how often and for whom will depend, but I know that following it will be at least interesting for you.



My name is Alexandru Răgălie, originally from Romania, currently enjoying life in my dream city.

I am 24 years old, with an intense passion for knowledge and self discovery.
With many hobbies, interests and curiosities, I try to enjoy my experiences and grab as many new and interesting ones as I can.


This blog will follow my experiences in this wonderful city called Vienna, and I hope you will enjoy them with me.

You can connect with me on twitter (@aragalie) or via email at alexandru.ragalie@gmail.com