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Archive for the ‘The Titanic’ Category

As you would expect, the movie “Titanic” is set around the luxury cruise ship called “Titanic”, which sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in 1912, hit an iceberg in the middle of the night and sank, taking 1,517 people to their death.

The story involves a young, free-spirited woman, who is about to be married to “the rich jerk”, in order to save her family from financial doom, and a young, street-smart man, who is sailing to try his luck in another country. They are attracted to each other, have a good time together, including several memorable romantic moments, and eventually he dies while saving her life.

Nevertheless, to me, although “Titanic” is a Hollywood epic for the general public, this movie is all about resisting change. Yes, yes, resisting change.

You see, the Titanic was designed as an “unsinkable” luxury ship for the “upper class”, a group of people mainly distinguished by the amounts of money they had. The people who operated the ship were poor, yet when disaster hit, their behaviors did not change and the poor people kept giving way to the rich and helping them, even when it was clear they were in danger themselves.

The Titanic was built to be “unsinkable”. As such, there was no need to put too many lifeboats on board. In the unlikely event these boats had to be used, surely the rest of the people could remain on the ship until help came. Unfortunately, the Titanic DID sink, and as soon as this was apparent, you would have expected everybody to do their best to occupy one of the lifeboats and the hell with everybody else, right?

Wrong!

Throughout the film, the young lovers got all sorts of strife from the people around them, who wanted them to conform, even if it meant giving up on what they wanted most and becoming miserable in the process, as long as those other people didn’t have to accept something different.

The band, which was playing on deck at the time, kept on playing. The poor musicians, who had spent their lives in artistic expression, saw their life’s purpose as bringing music for other people’s enjoyment. Even as everybody else was scurrying to the boats, they continued to “be musicians” and play music, rather than change their thinking and save their lives.

The crewmembers, who knew better than everyone else about what was going to happen, directed traffic to the boats. Old women went first, then rich people and the “lower class” (coming from the same places as the crew) were locked in the lower decks to die. They did not stop to think how long the old ladies had to live, or that rich people had no more right to live than anybody else, even in the face of clear and present danger.

Our young couple seemed to be almost the only people on board the ship, who were accepting of differences and flowing in life, as long as what they did made them happy, but in the end, they were powerless to change their world. The forces of habit crushed everything around them and left one of them frozen and the other alone.

The Titanic is a great metaphor for staying on a collision course, despite an obvious need for change. Unfortunately, many people behave like large ships every day, too.

Back in the days of open outcry trading, the futures market was not nearly as efficient as it is today.  Online trading has greatly improved the quality and quantity of trading and executing trades.  

But there is still one little nagging issue to beware of: slippage.

From Wikipedia:

“With regards to futures contracts as well as other financial instruments, slippage is the difference between estimated transaction costs and the amount actually paid.”

There are many other definitions on the internet, some very complex, but I believe the above referenced quotation is simple enough for our purpose.  Slippage occurs when you sell or buy at a specified price and your actual execution price is higher or lower than your specified pricel.  Even more likely, slippage can occur when you have a stop price specified and the executed stock price is higher or lower than you intended stop.

Slippage can occur for a number of reasons:

1.  You are trading in a thinly traded market and there are simply not enough traders to fill orders in a timely manner.

2.  Your brokerage software package is not efficient and is unable to execute buy/sell orders on a timely basis.

Whatever the reason, slippage can sap your profits if you don’t pay close attention to your execution prices and specified prices.

Very thinly traded markets, say copper, often don’t have the liquidity to handle large market orders.  If you intend to trade thin markets, you will need to cut down your order size to accommodate the reality of the thin market.

On the other hand, markets that have a high degree of liquidity are excellent for avoiding slippage.  For ES contract, for example, is one of the largest futures contracts, and I experienced very little slippage when trading this market.   More than a million contracts, some times even higher, are traded daily on this exchange and you will have little trouble getting your trades executed and filled in a timely manner.  I have trade up to 100 contracts on the ES and had excellent fills.

Pay close attention to the manner in which your broker’s software fills a trade.  Sometimes slippage can occur because the firms software is not “up to snuff” in the digital age and cannot keep pace with the fast moving, highly liquid markets like the ES.

For whatever reason, slippage is a real cost in your trading operation and you should do what it takes to make sure you trades are executed and filled at your specified parameters.  The failure to do so will result in real costs to your trading account, which is an undesirable outcome.

Most Life Science students go through their university lives believing that when they graduate they will have to get a science job (if that’s what they want) that won’t pay very much. In fact a lot of them think that they will have to work in the lab.

Both of these statements are not true. There are many science graduate jobs that will pay graduates, even with as little as six months experience, quite a lot of money but also, will be based in an office or on the field (and not in the lab). It’s sad to say that many gradates have no idea what these jobs are and no one who should be in the know is willing to tell them about it. So in many cases, it is not until a life science graduate starts working in the Pharmaceutical Industry before they find out about these amazing science jobs. But normally, at this point, they have already embarked on a career path which will NOT bring them the big salaries they want. So they either have to re-apply to positions where they have no experience (i.e. start from scratch) or just continue along the path that they have already started on.

The problems life science graduates face is that most of them have no idea what types of science jobs to apply for in industry and they have no idea what they should expect in terms of salary payments. Given this situation, many science graduates end up either doing another degree (like IT) straight after graduating in the hopes of improving their employability or they apply to completely unrelated fields (like Finance) so that they can get the types of salaries that they would like. It’s not difficult to see why these options are so attractive, especially since most students live in debt and graduate with even bigger debts. They have to pay these back as soon as they graduate, so a science job that pays between 15-20K is just not enough to take care of all their living expenses.

The thing that life science graduates need to understand is that the pharmaceutical industry is vast and has enough jobs/careers to cover every salary expectation imaginable. Yes, it is possible to be able to match some of these huge salaries that the IT and Finance graduates get paid by getting jobs within the pharmaceutical industry. As incredible as it sounds, getting paid about four thousand pounds per month after tax, doing a science job, is achievable with only six months experience. There are thousands of graduates in science jobs that pay this and more. The trick is to know exactly which jobs within the industry will allow a new graduate to reach these amounts in a short period of time.