Yahoo!Singapore has beaten its old colonial masters to be the World's second preferred place to do finance. Just by one percentage point!
So says a Bloomberg survey of investors, traders, analysts.
Their choices:
New York 29 per cent.
Singapore 17.
London 16.
Interesting is the rise of Shanghai. It collected 11 per cent of the votes.
So what happened to Hong Kong?
Tokyo got only 1 per cent now.
What's next for lil Temasek the red dot?
It wants to be an arts centre for the world.
Which shows you that restricted media freedom and tough I.S.A. laws - supposed to be BAD for business, and especially the arts - don't really matter. Or am I reading too much into one set of data?
THE END
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And now, some personal history. No need to read lah.
Ini cuma syiok sendiri writings.
I began writing a few lines to caption the picture above, but got carried away retellling my own history of 1992-1994.
Well, maybe my kids will read this one day and appreciate the junk their father had to do to earn a living.
Life was hard because I had zero knowledge of finance and had to learn real fast by reading books, and talking to investors, analysts, economists, money managers and traders in the "market".
I was covering the Stock Exchange of Singapore (SES, now SGX) and Clob shares, Simex futures, currency trading and the Singapore economy in general.
The words just flowed tonight, so I ran with it - this was the first time I am putting these thoughts and my miserable history into words.
Plus, I feel so old already, going through the nostalgic rumps below.
Wow, 15 years have passed already! Sigh.
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PICTURE: I used to work smack in that financial hub of Singapore, Raffles Place, with a superb view of the bay (as Financial Correspondent for AP-Dow Jones, in the early 1990s). I can't remember whether it was on the 17th or 37th floor. Or was it 10th or 20th?
The Stanchart HQ building then was near to the Singapore stock exchange, the-then Simex futures trading floor, all the world's big banks, stockbrokers, financiers, the works.
In movies, we often see the floor traders of the New York stock exchange - you know, running around and shouting orders, as the electronic ticker tape flies past.
Well, the Simex (Singapore International Monetary Exchange) trading floor used to be as exciting as that. Dozens of guys (and many girls too) shouting out orders like crazy and using fingers to signal sell and buy orders and wagging pieces of paper.
The trading pit of Simex Nikkei futures was the craziest. And the noisiest.
But since then they have introduced electronic trading, sigh, everyone sits at their table and click orders. Quiet as a barn. No fun.
The infamous Nick Leeson, then a manager at Baring Futures (I still have his name card) was just another Simex guy that reporters called. No, I didn't know him well at all, because the futures traders at the-then Big Four Japanese securities houses were the major players - Nomura, Daiwa, Nikko and Yamaichi - not Barings. Today, I think only Nomura is left.
I wonder what's happened to all my friends there.
Leeson did his financial shenanigan about a year after I had left Singapore to join Reuters in KL.
Your head will start to spin when you had to decipher where Eurodollar Futures and Euroyen Futures were going! (too susah to explain, just trust me that these are linked to big money players and how they would be affected by interest-rate movements in the US and Japan).
Here, in Raffles Place, was where my interest was perked to go to KL, because at that time I covered the Singapore stock markets, and it included Malaysian shares traded in Singapore using Clob (Central Limit Order Book). Remember those???
Most of the time, the KL shares were the active ones! So I said: Yeah, I wanna be there where the action is!
Dr M was at his prime in dishing out mega contracts and Malaysia was growing like 8 per cent a year.
If you remember then, you had to queue nearly one year to get a Proton! And you can use it for a few years and then sell it for a Profit!!! Crazy, heady days.
And I also had to cover world currency movements. I had to watch - in market terms - dollar-mark, dollar-yen, dollar-aussie, and the so-called currency "crosses" - sterling-mark, dollar-swissie, swissie-mark.
(US Dollar, German Deutschmark, Japanese yen, British sterling, Australian dollar, Swiss franc).
The ringgit and Sing dollar were very stable then.
One US dollar was then at 2.5 ringgit (Now a very weak 3.4 = a 26 per cent drop in 15 years!) The Singapore dollar then was at around 1.8 ringgit. Now it is at 2.4! (a 25 per cent drop!)
Yes guys, Dr Mahathir Mohamad later spoke of "rogue currency traders" based in Singapore. This was during the Asian financial crisis of 19987-1998.
I mixed with these guys who worked for the treasury departments of the banks.
Some of my closest friends were these traders! We traded news and rumours about our beloved "market".
I must say most of them were young boys - around 25 to 35 tops. Rogue traders? Yes, they have that attitude because it was their jobs to push currency around to make money for their banks.
But the most interesting thing covering currency movements was when these traders whisper "Negara's in the market".
You see, Bank Negara Malaysia was then a big speculative player in Singapore. Aha!
It had what it will later call "active treasury management".
That is like gambling, babe.
I won't go into details of fancy stories I have heard (hearsay they could be, later kena sue, susah), but suffice to say that was another reason I thought KL was the happening place!
This was in between hearing from the market about the central banks' market interventions - the "Fed" (US Federal Reserve Bank), "BOJ" (Bank of Japan); or "Soros", "stop-loss", "resistance levels", "butterfly spread", "the Dow" and "Greenspan says".
Then there were "US housing starts", "FOMC meeting", "fed funds rate", "tankan report" and "Crab index".
And then someone would whisper the magic words: "Negara is in".
Wah, bank pusat "negara Melayu" disegani seluruh dunia.
It really moved the global currency market!
This later turned to huge forex losses, see here. When the crash came for Negara, the whole world was laughing at a "Malay central bank" that was naive and stupid.
I won't say more except that when you are a big player, you should shut your brokers up instead of letting them spread the word about your positions. The market punished you together for being naive. Kerja bodoh.
Now, 15 years later, I must say that I don't miss Raffles Place, because it's too much of a bloody rat race. There's too many big egos there.
Too many rumours, speculations and gambling-like mentality in trying to make it big.
Tetapi cari makan dulu, 'bang.
(Reading the above, in case you get the wrong idea: No lah, I was not a big name at all in the market. I was just another reporter).
Then again, the world of politics is the same!
Too many rumours, speculations and gambling-like mentality in trying to make it big.
Big egos too.
Same old same old.
Only a different "market".
'Nuff said.
G'nite.
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