Super busy this past week in MBA land. The third quarter wrapped up with exams and papers coming due one after another. In addition, the Rotman International Trading Competition went down yesterday and Friday which took a huge commitment of time and effort of the extra-curricular variety. The RITC attracted twenty teams of four this year. They came from Canada the U.S. and the U.K. You can get all the details from the link if you're interested. I got involved by qualifying to take part the previous week in a trade-off with the other Rotmanites. The competition consisted of four trading cases which were ingeniously and fiendishly designed to test both your quant skills as well as your instincts. The highlight of the weekend was definitely the open outcry case on Friday night. Rotman's atrium was made into a commodity-style trading pit and the teams used runners, hand signals and the old-style hand written tickets to trade a ficticious simulated equity index. Action in the pit was hot and heavy, and continued on in a similar fashion when we got together at the bar after. Congratulations to the team from Penn State University for taking home the top prize.

Last weekend's NBA dunk contest was a huge disappointment again. I remember back in the day (mid to late 80's) when the dunk contest was one of the sports highlights of the year. I would fire up the old top-load VCR, tape that thing and watch it over and over frame by frame. All the West Van Highlanders would be talking about it for weeks. Now we're hearing from the pundits that they should retire the dunk contest, that its all been done, there are only so many ways you can dunk a basketball. Bullshit. That's like saying we should stop writing movies or books or making movies because its all been done. The problem is there's not creativity in the NBA anymore. Give me the Dominique Wilkinses and Spud Webbs and Michael Jordans, and to a lesser extent the Terrence Stansburies and Kenny "Sky" Walkers over these chumps any day. I'll save my extended rant on everything else that's wrong with the NBA for another day.


Its a proud day here at TAML, if you type the words "Thistle" and "Rotman" into Google, this page is now the number one response. Possible new catchphase for this blog: TAML - combining Thistle and Rotman in the number one way on the web since 2003. It just rolls off the tongue. Seriously, if I'm ever going to get enough traffic on this site to retire off its ad revenue I think I need a memorable catchphrase or slogan. Any suggestions?