75 Skills Every Guy Should Master

Esquire just put up a great collections of things every guy should know. There's a lot of good stuff -- some of it pretty old-school, but still spot on. Here are a few of my favorites:

• give advice that matters in one sentence (#1)
• show respect without being a suck-up (#12)
• throw a punch (#13)
• approach a woman out of his league (#19)
• be loyal (#23)
• jump-start a car (without drama) (#35)
• step into a job no-one wants to do (#52)
• shake hands (#70)
• iron a shirt (#71)
• sometimes, kick some ass (#53)
  

There's many more (feel free to add your own). Read the whole thing here.

HT: Neal Boortz

Good Resource on Derivatives

I recently came across this site called Global Derivatives. They've got some resources that students (and faculty) might find useful: a number of excellent spreadsheet models here and a good set of definitions here.

There's other stuff on the site you might also find useful or interesting. Check it out.

Studies Show That 87% of All Statistics Are Made up On the Spot

Once again, Scott Adams nails it.

Exam Blogging

I'm in the midst of giving my Advanced Corporate Finance class their final. Since it's open-book/ open-notes, monitoring costs are almost zero (I just have to check for occasional peeking at others' papers).

So, in the next three hours, I get to grade my other final exam, do some reviewing for CFA, and empty out my cache of unblogged items.

All hail the open-book exam. Of course, the cost is that I can't do multiple choice or simple definitional -type questions, so it takes longer to make up an exam. But since they're seniors, they shouldn't be seeing those types of exams in any case (that doesn't meant that some of my colleagues don't give multiple choice exams, but that's another story).

Earnings Before Everything

Earnings and cash flows are two of the recurring themes in my classes (Securities analysis, corporate finance, and my student-managed fund). But, unfortunately, there are multiple "flavors" of each. For earnings (profits), there's gross, operating, and net, and for cash flows , there's free cash flow to equity (or to the firm), cash from operations, free cash flow from operations, and (for some folks), EBITDA.

Now I have a new one: "EBITDAGSAC", or "Earnings before Depreciation, Amortization, General , Sales, and Administrative, and Cost of goods sold". It's got a nice ring to it.

Or, as we used to call it, Sales (or Revenue).

HT: Long or Short Capital.