The last few weeks of term have been really busy, but mostly in a good way. Here are some of the highlights…

• A fantastic practitioner seminar from the Director of Risk Management at the FSA. Informative, well delivered and absolutely fascinating for someone hoping to work there in the future. I even got his business card, my networking skills are not dead yet!
• A great mark for my Regulation of Financial Markets essay on MiFID and the fragmentation exchanges – I achieved my New Year’s Resolution to get a Distinction for an essay. Shame it was unassessed.
• Some very interesting seminars on how organizations deal with risk or ‘encounter’ risk, as per Hutter & Power. I couldn’t help but try to apply their framework to my most recent client – it would make for a very, very good case study.
• We also revisted Ulrich Beck in terms of the globalisation of risks – he’s giving a lecture at the LSE on 24th February. I’m going to attend with the objective of writing it up for a blog post.
• I have also crystallised my dissertation topic and presented my poster in class – will hopefully get round to writing a post on it here too. It seemed to go down well

There have been one or two lowlights too:

• I’ve had a nasty virus and labyrinthitis, causing me to fall behind a little in the reading and I missed a couple of seminars
• I tried (and failed so far) to write an essay on regulatory competition – the topic just bored me but I am hoping to bash it out otherwise I will continue to feel a sense of failure

In summary though, it’s been a great term so far, if quite pressurised. More posts to come soon, I promise.

Our seminar for our core course in Week 16 was devoted to our dissertations – we had to prepare a poster and do a four minute presentation. Here is mine (apologies if the text is a little small, I think you get the idea though):

Thursday was the day of two rather scary e-mails. The first contained the dates for post-graduate exams – from June 2nd to 25th June and the second was regarding the assessed essay for our core course, which is due on May 4th and is 25% of the mark for that course.

It made me realise that this is real, and that hopefully, after all this hard work I will come out of this with a lovely sparkly degree.

The assessed essay topic are great, and I think I’m going to choose this one:

‘Governments and regulators can never convince the public that they are regulating risks in an acceptable manner.’ Discuss.

It will hopefully tie a lot of ideas I’ve been thinking about together and I’m going to try to make a start on some of the reading for it.

I was pleased to see that exams won’t start until June 2nd as it gives us 10 weeks from the end of this term to be able to study in a more free-form way, I think there are some revision classes at the beginning of the summer term but it will be good to have a concentrated amount of time to do some thinking and joining up of all the dots.

This week I handed my fifth essay of the course, for the Regulation of Financial Markets module. It ended up being 3,800 words long, with a rambling and incoherent argument. I’m not hoping for a great mark. The problem was that the topic was so interesting, and there was so much literature available that I overloaded on information.

It was about MiFID (The Markets in Financial Instruments Directive) which aims to foster an efficient, competitive and integrated securities market across the EU and to create a level playing field for all investors whilst protecting investors from undesirable market practices. The effect of increasing competition has led to the fragmentation of securities trading venues as new types of venues have emerged. There is huge debate, both academically and in the market, about whether this is a good thing or not.

This lead me to learning all about ‘dark pools of liquidity’ which sound more exciting and dangerous than they actually are, and finding out all about the various alliances between the exchanges in Europe and the mpacts on liquidity and price formation. All fascinating stuff – and very topical, as the London Stock Exchange has just “bought” Turquoise, one of the major multi-lateral trading platforms (MTF) and Nomura has recently announced that it is launching a new dark pool but will be registering it as an MTF, a move that some have seen as a response to the increasing regulatory scrutiny in this area.

There will be a review of MiFID this year and it will be interesting to see the outcomes and whether there will be changes to the regulation….

Coincidentally, I noticed that the FSA is looking to recruit a manager looking specifically at these issues. I wonder if the job will be filled by the time I finish this course, because it could be right up my street.

One of my classmates has asked me to post some pictures of my cats. I know this isn’t strictly to do with my course but, well, both Scooter and Tinkerbell sit on the desk with me and keep me company when I’m studying. Ben (who is 20 years old) sometimes comes wandering in and out, particularly if they are hungry. So, here they are….

Tinkerbell

Ben

Scooter

I have started thinking seriously about my dissertation. This has been prompted by:

• Not wanting to leave it too late so it is a massive headache
• It allows me more time for ideas to bubble under in my subconcious
• We have to complete an official form about it sometime this term
• We have to present a poster all about it in Week 16

I had a couple of supervision sessions on my dissertation with Professor Black last term which were really helpful and have narrowed down the subject area. I don’t yet have the final question but I think that will emerge over the next few weeks.

I find the idea of an extended piece of academic writing, with research etc, fairly daunting and exciting at the same time. As with all huge pieces of work, I decided to break it down and produce a project plan. Treating my dissertation as I would a project at work seems like a good approach, as it’s one I’m familiar with and I am very good at project management (well, I’ve been doing it for the last 14 years in one form or another).

So, I’ve come up with a plan for the next 8 weeks, which I’ll add to as I go along. I have designated Wednesday afternoons as ‘dissertation time’ and I have a good idea what I need to do to get going. Here’s my plan so far. It’s not very detailed but is a useful starting point. I shall keep this blog updated on my progress…..

Sarra asked me to post a full size picture of the one in the header….I hesitated, as I wasn’t sure I should reveal the full scale of my obsession with stationery and organising things but actually, it’s quite cathartic to get it off my chest.

So, here is a picture of my colour coded folders. It may not come as a surprise that I colour code my notes, and entries in my diary for each course and have special coloured pens that correspond to the colours of the folders. Still, it works for me and keeps everything in order so I can concentrate on the important things, like reading and writing…..

Feeling fully rested and relaxed after the break, I made my way to campus this morning for the first seminar of the term. It was on the topic of ‘Sociological Accounts on State Regulation’ and I had read a book called ‘Law As Last Resort’ by Keith Hawkins in preparation.

We had a seminar on the enforcement of regulation on the core course last term but I failed to do any of the reading for it and so was keen to make it up with preparing properly for today. It’s quite interesting how this sociology module has a different perspective, and I’m not sure I’ve yet grasped what that perspective is. The bits – risk, economic life and regulation – do not seem to be fitting together into a coherent whole at the moment but Professor Hutter assured us today that this should develop over the remainder of the course.

We had a brilliant discussion as a group, and I left the seminar feeling excited and buzzing with all the ideas and absolutely glad to the core that I chose to do this degree. I’m going to spend some time trying to map out the concepts from ‘Regulation, Risk and Economic Life’ to try and make more sense of it and identify the connections between the topics we have studied so far.

Now, time to get on with my fifth essay….due on 22nd January.

Ok, so I didn’t do a great job of keeping up with my blog last term. To be honest, it all got a little bit overwhelming and I was struggling just to find the time to keep up with the rather stiff demands of the course.

However, this term, I’m hoping to do a little better with more regular updates. I also have some reflections on last term and some posts that I wrote in a notebook that didn’t make it up here.

I’m not sure if I’ve got much of an audience in the blogosphere, so my New Year’s resolution is to remedy that and to keep posting rather than let this slide.

This term will be even harder work, I think, as I’m starting to shape my dissertation and we have two assessed essays that take 25% of the mark for two different courses but I’m much more in the swing of things academically now and am rested and raring to go after the Christmas break.

So, onwards and upwards - 2010 will (hopefully) be the year that I get my Masters degree.

I got my first essay back today, marked. I did okay – got 62 which is a low merit in the crazy UK university marking system which I think is a credible first attempt, given the difficulties I had. It can only get better from here on in.  I hope.