Sunday, April 26, 2009

Monz

"I'm tired of selling Debra futures," my friend Debs exclaimed over Sunday dim sum at the Metropole. She's been on/offing with a man since college who hasn't let her go, but hasn't progressed after years of love messaging, booty call travels, and buying Debra futures with no plans of additional investments. .
He can't think I will be there for him in the future, how we are so good together, while he is saying to both of us to date other people.

I can relate, my latest adventure in Hong Kong dating has brought me to a man who is transparently hedging his bet with me and his last/current lady friend(s). "The thing about multiple hedging is you never know which fund will outperform the other," my friend Andrew says at the table. "You can't evenly hedge, then you're just flat. You have to bet with whichever outperforms and sell the losers. So Angie, you just need to outperform her and show him how much valuable you are in his portfolio. Plus, he's not married, fair game."

"There is never a complete hedge for an investment. If you are completely hedged then you are flat and you'll never get a decent return. You have to take a view of what will outperform when investing and sell the losers. So Angie, you just need to outperform her and show him how much valuable you are in his portfolio. Plus, he's not married, fair game."

His wife, my risk manager, tells me this investment is a short term buy. why the heck would you want volatility?
for all the wrong reasons..."Get what you need, then cash out."

IT'S NOT THE FIRST TIME ANYONE'S COMPARED POTENTIAL PARTNERS TO STOCK PICKS. AFTER ALL, TIME AND AFFECTION SEEMS NO LESS AN INVESTMENT THAN COLD HARD CASH. BUT THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT BEING HEDGED AGAINST THAT'S UNSETTLING. MAYBE HE'S HAD HIS HEART BROKEN TOO MANY TIMES. MAYBE IT'S STILL TOO EARLY TO DEMAND 100% OF HIS ATTENTION. OR MAYBE... THERE IS JUST TOO MUCH DOWNSIDE POTENTIAL TO AN ANGIE-WONG INVESTMENT.

The derivative comment was just about how people can be just as volatile and unpredictable like derivatives. U can win big but lose big too when betting on people/derivatives!

I am value-packed, but I didn't realise I had to put on a talent show to play this game. So I'm making a list of awesome qualities I possess. All I have on the page is 'Just because'. This exercise might have been the biggest waste of a Sunday afetrnoon I've had in a long time.
I decide to crack open an antique cookbook I picked up in Oxfordshire. One of my value-added qualities was that I'm not afraid of the big, bad kitchen. I found a simple recipe for carmelised bacon. One pound thick stab bacon, one box of brown sugar. No indication of what a box measures back in the early 20th century, so I wing it. I made what looked and tasted very much like bacon brittle. A salty candy like swine derivative. Brown to a nutty crisp, I spread it on a baking tray then crumble it on a salad.

eating my swine candy over a bowl of greens was ridiculous. And so was thinking up ways to impress this guy.

You have to create oppurtunities for him to be the aggressor.

How do I capitalise on this?

Truth is he is not calling me. So why wait?

So how do I become a long term investment? Rather than just a flip?

From people in the business:

Offer deep value, excess returns, and reliable liquidity

You just have to keep delivering the goods year after year.
Don't forget about the compliance officer (philippe) and managing the exchange fees and stamp duties (I don't wan this role... Any takers?). Considering my success w Fio/Cahill recently, I might as well stick to my current rule as the agency broker.
Long term investments also benefit from solid parent company foundations... But not necessarily. Sometimes hidden long-term gems just need to be polished up a bit.

Risk manger:It all goes back to fundamentals.

For the rational investor that is.

The rest of you are a bunch of yahoos that don't know how to value anything on the market. Foolishly and randomly driving up the price of shit investments that look pretty at first glance....
and good companies are very picky about their investors.

Long term investments also benefit from solid parent company foundations... But not necessarily. Sometimes hidden long-term gems just need to be polished up a bit.

I think the Korean market is basically a good place for me to parking some long-term cash right now... Especially in a KR company with a JV investment in China. But yur right, a solid company like that one ain't easy to inject capital... Deffo gonna take a little more "guanxi" to be given a shot!

The master of all long-term investors, Warren Buffett, says use the following 4 criteria:

"a business you understand, favourable long-term economics, able and trustworthy management, and a sensible price tag"

...which in the present context could mean:

Someone you "get," good timing, decent brains and judgment, and not overly high maintenance.

There are some investment opportunities that I wouldn't touch witha 10-foot pole, no matter how much restructuring they've undergone or plan to. Nobody in this group, but I'm just saying :)

I think it can be ingenious to use investment analogies in romance but what differentiates love from everything else is that it is impulsive, whimsical and totally irrational. And all of the above could lead to happiness, heartbreak or utter chaos. But the point is, and maybe the investment world can take note here too, is that if we don't try we won't ever know. You find your long term fill-in-the-blank when you give your all and you don't look back. The bravest, who take the first calculated risks, are often best rewarded and laughing all the way to the bank.

The right question Angie is how do you find someone worthy of your long term investment in them? And the answer, ironically enough, is by not hedging. Unlike real world investing there are no benefits to the portfolio approach. You find the investment you like and you go all in. Caution to the wind.. You bet your life's savings and put a lot of sweat and heartache into it in the hopes that the stock goes up and up indefinitely.

No need to diversify to protect yourself from the downside. B/c if the investment crashes and burns, unlike the real world, you have total control over when, how and if you will invest again. That's the genius of it. You decide whether a failed investment takes down the whole company or not. B/c in this game, one never runs out of investable assets. You can always choose to ante up again.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Swine

I'm sort of seeing this homeless guy. I wish I was saying this for shock value, but it's real. And he though he does not have a home, he has many addresses, including one at the Four Seasons. You see he's been doing something short of a social experiment where he had given up most of his worldly possessions in trade for a fuller life. He lives off the generousity of others, street smarts and charm. And to live this kind of life, and live it well, you must be one charming motherfucker. Which he is, which is why I'm so attracted to him.

I might him at the sotheby's spring auction where he picked me up with wit and free glasses of wine in the Southeast Asian contemporary wing. We had dinner when the wine boxes ran dry at the opening, where we continued on with a four hour conversation over a candlelit dinner at Union J. We spoke of his travels, he spends much of his life in the air, in first class no less, on a scheme. We spoke about wines, he spends much of his 'time off' touring wine countries. We talked about swine; about all the different ways to have swine.

He called me the next day and talk more swine, and the topic of buon mi came up. He suggested we spend the weekend in Hanoi where he would take he to have the earth's best buon mi. So then an entire dialogue of pork sandwich spun from that. We ended on a promise that he would make a cubano sandwich for me from scratch on our second date. This guy is a smooth operator. The only problem was sourcing the right bread, a serious problem citywide. By the end of the day, I sourced a baker who made portuguese rolls, the closes I could find to an authentic bun. When I dialed him back, the number turned out to be someone's phone he had borrowed. So no phone, and no home. Am I really doing this?

We began emailing a lot. It was our only communication without seeing eachother. Then one day out of the blue, he popped up unannounced to the office to tell me he found pulled pork. So with bread and pull pork, we have the two main elements for a proper cubano.

"It's my birthday on Friday," he said. "I could make it for you then. I just need to find fontina cheese, most people think it is made with swiss cheese, which is also good, but Cubans use fontina." He had learned to make cubanos in guest houses in Cuba by cuban women. He knew by heart exact measurements of spices, temperture, and time to roast the pork shoulder. He knew how to turn a brick and tin foil into a make shift sandwich press. He knew how to make his own mustard, which I don't think would be all that hard, but would never think to make it.

We had a great debate over whether swiss or fontina cheese made for an authentic cubano, but whereas I can only argue on taste and value, he could say he's actually been to cuba.

So we had a date of gathered ingredients to make the ultimate cubano and he promised me a real caphrina learned by his time spent in Brazil on his 30th birthday. He would walk me to work each morning telling me stories of his travels and what he ate and how he was going to make me that same meal. He would wait for me outside my office and walk me home or to dinner. I thought this was old fashioned sweetness until i realised he didn't have a phone.

The detail in his description put me to same. I could write an entire article about octopus avo lemono, but have never stepped foot in Greece. And he would tell me how he'd been to the bottom of the XX seas with a tickle stick to wrestle a family of octopi, skinned and dressed it with lemon and olive oil for lunch days ago. Whereas I could rate a cubano sandwich on the merit of taste and satisfication, he could name the origins, the authenticity and its history. I think I might have met the yin to my yang. He has spent months eating, cooking, learning the qualities of a good cuban sandwich. This made him an expert and me a pretender.

It all comes down to the references we have in life, and he seemed to have much more accummilated than I did.

We obsessively spoke about food, and I guess I didn't realise this at the time, but his guy could talk extensively about any topic as he just researches and absorbs topics all day long. He was charming my pants off. Quite literally. He wasn't an expert, but so much a con man I was half expecting.

"what do you see happening between us?" I asked him one morning. He had defacto been staying with me. What I was really asking was 'did he have direction in life or was he w=always going to be a wanderer? And it seems he has been in this circumstance before. When I was in the shower, he had made plans to make his next move: Massacusette. We spent one more evening together, eating swine and drinking rose.

Five days after he left, I walked to Gusto in Happy Valley to have a look. On its chalkboard specials it listed cuban sandwiches made with fontina cheese. I had to email him right away. The bread was all wrong and toasted up to be a hard rock, but he was right, the sandwich tastes much better with fontina.

Saturday, April 18, 2009

The Power of Now

Every once in a while people get intrived in a genre of books that won't go away. I've managed to steer clear from a recent wave of Happiness self love books.

Within the same week, two people I trust suggested I read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. I must really need it. I started and restarted the book three times and could never get past page 17. The words made sense, but my body rejects the ideas. Why would anyone want to not live in the past and look forward to events in the future?
It is a difficult book to read if you are not looking for enlightenment, or if for the moment you are in fact at peace.

We romanticise the struggle, my friend Philippe pointed out. I like that I'm twitchy and neorotic and destructive and manic. If I didn't have these struggles I would just be in blissful complicity.

we trade sleepless nights and our health for the pursuit of life, not to live in the NOW or in the pursuit of happiness. My professor asked me what I wanted out of life at age 19. I said happiness. And yes, that is the end game, but I don't want to be happy right now. Why should I be happy? I want so much more from life, and in its pursuit, there will be sleepless nights, heartbreaks, disappointments and self-hate. That's what makes us better I believe.

If you are in contentment, what's left to achieve? Why not wrap up life and call it a day?

So unhappiness, is the pursuit of happiness. Struggle is the path of enlightenment.

I decided to go back to a stage when I was first thirsty for understanding life. Right before I graduated from high school. Two movies did it for me; Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty and Ben Stiller's Reality Bites. I decided to do movie night and relive my hopes and dreams of 1994.

I'm scared that I will not be loved. But then I realise all this struggle will make it all worth while when it does happen.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Ben's lamb dinner

As the saying goes, the direct path to a guy's heart is through his stomach. I didn't broach the topic, but he brought up throwing a dinner party at his place. "I can cook," I eagerly offer my homemaking services. "What would you like me to make at your dinner party?" "Our dinner party," he counters. "You invite your friends and I'll invite my friends. Should we invite couples or keep it a singles' party?" Was there ever a more loaded question?

We decided on leg of lamb. A classic family style roast with prewritten gender roles of the female netting the lamb and the ceremonious craving of the meat table side by the man of the house, in this case his newly renovated home in the midlevels. Invites were sent, a date set, and lamb ordered from New Zealand. Only one problem. I've never made lamb in my whole life. I grew up on American beef. Lamb was not a staple where I'm from. And honestly I would have winged it if I didn't like him so much.

But because I somehow thought that if I could deliver the perfect meal he would somehow like me as much, I drove myself insane crafting the perfect meal. Nights were lost studying cookbooks, I even bought the Jamie Oliver DVD box set for one recipe. Except the DVD showed a butterflied leg of lamb, and in my fantasy dinner party, rather our fantasy dinner party, I had imagine an entire leg, bone and all. Arg, frustrated, I write to Jamie Oliver posing my delimma. I was half surprised that he wrote back with a recipe with called for XXX, well that doesn't seem right.

I ran this idea by XXXX of Michelin starred Amber. "This guy, what is he?" Richard asks. "Aussie," I say. "Well you can't serve an Aussie a leg of lamb with XXX. Jamie's a Brit, the Aussies do it differently" He proceeded to run a laundry list of how make the perfect leg of lamb but of course this is Richard XXX of two michelin star rambling, I'll never be able to recreate this at home.

I buy two legs from XXX in Causeway Bay on the suggestion of my dinner party-cohost. One will have to be a test run. Now, I know my way around the kitchen and I'm not afraid to improv, but this leg of lamb scared the shit out of me. So much so I kept pulling it in and out of my freezer several times.

I was picking up Italian tomatoes from Sicily to practice a salad I've made a million times when the phone rings, it's XXX him; "Hey, how's it going?" "Everything's good, looking forward to our dinner party," I said cooly. "I was making a test leg of lamb," shut up I'm giving up too much information. "Wow, really? When I was a kid my grandmother would roast a leg of lamb, it was one of my favourite moments growing up." Ah shit. "She would put-" at that precise moment a roaring city bus crosses my path. "Wait, what did you say? I'm sorry I couldn't hear you," I say half panicked. He mumbled his grandmother's secret ingredient again but I still couldn't get a clear connection through the city roar. The forces were against me. I asked loudly a third time like someone using a mobile phone for the first time thinking since the person is far away he could hear me better if I screamed and I now I just sounded like a dweb. And then I said it without meaning to: "I'm sorry I can't understand your Aussie accent unless I see your lips move."

I have four more days before he returns from his trip and before I entered his kitchen. Deep breaths I told myself. "You need to serve mint sauce," the general manager at Zest told me. "Mint sauce? That's an English thing right?" "Ok, keep it simple. You want to win this guy right? Forget shoving in anchovies, forget the bacon, forget everything. Simple. fresh mint sauce, fresh rosemary stuffed in the lamb, roast potatoes, gravy. You know how to do this. You know how to make head cheese for god's sake."

"I think I'm just too nervous that I'll fuck it up," I admit. "You have too much riding on this. It's cute how worked up you get. How about this, my kitchen will prepare everything for you. You just need to pop it in the oven." This was so cheating, but it was so brillant.

No one really cooks from scratch anymore, we think we cook, but all we really do is assemble all the prep parts we pick up from the market. Ok, conscious resolved. "You sure you want to be with a guy that drives you this crazy?" the chef asks before handed me over the goods the night of.

Was I crazy? Obsessive yes, all the best ones are, but crazy? I guess I was alittle nuts. I did bombard three chefs with a collective of five Michelin stars on how to make a simple roast, I did invest in three legs of lamb from New Zealand, another leg I'd have the entire set; I did buy special dishes that held exactly four medium sized tomatoes sliced in halves; I did hand carry a bottle of whiskey from the US, truffles from France, grey salt shaved from the salt banks of Gunmuden, herb rub from Borough Market, and a bottle of aged balsamic vinegar from Italy for this party, I am now the owner of a gravy bowl in the shape of a duck. I founda supplier of Antartic ice cubes, but thought that to be unsubtle. This was going to be the G-8 of dinners. Ok, maybe I went a little crazy.

"Hey, um, we've got a problem. All my friends cancelled," he texts to tell me as I'm getting hair and makeup done. "What?!" The blast radius of my scream silenced all the blow dryers. "Yeah, let's postpone ok?" Not ok, but I didn't say that.

I made the lamb any way, but for me and close girlfriends. I ditched all the professional sauces and just popped the leg in the oven dotted with a few cloves of garlic and rosemary sprigs and it turned out to the most delicious and honest meal to ever come out of kitchen. Made with love, not crazy psychotic behaviour, we feasted.

Monday, April 6, 2009

Intro

The more time I spend here, the more I can say with certainty that I hate this Place.