The Death of Italy Football???

is 2011 the year which Italy football die?

Italian clubs perform very poorly during the season with all their Uefa Europa League contenders eliminated (last surviving club was Napoli which was defeated by Villareal). All 3 of Italy representatives in Uefa Champions' League, AC Milan, Roma and Inter lost their home game and are expected to be eliminated. Italy serie A is officially ranked number 4 in Europe behind Spanish La Liga, English Premier League and German Bundesliga. There are speculation that Serie A will fall behind French Ligue 1 soon.

I started watching football since 1990 and 1990's was the decade where Italy football is the king of the world. Some call it "world cup league". The greatest and best football player played there.

From 1990 to 1999, European football was dominated by Italian Clubs. Uefa Champions' League (previously called European Cup), Europa Cup (at the time it was called Uefa Cup) and European Cup winners' Cup (now cancelled) were superbly dominated by Italian teams. Of the 10 UCL finals during that decade, Italian clubs played in 8 of them (only 1991 and 1999 saw no Italian representative).

Domestically, Italian serie A was the most watched and most exciting football league in the world. During the time, there were 7 giant clubs that controlled the serie A and any of the 7 teams could win it. Juventus, Inter, AC Milan, Fiorentina, Parma, Lazio and Roma were all giant teams in Europe winning multiple championships. Competition in serie A at the time was fierce and colourful. Player like Zinedine Zidane, Gabriel Batistuta, lothar Matthaus, Roberto Baggio, Ronaldo, Alessandro Del Piero and countless others pushed serie A to the top of the football world by substantial margin.

Today, serie A is just a boring and lifeless league full with teams that have no chance of competing in Europe and heavily in debt. Even the big teams like Milan and Juventus failed to keep up with the rest of the world especially clubs from Spain, England and Germany.

Inter is the only good team in Italy, winning last season UCL. However since the departure of Jose Maurinho, Inter, under the hand of Rafael Benitez and Leonardo, is slowly move towards mediocre European club.

So how can Italian Clubs improve?

1) Financial Management. The main reason Italian football fell into today's slump is poor financial management. Teams overspent every year and eventually, they did not money to even pay the wages of players. Invest wisely for players, focus more on player development and most importantly, attract foreign investors that can inject large sums of money (remember how Chelsea become a giant today).

2) Balance domestic league and European competition. Italian clubs generally focus more on domestic league. Focusing on European competition can attract fans outside Italy and ultimately increase number of viewers for Italian football.

3) Constantly changing. teams in Italian football need to change constantly to keep up with the pace of Spanish and English football. Tactics, technique, skills, mentality etc. need to have constant changes.

4) Marketing. Football need fans and Italy alone do not have enough fans. Marketing will attract fans outside Italy and revenue from sales and TV rights will improve. English football is the prime example of excellent marketing. Before mid 1990's English football was far inferior compared to serie A but now, they are wee superior.

5) Winning matches. Ultimately, football is about winning and winning is the best way of attracting fans.

Can Italian football overcome their recent slump or will 2011 be the death of italy football? I favor the first.

What really cause the fall???

Recently financial market take a big hit. Except for certain commodity markets (energy, precious metal), markets around the world tumbling significantly. We all know about the Egypt problem, China rate hike issue and currently Libya issue. However are these issue the reason market take such a big hit?

NO!

Markets have been rising constantly since the crisis 2007/2008. US markets are around 15% of the high in October of 2007. Some markets even surpass the 2007 high with significant margin. Since we know stock market is the reflection of real economics, one must wonder are we near the economic condition of 2006 or even better than 2006?

NO!

We are nowhere near 2006. We are not even close to it. In fact global economy today is worse than 2001 or 1993. So the question is why global financial markets keep on rising?

HOT MONEY!

Markets rising are not caused by improvement in real sector or monetary market, but only caused by hot money generated by unresponsible central bankers and hugely leveraged commercial and investment banks.

So why now?

We had similar problem before this. Greek debt issue, Dubai default, China inflation concern...... none of these caused any problem to the overall markets. Markets merely sniffed and continue higher. So why Egypt and Libya can cause such a big fuss?

Markets responce significantly on such issues shows that there are weaknesses in the bullish trend that we are having in recently run. The Egypt and Libya issues are just a need "the straw that broke the camels back". Markets are heavily overbought in monthly scale with RSI of over 80 for most of stock markets. Dividend per price for stocks are at historical low. VIX index just had a double bottom indicating risk incoming and volume of hot money is in trillions. Real portfolio investment data around the world shows that increment of 100% since 2009.

So, even without the Egypt and Libya problems, it is very likely that markets will have a U-turn. At the moment it is unclear whether the middle east political problem can cause any significant contraction to financial markets globally but the reality is there: we will have a huge contraction or at least, a significant retracement that will bring us back at least 30% of current level.

VIX

This is the weekly chart of VIX or volatility index. Every indicator on this chart (Macd, Stochastics, double bottom etc.) shows a bullish outlook. So if VIX is bullish, chances are stocks are bearish. Lookout!

3 Great Movies

Watched 3 movies this weekend. 1 at cinema and 2 on DVD. All 3 are great movies so I plan to share my thought here. Btw as predicted market is going south (with or without the Egypt problem). Commodity had a great rally thought (slv!!!)

1. The Way Back.

The way back is a great movie. IMO it excel in 3 areas: directing, acting and story. I think this is Peter Weir best work ever and he done a fantastic job of turning The Way Back into one of the must-watch movie.

Acting is also superb. Jim Sturgess, Colin Farrell, Ed Harris, Saoirse Ronan and rest of the cast are all amazing. It is their acting that make this fictional story believable.

Story is also another superb element of the film. The main storyline is good but the real clever part of the story is the interaction between characters.

However, they are some "not-so-good" part in the film. The opening part is boring and too long. There are some unnecessary characters and the ending is pretty stupid. (spoiler alert! go back to Poland after 1989? lol)

Great movie, 8.5/10.

2. Buried.

I didn't go to watch this at cinema and it was a bad decision. The movie is great in its genre. The real clever part of this movie is the originality of it. 1 actor, 1 location, 1 simple story. That's it.

Ryan Reynolds I think did a good job. Although he is overreacted in some parts, overall his acting is believable. Director Rodrigo Cortes manage to turn this into something exciting and suspenseful.

For me the best part is the ending. Although many critics and viewers criticize the ending, I think it is great. Spoiler alert! When the guy said sorry they found Mark White instead of Paul Conroy, it is a dagger to the heart and will leave a much longer memory on the viewers than simply a successful rescue.

There are some flaws with this film like the snake part is really stupid and the joke about voice mail is dump as hell. Still a great movie. 8/10

3. 127 Hours.

Unfortunately in Malaysia, this movie still hasn't screened yet. This is a fantastic film based on a true events. Most elements of this film are superbly done. James Franco is amazing. He deserves the oscar this year. His portray of Aron Ralston is both funny and merciful. Unbeatable performance.

Director Danny Doyle is great and manage to keep the 90+ minutes movie entertaining with only 1 actor.

The beginning of the film is probably the weak part of this film and the inclusive of that 2 females is bad and boring.

The film should get 8 or 8.5 but because of Franco I will give it 9/10. One of the best movie of the decade for sure.

Next movie for me (at cinema) is probably sucker punch (kick ass trailer!!!).

Beginning of the End?

Yesterday was a significant day in financial markets. Although stock markets across the globe weren't badly affected (Europe markets were the relatively underperformer).

However commodity markets were severely affected. energy decreased more than 2% and precious metal decreased more than 1%.

The most important indicator, copper, gave up more than 2% as well.

Bearish sentiments are all around every corner. Although firms' earnings are good, they are past data. Quantitative easing 2 (QE2) is not likely to save the economy from going south.

From technical, financial and economics point of view, there is no way the stock markets can maintain at current level. The contraction or at least correction that were predicted by many analyst last year is still pending. All we got last year was some small downs and mostly marginally increases.

Unemployment stay high across the developed nations, China inflationary pressure and artificial expansion of monetary aggregates. All of these can only lead to lower stock markets.

So, can we gain from all these?

(1) Hold as many money in risk free (or minimum risk) assets as possible.

(2) Invest in dividend yield firms in minimum exposure markets (such as New Zealand or Indonesia).

(3) Short the over inflated markets (almost every markets lol)

(4) Wait to buy any commodities when the prices are reasonable (I prefer silver and sugar)

Just think for a second: markets around the world has risen at least 100% from their lows and at most 40% of their high in 2007 but the economy are going nowhere in the past 3 years (at least for developed nations). How can stock markets keep getting better??

Private vs Public Universities, The Case Of Malaysia

As a part time lecturer in one of the private universities in Malaysia, I get this question all the time. Generally students think that private universities are better than public universities. I disagree so here are my brief analysis on private and public universities in Malaysia.

In Malaysia, public university are non-profit organisation partially funded by central government and private university are profit based non-government coorperation. The followings are (for me) the advantages of public university:

(a) Academic stuff. Since 2010, public university have over 80% of their academic stuff are Phd or Phd candidate while less than 20% of private university academic stuff fall under that category. Phd graduates academic stuff may not be the best lecturer / tutor, but they are most likely to be better researcher.

(b) Research. Just look at the thesis done by private university student and public university student and you'll imediately know why public universities is better. I have the access for Master level thesis of some private universities in Malaysia and most of them are worse than undergraduate level thesis for public universities.

(c) Facilities. Since public universities are non-profit organisation and partially funded by government, their facilities are much better than private universities'. The library and database of public universities are incomparable.

(d) Students. In Malaysia, generally we have a tradition: The very best high school / secondary school graduates will study oversea in foreign universities. The next level of graduates will study in public universities and the rest will end up in private universities. This is happening as private universities tends to accept weaker students for higher profit. Because of that, public universities have much better competition among students and the environment of study is better too.

Private universities are catching up to public universities but they have a long way to go before they reach the level of public universities. As long as they can't improve on those areas, they will never surpass public universities.

A Freeman is captured

Surfing the web led me to this funny page. It is a page in the Florida DOJ. The inmate's last name is Freeman and apparently his attempted escape from a prison has failed.

A Freeman is captured!!!