I cannot issue a guarantee of correctness of the statements made and information provided in this blog.

The last 10 days

The last time was pretty busy and exciting again. On Sunday 25/11 there was Europe's biggest erotic fair in London. Headliner, if you can name it that way, was Dita von Teese, who gave a show that featured me in the first row. Unfortunately, no cameras were allowed. The next days I lost quite some money, fortunately not mine, on some Bund Futures trades. Nevertheless, I was allowed to join some of my colleges on a night out with some of our brokers. Of course, everything was paid by them. We were at a Chinese Restaurant (http://www.hakkasan.com/), probable the best and most expensive I've ever been to (~200 GBP p.p.). We ended up with a bottle of champagne in a strip club in East London. Apparently, all stories about being out with broker are true.

The next day was terrible in the office, but after that I went to see a soccer game, Tottenham Hotspurs vs Aalborg. On Friday and Saturday I was out with some German guys, which are actually quite nice albeit their nationality.....
Friday: Sopranos www.zebrano-bar.com
Saturday: KOKO www.koko.uk.com

....time's passing so fast. its already my last week here in London.

Dita von Teese giving autographs


Show at the fair


First shot


Explaining why Austria is better than Germany ;-)


Christian, Lars, Markus, and I

On the 17th of November something special happened. There were some of the greatest rockers ever in town. I talk about the real shit, a guy who owns the second ‘O’ in HOLLYWOOD and who’s connected with Rock as hardly any other. I saw glorious
A L I C E C O O P E R & extremely rockin’ M O T Ö R H E A D in the Wembley Arena. As a bonus Joan Jett heated up the crowd for the thing to come following.

Admittedly, I did not know so many song of Alice Cooper before, and still I just remember 2 songs of the concert, the 2 songs I actually knew already ‘Mr. Nice Guy’ and ‘Poison’. Both fantastic, but the other songs were not really my taste. Anyway the show was great and he is the man!

Motörhead, don’t know what to say about them. Just amazing, hearing the famous ‘We are Motörhead and we play play Rock N Roll’ said by Lemmy with his very weird, kick-your-ass voice was great. And they did what they promised, they played straight rock n fuckin’ roll.

Joan Jett is just as much as a Rock n Roll icon as Motörhead or Alice Cooper. She gave a very nice show and is still in a good shape for her age. I really love love love her songs ‘Bad Reputation’ and ‘I love Rock n Roll’. Besides them, she played some other really good songs which made me thing of getting her new CD.

Here are some short videos I shot during the concert:

Wembley Stadion

Joan Jett rockin'

Waiting for Motörhead

Lemmy rockin'

Waiting for Alice Cooper

The Godfather of Rock himself

I was visited by Carina, Günda, and Biertschi, aka Il Presidento, on weekend 9/10/11 Nov. We did quite some sight-seeing which included Rgent Park, Oxford Street, Liberty's, Camden Market, and Harrods, had quite a lot of beers and Mojitos and spend a half of a night in TigerTiger and another half at a small punk and rock n roll pub near Camden. The pub was fun as they had three bands performing there on saturday night. Anyway, on sunday we enjoyed some traditional british 'sunday' food (Sunday Roast, Fish and Chips, and Sausages with Mash) + beer + soccer in a pub near Liverpool Street before they left again.


There they are, the three mighty
gangsters.

Regent Park

Nice to shop at Liberty's.

Some visistors

Last weekend I was visited by Moni and her boyfriend. We had a bottle of wine with the XXX pushed in somewhere in the street. Like in the good old days. After that we hit the tigertiger which turned out to be great fun again. We drank and danced until the club was closed.

On the following Sunday, Flo and Schaua were in town. After being rebooked on their flight to Bangkok (oh my gosh, I was really envy) and enjoying business class from Vienna to London, they had some spare hours to meet up. We met in A pub in Kensington and had a couple of real tasty beers (and shadies = Radler).

A very similar story with Koe Tom. He changed plains in London on his way from Hong Kong, where he is on exchange, to Vienna. Again, beers and food in a Pub near Victoria Station. For all who forgot, here is his blog: http://koeinhongkong.blogspot.com/

Christiane gave me the kind hint that there's still a picture missing showing the both of us together. Here it is my dear....

http://www.ninjatrader.com/webnew/index.htm
Nice Trading Tool for free

1st Trade

I finally did my first trade yesterday, I shorted ~ 1 mio. € Bund Futures and earned 12K. Thus, I already made up for my wage.

I finally made myself a name within the bank

In order to celebrate the Q3 results, which were not too bad, Straumur organised a bowling night for the London office. The night did cost around £300 p.p. and was real fun as you can surely imagine. Free drinks, free finger food, ..... (I was missing the coccaine, champagne and hookers, things that should not be missing at a bankers party - as far as the movies say.) Another nice fact of the night, I did pretty well....(see email below)

From: Diana German - Straumur
Sent: 26 October 2007 09:42
To: - All London
Cc: Davíð Freyr Oddsson - Straumur; Björg Björnsdóttir - Straumur
Subject: Everyone's a winner

All Star Lanes in Bayswater was the venue for London’s bowling night out. To set the scene, imagine cheesy diner style décor, leatherette booths, rock ‘n roll music, burgers, onion rings and fries with milkshakes and bottled beer.

It was a closely fought battle with only one point in it between the two top teams. In second place came Matthew’s team from capital markets with 272 but in first place came corporate finance with 273.


Star performer
Christoph “Bullet” Schmidinger who consistently outplayed everyone else in the alley. His personal best was 89 followed by 82

Top team
(based on 2x5 frame games)
Corporate Finance take the crown with Markus, Shahram, Hicham, Wei and Kuat being the top team.
It should be noted that that only reason these guys won was because they arrived early and had time to warm up and perfect their technique before everyone else.

Other star performers were
Kris “Kristofferson” Meissner with 81
Shahram “Evil Knievel” Shoraka with 80

Most entertaining bowler
Daniel “Carry on Bowling” Svanstrom for his camp style; waltzing, through the legs, over the shoulder and always with a drink in hand

Most improved bowler
Wei “Take it Easy” Li’s slow and gentle style steadily developed into a cracker of a performance in his last game when he scored a double strike and narrowly lost winning the game by 1 point


Please come and see me after lunch to receive your prizes. Photos and evidence from last night will hopefully be up on Insider by lunch time.

Other memorable performances:
Antonia’s unique “bouncing ball” technique which was surprisingly effective as she scored a number of strikes
Mikael’s wildly exuberant style that meant everyone had to get out of the way; even the skittles seemed to cower
Kris for his perfect bowling style and technique, signs of a misspent youth me thinks
Carolina who managed with unerring accuracy to get the ball in the gutter almost every time she bowled – what a consistent performer
Simon (I) for his ability to dance, joke, sing and bowl all at once whilst also trying out new bowling techniques which included a double handed push from an all fours position (it failed)
Mounir for pretending to be a bowling ball himself but falling way short of the mark with a slapstick style slip
Samuel for his prayer like pose after every bowl that only saw him rise up when skittles went down

Thanks to everyone for coming and to those who helped organise a top night out. Obviously thanks to Isabelle to who paid for everything – we’ll go out with you again!

Di

It has already been a while since my last post. Ok, nothing really important happened in the meantime. My orientation definitively improved, I spent some more money on clothes – I can already deal with the high prices, I just ignore them and buy, just that simple – and I am already used to staying in office for 11 hours each day.

I admit that it could be worse, there are investment banker who almost live in there office and who are envy on guys like me who can leave at between 7 and 8. But still the first time was hard for me too. Nice greetings to Nacho, Rodrigo, and Caio who probable need to work like “real” investment banker, sorry guys.

What else happened? My girlfriend Christiane visited me during the last weekend. That meant a free Friday, lots of shopping (and spending), and sight-seeing to me. I really enjoyed the time and was happy to have her around.

A week earlier, I finally found time to do some sports, I was running in the neighbourhood and found a nice and close-by park and a small & affordable gym. In order to find some balance, I gonna enrol. Just working and going out during weekends is not really satisfying.

A short excurse back to work. I hosted my first presentation today. That means that I had the CEO of a company called QuantHouse coming to present their Algo Trading Tool and that I took the part of presenting our company and led through the whole procedure – I asked the questions. Furthermore my duties were broaden in the meantime. I am now also dealing with Icelandic inflation-linked amortising bonds and option strategies on them. Very interesting, especially as I never had anything to do with such instruments.

Sorry for that boring post again.....

Last week was just business as usual, after one week in the office I am already in a position to say so. I am working in Capital Markets – Fixed Income Trading, my first project is to program, test, and implement a trend-following trading algorithm in Matlab (which is a nice and comfortable alternative to R). A lot of testing is already done and I hope to now implement it and start trading, for the start: Futures on Treasuries and on Bund-Futures.

But enough about work! Joe and Alex visited me last weekend. We did a lot of sight-seeing and they made quite a lot of pictures, which I can post now. It was fun to have them here as we really made use of the weekend. On Saturday, after spending some time on Portobello Market we drove into the City, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Monument,……and spent some hours in a club called Collide-A-Scope. I messed really up, though. I forgot the name of the club and we hardly found it. Instead of a 10-minute walk from the tube station, it took us around an hour to find it. But finally, having found it, it was absolutely cool. We drank and danced the whole time until we were more or less pushed out. Way too early. We spent the whole next day in Camden Market, which was again really funny. It’s unbelievable which freaks you can spot there. But nevertheless the coolest market in London. Uploading pictures sucks. The internet connection is unbelievably slow….

The two guys already left again for Austria, Alex had her graduation ceremony and Joe is probably learning Bavarian for his new challenges in Regensburg. Mutual friends know already that he moved to Regensburg to work at university and torture German students. And that’s a good thing, cause, as we all know, Germans deserve that……..just a joke.

Shopping is just fun in London. Alex and me proved our maleness and bravery as we did not dare to dress fancy and shitty. But as joe has to be a role model for his future students and in order to not destroy a promising career we spared him from that....

For us that does not account as we are becoming consultant and banker, there is absolutely no shame in either business!

My neighbourhood

Somewhere in the City

In front of St. Pauls Cathedral

Around the corner from my office, Piccadilly Circus.

The most important picture of all. No London trip without a shot of Big Ben....

At Camden Market

First Post

I’m just starting with my blog. Let’s see how often I really can find enough time to post something. Within the first week there was no free time slot to be filled with writing a blog entry. Still, I’ll try to give my best to just keep you on top of things happening.

The first days in London were, of course, very nice. No work, just sight-seeing, shopping, and looking for a room. I ended up in the apartment of an elderly lady whose daughter is travelling around the globe. I’m only paying 55 Pounds a week for my room, what is extremely cheap for London, especially as my landlady washes and irons my clothes and I’m also offered a breakfast every day. Not so bad. Unfortunately, I have no internet access in the flat. An absolute drawdown as I have to go to an internet cafe every time I want to email or use skype. But anyways, a girl told me last week that she is paying 92 à week for only 7 m² even farer outside Central London than me…

For everyone who wants to contact me, here’s my mobile +44 7939 402542 and my address
97b St. Stephen’s Avenue
London W12 8JA
England

But now, here is more about my professional life in London. As some already know, I’m doing an internship with a small but rapidly growing Icelandic investment bank called Straumur-Burdaras Investment Bank – www.straumur.net – I still can’t pronounce it correctly. The days are long, on average 12 hours, but as they are filled with interesting work it does not seem that long at all. Some of my friends, especially those working, would now say that 12 hours isn’t that bad. But hey, I’m not used to….not until now.

Bad news concerning pics. I forgot the cable to link my camera with my laptop. So I have to think of other ways to provide you with the most touristy pictures of London ever. May they have a card reader in one of my beloved internet cafes. Oh, I already hat them.

I spent my first Saturday night first in a pub in Soho, I think it was called something like ‘The three greyhounds’. I met with some german guys I met randomly for some beers. After 3 or four or five of them we went on to the TigerTiger, which some of you might know, and kept on drinking and started dancing as well. Thanks to British customs the club closed around 3 or 4 and we were pushed out. That was the time when I lost the others and, after looking for them for a while, I tried to find my way home. It wasn’t that easy as it was my first night out and I had absolutely no plan where to go and which bus to take. But there were enough people to ask and that’s how I made it home….just to have a bad Sunday.