Highlighting the Highlights

It is already the end of May at the moment I am writing this article. Weird, right? It is almost a year ago I was announced as the Internal Affairs officer of Asset | Econometrics! The past year went really fast and without realizing it, my board year has almost come to an end. And therefore I want to give you a recap on some of the highlights of my past board year.

My board year officially kicked off after the DMM (Department Members Meeting), after which my fellow boardies and I were responsible for running the department Asset | Econometrics. From that moment on, I have been on a rollercoaster ride. My board year started with a lot of constitution drinks from the other Asset associations, and so I experienced a new concept: ‘Sleep is an emotion’, which Thomas van Manen explained in another article on Nekst-Online. See, you have to be present at the rooms in building E at 10.00 hours at the latest, even after a heavy night of consuming too many alcoholic beverages. As you can imagine, this can be very hard from time to time.

After a tiring period with quite some parties, the International Business Tour took place: we went to the beautiful city of Cape Town with 24 students, from October 20 to 30. This tour really made a big impression on me. On the very first day, we were picked up at the airport and drove to our hostel, during which we drove by a township (the slums in South Africa). Simply driving past this was really impressive, since we cannot imagine such poverty in the Netherlands. However, at the same time in that car I was enjoying the view of Cape Town, since it is a beautiful city to look at. This contrast is typical for Cape Town, for you can see the rich- and the poorness of the country at the same time. Being there for ten days was an amazing experience, during which we visited a lot of highlights of Cape Town. We paid a visit to Robben Island – the harbor of Cape Town -, the parliament, a township, and much more. Besides the sightseeing, we had some great parties as well, and we even went on a Booze Cruise on the ocean!

Being in Cape Town was an amazing experience

Another highlight of my board year is the start of the Quantitative Investment Group (QIG) in the beginning of February. Thomas and I are coordinating this new group of fifteen students, who will look at the stock market as a quantitative trader. The goal of this group is to learn from each other and to learn how to trade on the stock market based on numbers, rather than on gut feeling. Now we are almost four months up and running and we are going to make our first investment very soon! I think this is quite an achievement, since we started with nothing in February. Nobody had any knowledge nor experience regarding how to trade as a quant on the stock market, so having a good group structure and two quantitative strategies running is quite an accomplishment.

However, as a board you are not only organizing events or coordinating committees, for it is a tradition that all committees prepare a dinner for the board. The committee that presents the best/most original meal will be treated to a dinner from the board afterwards. Up until now, we have had some really delicious dishes, but also extremely original ones. Over the past months we have been served a ‘Friettafel’, ‘Space brownie’ (with parsley instead of actual drugs), sushi, wraps, pies and countless other really tasty dishes. We even had one dinner that went from fancy to ‘pauper’, which means that the committee started business casual, but eventually dressed in trash bags. The best things about these dinners is that you get to know the members of Asset | Econometrics even better.

By now, I touched upon some of the highlights of my board year. I am happy that I have been given the opportunity to run this association, and also that I could get to know a lot of amazing and nice people within Asset | Econometrics.

 Text by: Björn Floor

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