Lai See
SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY
One of the best things about newspapers is that no two people ever read one exactly the same way.
Our Shanghai business correspondent recently received an earful from a 'Hong Kong solicitor lady in her 70s' who complained the Swiss stock prices published in the South China Morning Post had not moved for three weeks. 'We Hong Kong people with Swiss francs play the Swiss market,' she huffed.
It was news to us, of course, that we even carried Swiss stock prices.
We eventually discovered that the prices of selected Swiss companies were included among many others in a 'Europe' section on the World Markets page.
And sure enough, the Swiss companies' stock prices had not changed, while those listed on other European exchanges were up-to-date.
Apparently the Swiss exchanges had changed the companies' code numbers without informing our data provider.
We are happy to report that the glitch has been remedied and the section in question is again running like a Swiss watch.
OUT OF OUR LEAGUE
Ever get an invitation that makes you feel, well, a bit dim? Lai See received the following one yesterday: 'Modelling Long Memory and Asymmetry in Exchange Rate Volatility - A Multivariate Garch Approach with Time-varying Correlations; organised by the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, HKU.'
'Garch', by the way, is apparently an acronym for 'Generalised AutoRegressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity'.
Unfortunately that leaves us none the wiser.
