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Is this the time of the year when we (chinese) eat mooncake already? I didn’t have a clue until I found some at home. Here’s a picture of the mooncake(s) I have at home, it’s from breadtalk:

It has nice packaging and stuff like that. Naturally, I was tempted to eat it - so I opened it and found 4 mooncakes inside! And now here’s the problem: each of them is of different flavour. From memory: there’s green tea - single yolk, white lotus - single yolk, sesame? - single yolk, and I can’t even remember the last flavour. There were too many of them!

And so this is when my mooncake saga began. First of all, I’ve never eaten anything than just ordinary straightforward plain mooncake. Having four different flavours made me think which one is the nicest… but then again, there’s a problem eating from the nicest to least nice one - it decreases the utility of the mooncakes (it means less satisfaction as I will start from the nicest to least nice - the utility value will decline each time). So there’s the first problem, do I eat from the most nicest to least nice? or the other way around?…. or… Oh stuff it! In the end I couldn’t care less, I’ve never tried any of them anyway, how would I know which one is the nicest?

So I picked one that seemed promising: a green-tea flavoured single yolk mooncake. At least that’s what it said on the label… which got me thinking: Now if there’s "single yolk" instead of just plain "with yolk" - does that mean there are some mooncakes with double-yolk, triple-yolk, or even half-yolk? Typically a mooncake is split into 4 parts with perpendicular cut on the surface. Imagine a ‘double-yolk’ mooncake - what would be the position of the yolk? Next to each other? or One on top of another? I would have thought the latter would be more appropriate - that way, when cut into 4 pieces, each piece will have the same amount of yolk.

Anyway, enough of the silly mooncake discussion. I tried the green tea mooncake in the end. And quite unexpectedly - it tasted just like any other mooncake! Either that or there’s something wrong with my tounge (Like I can’t taste green tea?). In the end… I found all mooncakes are so overwhelmingly sweet - it literally overcame any other flavour. Nevermind… I just made my own green tea to reduce the sweetness of the mooncake.

The moral of my mooncake sage is this: nevermind the packaging, or the gimmick, fancy things seem to promise more than they deliver. Believe me, they all taste almost the same anyway. Next time around you find something ‘new’ with nice packaging and fancy flavour (maybe a mooncake & mochi hybrid? who knows…) that arises your interest, don’t get your hopes too high. Chances are that they are not as nice as your ordinary straightforward plain food that you used to eat.

Anyway, happy mooncake eating day!! I don’t even know when the date is… but you know what I mean.   Cheers.

After reading the article below:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/business/greed-is-good-but-patience-provides-the-better-returns/2006/09/22/1158431899114.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

It got me thinking about one fundamental problem in our daily lives. Valuation.

If I show you a nice house, how much do you think it’s worth? I’m sure you’d say: "that depends…". Well, you’re right, that depends on a lot of factors. How big the house is, how close it is to amenities, the neighbourhood it’s in, the built quality - and so on. But still… that doesn’t answer my question, what do you think it’s worth? $200k, $400k? or even half a million dollars?

What most people would fail to notice, is that the value of the property - most of the times are decided not by the things we can see. If you’re the owner of the house, of course you’d like to be assessed as much as possible, but if you’re a buyer, you’d like to get it at the lowest price possible. Obviously, the buyer and the seller needs to agree on a fixed price before the transaction can go ahead, how do they do the valuation. In the case of property, it’s not that hard… you look at other similar properties in the vicinity that was sold recently and compare the prices. Voila! you have the price of the property.

Simple isn’t it? (if you’re not a property player I’m sure you’d say yes).

Now, let’s consider stock market. How do you know about the value of a stock? Whether it’s overvalued or undervalued? The wisdom is simple, buy undervalued stocks and sell overvalued ones. If you can do that all the time, you’d be the richest person on earth in less than one year. Here’s the crux of the matter however, valuation IS about predicting the future. A stock may worth $105 now, but aside from God alone (and I don’t think God buys stocks!) who knows what it will be worth 3 months from now? Of course, there’s always some genius making guesses based on the company assets, earnings forecasts, market capitalization… and so on. But one fundamental problem with stock market are, that the players in it are human beings. And predicting the course of decision of a collective human being is like predicting which horse will win the horserace. It is at worst gambling, and at best - calculated gambling (which is still, gambling, nevertheles).

And as with gambling, you have winners and losers. Only in this case, the winners of stock market can always say that they have a methodical way of picking stocks. But, if you ask the losers, they also have their strategies too!

I guess, at the end of the day, a good rule of thumb is: the value of something is how much someone is willing to pay for it. All you have to do is to analyse that ’someone’ (be it your customers, buyers, or even other stockholders) - you have to see the object from their point of views. Most people failed to notice this - they cling to their own perception instead. The closer your analysis about their perception, the better your valuation skill is.