This week, I have been mostly counting planes

Things are starting to slowly wind down before the end of the first period. By wind down I mean lecture content is decreasing while work outside of lectures is increasing exponentially.

Past week was spent writing my "Leading People and Groups" paper - that's the class where I wasn't sure whether it was all hot air or genius. To be frank, after staring at the paper brief all week, I'm coming round to the point of view that the abbreviation of the course title warmed up tells the whole story.....

But enough about gas. The other big project this week has been the Boeing 777 case. This is a finance trasure trove - and completely underlines my issue with this whole finance thing. Given reams and reams of tables of data you're supposed to say whether or not it's worth investing one billion squillion gazillion dollars in the whole thing.

So of you go, levering and unlevering companies, plugging leftovers and betas into the Capital Asset Pricing model and then having conversations with Clippy when it all starts looking a bit too surreal. And in the end you come up with an aswer that says "Well, maybe. You'd have to look into other factors of course". And because you've spent hours getting to that point, the fact that you got there from a spreadsheet that has projections of number of aircraft sold for 20 years into the future somehow doesn't seem that important. But then you stop and think - but wait a minute! This is just one great big giant monumental guess. Except it's dressed up to be this great piece of fairly complex looking analysis......