Getting Down To Business

Hey Everyone!

We only have one week left of school!!!! I'm definitely looking forward to the freedom I'll finally have, and I'm really excited to get into the meat of my research. On the other hand, I'm also somewhat nervous for what the future has to hold. After this week, the next time I'm going to be in school is in college, and that's a really scary thought.

Anyways, since last week, I've caught up with a good deal of the data collection I outlined within my schedule. I've recorded the total assets and EBITDA values for Facebook, LinkedIn, Tencent Holdings, Yelp, and Twitter, and then began recording the same values for all firms in their industries. The main problem I had this week was finding that LinkedIn's data was no longer on the NASDAQ site. This is because, in December of 2016, it was acquired by Microsoft. I was able to find a quick solution this problem, however, as Google keeps historical data from companies trading on large exchanges like NASDAQ or the NYSE. Therefore, my project is still on track. Last week I mentioned that I would have to collect data for analyze over 1000 firms in order to obtain a proper comparable firm sample for the 5 firms I listed above. I'm happy to say I no longer have to do that anymore, thanks to a filtering method I'm taking. NASDAQ has companies ranked based on their market capitalization. By filtering based on this metric, I am essentially looking only at companies that have similar levels of market capitalization to one another, and therefore, have similar size and total assets. This allows me to collect data for far fewer firms than I had initially needed to. For the rest of the week, I anticipate finishing my data collection phase and moving on to finding comparable firms for each of the companies that I picked out. From there, I will perform my analyses on each of the comparable firm multiples that I chose for my study.

Other than this, I've been working to clean up my methods and literature reviews for the end of the trimester. My methods assignment definitely needs more explanation, and I need to articulate complex statistical calculations in ways that everyone can understand easily. Specifically, my biggest problem is making sure my derivation for the harmonic mean projection of a multiple is simple and easy to understand.

That's all for now! Stay tuned next time for musings on calculations! (413)

Akash

Challenges and Drawbacks

Hey Everyone!

Over the past week I've got my critiques for my methods proposal and began fixing it. For the most part, the big problem with my proposal was in the way I explained it, so now it's time to get down to business and begin my research! 

My original plan for my research began with the collection of data for all of the companies in the social media industry that I planned to analyze for my comparable firm analysis. Although I have begun my data collection, I have not completely finished as much as I initially wanted to. This is primarily because I have been focusing on my methods assignment rather than my research this week. In the coming weeks, when I have far more time to work exclusively on my research, I don't envision the same problem arising again. Another unanticipated drawback that I have experienced in collecting data is the amount of tedious searching I have to do on NASDAQ's site. Historical data isn't listed directly in a table for companies, so I have to manually go through each company in the industry, and record their historical data at various IPO periods. Thus, I must sort through close to one thousand companies on NASDAQ's site. This may take longer than I initially anticipated, and I think two more weeks is an appropriate amount of time to set aside for the task. The good thing about the data collection, however, is that I only have find data points corresponding to five different time periods, rather than ten or twenty.

This puts my schedule about three to five days behind what I originally projected. However, I am not too worried about such drawbacks, because the data collection was already the most tedious part of my methods section, and I expected to spend a long time with it. For the most part, I have created my schedule so that I have "buffer room" each week in case an activity is more difficult than I envisioned it to be. The other part of my methods that will most likely be tedious is the selection of comparable firms for each of the five firms that I am analyzing. After this, I expect the methods implementation to be on par, if not easier than what I originally expected, as I have become more familiar with the implementation of the methods after reading and thinking about them more.

Finally, I initially planned me methods implementation to last until February 20th. This gives me a week of extra squeeze room in case something goes completely unexpected to plan. Otherwise, I'm feeling great about research, and I'm excited to be doing it! (449)

Signing Off,

Akash

Flaws in the Plan

Hey Everyone!

It's been a pretty long time since I've last posted, and in the time between I've submitted my official methods proposal. Right now, we're critiquing out proposals with others. Although we haven't gotten to my proposal yet, I still think it's important for me to analyze my own methods and determine the weakest parts of it to discuss with my group later.

So here it goes...

Personally (I don't think it's that much of a secret though), I think the weakest part of my proposal is my explanation of technical equations and terms that come up in my paper. I've been working on it a lot, and my explanations have come a long way, but I definitely have a lot of work to do in making sure every term and formula is explained correctly to the reader. If not, I could risk confusing my reader, and in turn, undermine the significance of my results and discussion section. I think I particularly need to do a better job of explaining how I derive the equations that I plan to use in my research and what their implications are in terms of the data. In general, because the formula's deal with more abstract statistical methods, I've been trying to describe them through more concrete examples. There's still a lot more work to do, though. Discussing my methods with my group will be really helpful in explaining the equations, so I'm not too worried about this weakness. I just need to keep on drilling at the problem.

Walking hand in hand with my confusing explanations is my method section's second weakness: length. My section is far over the word limit, and I need to cut it down. The big problem is that I need more words to explain most of the technical terms in my paper. Ultimately, I think the problem with the section is that I reiterate too many terms from the literature review. Deleting some of my re-explanations will be crucial to keeping my paper under the word limit, but I need more guidance on what exactly is explained well initially, and what needs more explaining. I'll be sure to discuss this with my group in a few days, but I am definitely be open to any other suggestions on things I could cut out or ways to reduce my word count in my paper.

Other than that, I think my methods section is pretty solid (I guess we'll really see in three days).
No it's time to do some real research! (424)

Akash