Snowed In

Today was a typical day in my new, post Barclays life, in Devon.

Having fed the dogs their breakfast of Weetabix (don’t say anything), I sat down at my computer at 08:30. I had neglected my CFA studies for a couple of days this week so decided to catch up on Session 4, Private Wealth Management. This comprises readings on

• Managing Individual Investor Portfolios – using situational profiling and psychological profiling to create a meaningful Investment Policy Statement
• Excerpts from Investment Management for Taxable Private Investors – understanding tax implications – now I prefer death to taxes
• Multiple Asset Locations – how the wealthy avoid tax through various vehicles such as GRATs, GSTs, CTs, VLIPs, Foundations and Intergenerational Transfers
• Low-Basis Stock – about the emotional attachment and letting go as entrepreneur becomes an executive and then finally an investor in his own business
• Goals-Based Investing: Integrating Traditional and Behavioral Finance – setting understandable, meaningful and tangible goals for the client
• Life-Cycle Investing – about how level of wealth supersedes age in setting risk objectives: the wealthy, at any age can invest aggressively while the not wealthy (poor) should always take a conservative approach (i.e no lottery tickets)
• Human Capital, Asset Allocation, and Life Insurance – human capital seemed to be defined as the present value of total future earnings potential and hence declines from start of working life until retirement

At lunchtime I walked the dogs..

From Snowed In

In the afternoon I was doing some website updates for a client who wanted to launch a new pricing scheme that required Worldpay Remote Administration so I was doing some prototyping to check it out. It seemed a little insecure but use of PHP CURL to perform the updates should minimize risk.

$ch = curl_init();

$data = array(‘instId’ => ’123321′, ‘authPW’ => ‘guessMe’,
‘futurePayId’ => ‘$futurePayId’, ‘op-adjustRFP’ => ”, ‘amount’ => ‘$amount’);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, ‘https://select.worldpay.com/wcc/iadmin’);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);

$response = curl_exéc($ch);