Month: December 2009

I used to be a keen debater during my college days, and recent email exchanges with one of my debating buddies reminded me of the good old days.

My debating skills vastly improved when Dr. Pramesh Ratnakar, one of my favorite professors taught me about the structure within which a debate should be written.

I thought it would be a fun post to write about this structure, and some of you who need to give presentations will find this structure useful because most presentations fit quite well within this structure.

My favorite debate was one organized by Hindustan Times, and the topic was: Should Sensuality Always Mean Sexuality.

To me the obvious answer to this is No, so I took it upon me to do the opposite, that is — defend the topic. I spoke in favor of the motion, and didn’t win any individual prizes, but our team did win the third prize, which, considering the colleges that participated, was not bad either.

I’ll use this topic to detail out how we used to structure our debates at that time.

1. Definition: The first thing to do was to define the concept, here the key terms are sensuality and sexuality. At the very beginning — you want to define what you mean by those two concepts, so the audience is on the same page as you for the rest of the debate.

2. Phrase the topic in your words: One of the key things to do after you define the important elements of the topics is to phrase it in your words. Often, this will be a means to narrow down the topic or take the sting out of something. In this example: “always” is a very important word. If you go with the literal meaning of “always”, — defending the motion becomes very difficult. In my case, I think I said that the literal meaning of always should only be used for facts such as the sun always rises in the east, — things that we know to be true — and about which there is not an ounce of doubt. That changes the way you can approach the topic because now you have more room to work with.

Phrasing the topic sets the tone in your favor, and gives you a chance to condition the audience to what you are about to say. I don’t remember the exact phrase that I used at that time, but I do remember the focus on the word always.

3. Draw a parallel: Drawing a parallel to something which your audience can relate to makes your job much easier. A romantic dinner is sensual, a moonlit night is also sensual, and most people can easily picture such scenes. I felt that it was always better to use such words instead of using sensual. So instead of saying sensual, I would say “bed of roses” or some other phrase like that.

4. State your case clearly: State your points on why you feel your argument is right. These points should be distinct and easily tied back to your parallels and definitions. This is fairly straightforward so I won’t elaborate this a lot.

5. Qualification: Stating your points is not good enough though, you need to list out a few points on why the other side is wrong too. This gives real weight to your arguments. I spent the maximum time on this, — partly because it was fun, but also because it used to have a big impact on how decisions were made.

6. Conclusion: Conclude crisply, and present a brief summary of what you just said. To me, this was the hardest thing to do. I found that condensing 4 minutes into 30 seconds was much much harder than stretching 30 seconds to 10 minutes.

This was the structure I followed, and it worked reasonably well for me. There were debaters who were a hundred times more talented than I was, and some of them didn’t need any preparation at all. I wish I was one of those guys, but in absence of all that talent, this structure worked quite well for me. I use this in presentations, and occasional reports, and you can give it a try to see if it works for you too.

I really enjoyed writing this post because it is quite different from what I normally do, and brings back many sweet memories from a long time ago. I hope you enjoyed it too, and I’d be interested to hear what you have to say, so do leave a comment below.

Last week I did a global portfolio and the thing that jumps out when you look at that is — you had to be invested in the emerging markets in the last five years to make any kind of significant gain.

It doesn’t look like this is a one off thing and I feel that several people are coming to that conclusion independently, and last week, — I read a few things that were related to this, and were perspectives on this from different sides. By different sides, — I mean perspectives from people who are going to invest this money, people who facilitate this investment, and finally the recipients of this investment.

Investor Perspective

I read DRs post last week, and he said that about 20% of his portfolio is in emerging markets, a number he thinks should grow in the coming years.

Patrick J who left the original comment suggested a similar ratio, and I am sure many more are thinking along these lines.

Recipient Perspective

Of course, if money is going to go to emerging markets, those emerging markets need to place some controls on these inflows, or else they risk their markets getting overheated, and local currencies gain in value.

With that in mind Brazil imposed a two percent tax on inflows in its stock market. There have been some concerns raised in India about the inflows and Ajay Shah had this great piece comparing the capital inflows in India over the last decade. His analysis shows that India has had greater inflows in the past, and current levels are not high enough to be alarming.

Funny how one side wants to get in, and the other one wants to make it hard for them to do so.

The Facilitators

Then there was this news about two new ETFs being launched which focused on Kuwait and Egypt. This is undoubtedly a glimpse of things to come.

If people want to get in on something, that is a great opportunity for ETFs and mutual funds. They smell that big opportunity and are going to bring in more products to satisfy such investor demand in the future.

Final thoughts

The fact that I read all these things in quick succession may mean that I am making too much out of it, but I do feel that this is a fair indication on how the next few years will be.

Investors in the developed world are going to look for more and more avenues of investing in emerging economies and fund houses are going to come up with more and more ways to satisfy the demand. The emerging countries will of course try to control this and make sure they are not too exposed to the vagaries of international finance and hot money.

It would be interesting to see how this trend develops and plays out in the next few years.