Weekly Journals (1-4)

Md. Osman Goni

Id: 103 0927 030

Lanka Bangla Securities Limited

Journal 1 as at 18/01/2015
The first week as a Lanka Bangla Securities Limited (LBSL) intern was marked with
a lot of learning experiences. I spent the first week primarily on doing data entry.
LBSL taught me new things, which added to my knowledge base. Things that we have
been taught all these years in finance courses were improvised on. A fellow intern
from NSU and me were given a joint task of analyzing handpicked companies in the
DSE, details of which are prohibited to be discussed about. However, I did learn a lot
of new things as to which figures mattered more than the others, which figures should
be looked upon, as well as which figures were relatively less necessary. Also, I got to
learn a lot of new things in Microsoft Excel. What I felt all this week was that we
could have been taught these things in our university courses instead of in the
internship. I learned some new ratios and terms which were previously unheard of and
this greatly enhanced my stock of knowledge. I also am learning how to behave in the
corporate world. Being amongst a group of highly professional people who are very
courteous, helpful and informative, I myself am learning to exhibit such attributes and
I am hoping my weeks ahead will be equally fruitful if not more. I am also
maintaining a professional get-up at all times just as an investment banker should. I
have also been assigned a station of my own where I complete all my assigned works.

Journal 2 as at 25/1/2015
The second week in LBSL was one in which the work really sunk in. What I mean is I
actually got an idea as to what it will be like to become a research analyst, or a price

analyst, for that matter. My fellow intern and I were given a combined task of creating
a database for the company. This is to be an internal research project conducted by my
supervisor Mr. Taj Mohammad and we have a team of four people working on this
project (including him and another colleague). This team includes my fellow intern
and me. It is supposed to be a project that only four of us are involved with, and
entails us doing data entry. We are creating a pool of data for LBSL to use. With the
help of these data, LBSL probably can predict immediate prices and future price
trends. Figures such as P/E ratio, EPS quarterly values, weighted EPS values, daily
average trading, cost of capital, profit growth rates, NPL etc. are few of the many
figures that we are tabulating with the help of the respective company annual reports
and the DSE website. Our database has been accumulating from day 1, and more
work is being added on as we are proceeding.
We are having continuous meetings, where our database is being improved and
rectified wherever necessary. University studies should have taught us more than just
theories. Until and unless one really applies the theories in the real world, s/he never
really learns. No matter how many tutorials one takes on how to ride a bicycle, a
person can only really learn the art of riding it when s/he actually puts his/her feet on
the bicycle pedals. We are experiencing constantly how LBSL people are trading,
placing buy/sell orders, analyzing, forecasting and evaluating the stock market. It will
be wrong to say that we are learning. What would be right to say here is that, we are
experiencing. I am part of the PMD (Portfolio Management Division) of LBSL and I
am actually experiencing how the experts here are actually managing portfolios of
clients with investments of millions of taka. And my supervisor, in particular, is
helping us to experience and develop. All in all, in week 2, I feel like my feet are
about to touch the bicycle pedals of portfolio management.

Journal 3 as at 01.02.2015

The third week in LBSL was marked by some spectacular events. The emergence of
Acme Laboratories in the stock market has caused some analytical work for us to be
done, such as finding out a few ratios, seeing if the company has been in a stable
enough position to be invested in. Having done the basic technical analysis of finding
out liquidity and financial ratios, we looked into the more important figures, such as
its last five years NAV, EPS, P/E ratios, along with the price-to-book ratios. We
computed these values in excel sheets for the seniors to look and make major
investment decisions for the company. The seniors have been doing extensive meeting
with the Acme Group for what I can speculate to be as attempting to gain the
placement of Acme Laboratories, to do the underwriting and prospectus development
for them.
Having completed the model for Acme Laboratories, I was also assigned to look into
the pharmaceutical sector for a while, tabulating the figures (as mentioned earlier) of
companies such as Beacon Pharma, Oriental Pharma, ACI, Beximco Pharma, Glaxo
SmithKline, Reckitt Benckiser, etc.. I am really looking forward to being done with
this phase of data tabulation and finding out the premises of actually how to make
money via the stock market. There were also a few meetings of the PMD (Portfolio
Management Division) and I happened to be a part of them. That is where the big
heads of PMD laid out their arguments as to which shares to buy or which to sell off,
and at what prices. The war of words was a mouth-watering delight to see, and it only
made me hungrier to know more and find out more about portfolio management and
stock investments.

Journal 4 as at 08/02/2015

A falling DSE market marked this week in LBSL over a period of three days, and then
the market caught up. Apparently, this fall and then subsequent rise in the DSEX
signifies what can most likely be called a price retracing. We interns were given
new work, which included updating the database that we already had of all the
sectors companies. We had to add the pharmaceuticals and textiles industries to our
already computed database. We also were given brief sessions on what are called
equity research reports, or simply, stock research reports, and we had to download
various equity research reports online (of companies from around the globe). Also, my
fellow intern and I were given the combined task of preparing a market review of the
DSE. This particular market review was computed using data from the DSE website,
and is uploaded daily on our website (www.LBSL.com). We have the market review
posted on the research section of the website.
The market review comprised of the DSE index graph, a few business news, recent
market information such as volume, turnover, gainers, decliners, market movers,
volume movers, commodities prices, etc.. We also included a short description of the
summary of the market for that particular day. Our senior did this part because the use
of terms was very important and it would take, according to him, ten to fifteen days of
our practice, in order to construct a near-perfect market review for LBSL. The
formatting a challenging job, and takes us amateurs a long while. We start from
3:15pm and it takes us until 5:00pm to complete the job. We also have been doing
extensive meetings on updating our database, and also took a especially close look at
the steel industry, trying to look for exploiting potential opportunities.
We also celebrated our CEOs birthday on the 7th and it was a great break or a lunch
out for the LBSL team. What we realized in this week is that, being a research or price
analyst involves being committed, dedicated and very passionate to the work. And the
dedication has to come from within, or else, working in front of ones desktop
continuously can have its after-effects.