On the beach in Izu

Thor walking on the Katase Hot Springs rocky coast.

Malaysian History Lesson: Melaka

I thought having a weekend in Malaysia would be great. I had been in KL for an ETF conference, and then needed to be there the following Tuesday for the FTSE Bursa Malaysia Committee meeting. Rather than get on the airplane again over the weekend, I looked for a place to chill out.

The problem was that none of the Starwood resorts would let me use my hotel points on the weekend! Ha! So much for no blackout periods....... Rather than pay top dollar, then, I hit on a trip down the coast to the port of Melaka, aka Malacca.

So I bussed there from KL on Saturday afternoon and stayed at the Hotel Puri on Millionaires Street - where all the rich Chinese took up residence after the Dutch moved out. One block to the north was Jonker Street with its antique shops, restaurants and sweet shops.

It was hot and humid, so I didn't venture out more than a couple hours, coming back to the Puri's air conditioning and shower. Whew!

In one of the antique shops on Jonker a Chinese Nyonya shopkeeper took me through her collection of Buddhist, Chinese, Thai, Cambodian, Indian and other culture's icons, paintings, carvings, metal works - explaining the talisman function or symbolism of everything. She was a good saleswoman. As a souvenir, but also an Indian talisman, I settled on a Cambodian sandstone carving of Ganesh. I had been terribly impressed with the Ganesh at the National Stock Exchange in Bombay and a collection of small Ganesh in the office of the CEO of UTI Bank. Having my own Ganesh with the pending launch of the FTSE IDFC India Infrastructure Index Series seemed a good thing. So I paid the RM160 she was asking for and took the Indian god of good fortune back to KL with me. Later in the week Citigroup agreed to licence the indices with a six months exclusivity for US$88,000. Just the week earlier we had been arguing about them paying anything at all for the exclusivity, and now we got nearly a 100% premium on the base fee of US$48,000. Ha! Ganesh was thanking me from liberating him from that Melaka trinket shop and putting him on the front line where he belongs. He won't be some benchwarmer on the Hoff Team!

I left Melaka by car on Monday morning to go back to Kuala Lumpur to continue my meetings; then flew to Hong Kong Tuesday evening to prepare for another series of meetings for that market.

The big word at FTSE these days is multitasking!

Investor Freedom!

Izu Moon

Here's a typical view from the Hoff deck on a Saturday night with the full moon.