Feng-shui

No, this is not about that lame horror movie starring the misguided daughter of an ex-president :P I was just watching a feature on feng-shui on the National Geographic. I find it amazing how feng-shui is so popular. In Hong Kong they build buildings based on it. In fact, there’s a building with a hole on it to allow the dragons of the mountain behind the building to drink at the bay in front of the building. So, thoughtful of them :D And at the HSBC, they have a good luck escalator and a bad luck escalator . The good luck escalator is for employees while the bad luck escalator is for clients. The result is that the bank gets higher revenues. Very comforting thought if you’re a client, huh? :P

In another case of feng-shui strangeness, my finance professor related to use how a financial institution in Hong Kong contracted the services of feng-shui masters to predict the stock market for a certain year. The actual outcome turned out eerily like the predicted outcome. So alike that they contracted the services of the feng-shui masters to do the same for the following year. Although my professor didn’t say what the result for the following year was, he said that they expected that the actual outcome would also follow the predicted outcome. Make you wonder, though, if all those feng-shui believing traders traded, consciously or unconsciously, based on the prediction. A case of a self-fulfilling prophecy. But then, doesn’t superstition work that way?