“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

And with this I have to agree with Benjamin Franklin.

It appears the Philippines has regulations on taxes that’s different from what I learned during the course of my MBA. Businesses have three basic types of taxes here:

1. Value Added Tax – is a business tax imposed on and collected from the seller in the course of trade or business on the sale of properties, lease of goods or properties, or rendering of services. The business is charged the difference between the percentage tax on the gross sales amount and the percentage tax on Cost of Goods Sold/Costs incurred to deliver the service. Thus, this tax is directly proportional to the margin a business sets to make profit and is also an indirect form of tax that can be transferred to the buyer.
2. Percentage Tax – is a business tax imposed on persons or entities whose gross annual sales or receipts do not exceed Php 1,500,000 and are not VAT-registered. You can look at this as the barrier to entry for small entrants, as they get taxed on the gross sales amount of their receipts (not their Net Income) and simply says they get taxed regardless of whether the business is earning or losing money.
3. Excise Tax – apply to goods manufactured or produced in the Philippines for domestic sales or consumption, and is imposed in addition to the Value Added Tax.

Bottom-line: Tax rules are different for every location.

My modern day hero

Everyone knows that the person I admire the most is Elon Musk–for his genius and his ambitious goal of bringing mankind to Mars–but he’s not my modern day hero. The fact of the matter is, that I attribute the latter to Eugene Fama. Now if you have no clue of who he is, I’d ask this question: “Do you remember CAPM?” If you don’t, then you’re already lost. If you do, then you’re in luck. What he came up with (along with Kenneth French) is way better.

The Case for Finance

A lot of people had been asking me on my decision to hop from one industry to another and ever since I never came up with a really good answer to the question. So now I’m writing this blog post to uncover what’s running inside my head when I decided to take the plunge to this rich (literally) new world of Finance.

A Brief History of Time

One of the major foundations of modern finance is the Market Efficiency Theory. Simply put, it says that the current market prices are reflective of all the information available to the market.

In this video, Eugene Fama gives us a brief history of the theory, which I believe is pretty much the same journey in understanding the history of modern finance.

On Lakes and Swans

So what is Swan Lake, what’s a black swan, and why am I a diviner?

Hello World

This is my very first post and I’m new to WordPress.

I created this blog to capture my thoughts around three particular domains of knowledge that I’m particularly passionate about. Hopefully this blog can act as a channel to pass on the learning I achieve everyday and serve as an archive of the knowledge base that I will be building.