Tian

  Blog 3:- Apple’s Bold AI Expansion: A Corporate Finance Reflection Using Gibb’s Cycle The moment I heard about Apple's $100 billion in artificial intelligence investments in early 2025 (Acton, 2025), a thunderbolt of awe hit me. This was among the largest R&D budgets put into any tech industry toward morphing the Apple ecosystem—from an upgraded Siri to AI integration for iPhones, MacBooks, and Vision Pro. This was no mere breaking news for me; it was a moment to be halted and pondered over. At the time, I had finished a newly completed module on capital budgeting and strategic investment, and suddenly, what I had studied in theory was beginning to unfold before my eyes. It made me think: if I were part of Apple’s finance team, how should I assess the risks and returns of such an extremely large investment? (Source: Acton, 2025) I remember being excited initially—a mix of excitement about the vision, the scale, and the potential for future development. Such feelings t...

  Blog 2:- Navigating the 2025 Auto Tariffs: A Personal Investment Reflection In March 2025, when President Triumph announced a 25% tariff on imported automobiles, I wasn’t just reading about it in the news; I was feeling it unfold in real-time" (Inagaki et al., 2025). At that moment, nearly 40% of my investment portfolio was tied into automotive stocks, including Tesla, General Motors, and Ford shares. I had always thought that the auto industry was one of the more secure and stable sectors. In my mind, cars were not only necessities but also icons of innovation and continuity-the sudden market reaction affect-feeling loud collapsing prices across the board felt like a very direct blow to me, both emotionally and financially. That myth I had constructed about the "safety" of being in the auto sector crumbled within a matter of hours. (Source: The Free Press Journal, 2025) Before this incident, my investing philosophy had remained fairly simple i.e. I would look...

  Blog 1:- Reflecting on Financial Ethics: The Trafigura Bribery Scandal In early 2024, the Trafigura bribery scandal emerged to make headlines and sent a deep shiver down my senses. The commodity-trading giant Trafigura admitted to paying bribes to Brazilian officials to secure oil contracts, and in doing so agreed to a $127 million-plus penalty (Hook, 2024). Such a revelation was parlaying into decades of corruption from at least 2003, with falsified records, secret payments, and an entrenched disregard for ethics. It immediately caught my attention as someone studying finance and wanting to work in an international corporate world-the sheer magnitude of the wrongdoing challenged my paradigm of what professionalism and ethics should stand for in global finance. (Source: Copperbelt Katanga, 2023) When I first read of the scandal, I was shaken and then saddened. I had always held it in my mind that Trafigura and other big firms are high-level structured and well-regulated i...