I'm typing these out of boredom and the need to distract myself. They don't make sense, but its useless random stuff like this that gets posted to blog. So bear with me if you are reading it, and laugh at me all you will.

In investment finance, we have a portfoilo of securities to invest in, to hopefully grant us returns on our investment. In each of our lives, the same holds true. We have a portfoilo in which we invest in, both in time and money. We hope for a good return on our investment, growing in our lives in many ways. We could be more well-off materially, we could be happier emotionally and we could have a more fulfilling life. There's also spiritual growth if we choose to invest in religion, and perhaps growth in maturity, or in many ways.

In order to pursue our goals, we invest in many activities. Work, church, gym, clubs, movies, sports etc. Our portfoilo of life conists of all the available securities/activities that we can invest in to achieve our goals. There may be a better security out there, perhaps a better job, a tour to a farway place that we've always wanted to go, a more suitable church, etc.

In our own macroeconomy, there are factors that can affect our portfoilo returns. The performance of the economy is a factor; if you get retrenched you are gonna affect your entire portfoilo. You might have to readjust your portfolio from going to club to finding a job and forgoing many of your other activities because of the change in your income, which is indirectly linked to your job. Each factor has a diversifiable and a nondiversifiable component. For example, you might have a lousy day at work, but this might be made up by that hot girl's acquaintance you made at a club, or by the support that a prayer meeting provides.

Of course, there are many other macroeconomic factors that can influence you. Your family's wellbeing might be another one. Something else, say, maybe Chinese New Year, or Christmas, might reap you returns, in terms of happiness, or leisure time from the holidays, or material gains from angbaos/presents.

Obviously, love is another major factor. A relationship can improve your overall return, or it could decrease it overall. And much of this influence is non-diversifiable; it's outside your control, but it's still gonna affect your portfolio.

Then we have the beta of returns. Beta is the sensitivity that your returns has with the factor in question. Say you are a sports fan and support Newcastle 100%. You attend every single game, and spend time at the pub talking about Newcastle after games. Obviously, Newcastle's perfomance in the pitch will affect you considerably. You can probably have a high beta, say about 1, to Newcastle's performance, if you could both make Newcastle's performance into an index and find some way of quantitatively measuring your beta to that index. A casual fan, like me, would probably have a much lower beta of perhaps 0.2 to that index.

So love. Love is a macroeconomic factor to you, because in your own macroeconomy, love influences the entire market. Of course, the state of love for everyone is highly different, and so is the beta that everyone has towards love. Someone who is not romantically involved may only have a beta of 0.1 to love. You can't completely discount the effect of love; maybe the cute guy you've been eyeing at your work just got attached. You might be slightly affected, perhaps maybe as much as 0.0005 of a beta. It's just that the other girl who's been flirting with him might have a higher beta, of say 0.5.

Love is highly volatile, as a factor. In a rough relationship, it could be more volatile than a long term, stable and monotonous one. But that stable relationship could start to have negative returns. Try as you might, it's very unlikely for you to reap any returns, and then that girl who has been flirting with you suddenly seems like a viable investment.

But love, oh, being so volatile, makes options that much more valuable. The option to take a new job makes it seem so much more valuable seeing how you have an additional reason to take the job on to save up for marriage. Or perhaps a tour overseas is more valuable if you are going with the one you love than with friends.

Love. Can't do without it. You could diversify away your exposure to the risk of love by not investing in any love-related securities. But you can't fully diversify it away. There might be times where you'll be envious of that couple you saw in the park. That has a minute effect on your overall portfolio too.

So what am I trying to say? I'm saying that love is one of the most volatile factors for humans. Few things can affect a person as much as love. A person in love smiles in his sleep. A person without love cries himself to sleep. A breakup is a nightmare for anyone involved in a relatinship; a blossoming relationship could make everything seem so much better.

What's your beta to love? If you have a low beta (<1) then you might think yourself lucky. But you are forgoing any upsides to what love can offer you, while you get rid of that downside to it.

The key to any portfolio is to achieve a certain level of return. You only take on the risks that you are prepared to take, while you eliminate those which you don't want to. I think a relationship, and consequently a marriage, is one of the biggest risks that anyone can take. But at the same time, everyone takes on the risks, because it is one of the very few ways to really reap hugely abnormal returns. It's the same reasoning why people buy 4D: there's a high risk, but there's potentially high returns, possibly higher than if you just stick to a fully diversified portfolio and higher than what you could ever achieve.

So yah, there's really no point I'm trying to make. I was just bored enough to wanna express things, especially love, in finance terms. Well, I think I did quite a good job of it. Makes sense to me so far. What's your beta to love? In fact, what's your beta to the many macroeconomic factors of your life? For most people, love, family, friends, work, studies, leisure are the main factors, but there could be alot more. If you had to derive a figure, what would it be?