Archive for March, 2008

What to do in a falling market? Tips for a sliding market….

By PV Subramanyam So, what’s a stock market investor’s best response to dropping stock prices? First, forget about rationalising and explaining (or listening to other people explain) why stocks are falling. It’s a pointless exercise at best, and misleading at worst. Second, file the painful experience away as a worthwhile reminder of the riskiness of [...]

falling markets are a falling knife!

It is so funny that when markets are rising, everybody asks you to buy, and when it is falling everybody asks you to sell! One commentator who unabashedly acused another big investor of “luring” the poor investor into the market (when the index was 7000), then changed his mind to predict 25000, then changed his [...]

What a student of financial planning should know…series II

Well he/ she should know life insurance and mutual funds for sure. Should know famous books and names of authors – so that they know where to turn to if they want to know behavioural finance. Or how a Random Walk works. They should also know that Nasim Taleb has written more than one book. [...]

All private companies are a part of LIC!

A new agent joined a private life insurance company. He took about one month to start and then started blazing all records in sales. Like they say “Din Dhugni raat Chougni” sales was happening. He was brilliant, absolutely brilliant. His immediate manager wanted to go with him on a sales call – one does not [...]

Will the market fall futher than 15500?

It is easy for fund managers and television anchors to talk about index being at a pe of 15…but let us not fool ourselves. There are many shares at pe of 58 and 38 – L&T, Tata Power to name a few. How does one deal with these companies? Well a little differently. Why should [...]

Best insurance plan for all

  For many of us who deal with life insurance, we dread the call from the client’s nominee asking for a claim form, do we not?   However, do we expect a call from a client to say “Thanks for the term life insurance that I took from you last year, I am alive, but am [...]