Archive for February, 2009

Market timing or Time in the market: Myth busting

Myth: Time in the market is more important that timing the market.
This says that the longer you stay invested, the more chances of you making money. Again, only partly true. Good investors know that timing is all. While no one can call market peaks or troughs correctly all the time, we all can figure out [...]

Gold : buy or sell?

Gold: buy or sell?
Most mothers (in India for sure, internationally, I do not know) are telling their sons and daughters – Gold is far better than the shares that you have. In the last 1 year it has given 32% return vs. -45% in your shares, so buy gold.
To most common people this looks like [...]

Monthly expenses can really add up…

My parents always managed to make ends meet, even though my mother was a stay-at-home mom and my father worked in a factory! Neither my sibling nor I did things like       ‘tuitions’ and these kind of income supplementing stuff.  Of course unlike many people of my father’s generation he did not have to support his [...]

Cash is a strategic asset: why hold cash at all?

Why should I hold cash? A very good question which many people keep asking. It is true of individuals, corporations and funds.
Well cash is held for 3 main purposes (any Economics tutorial 101 will tell you this):
1. Transactions Motive – to do transactions
2. Precautionary Motive – just in case I need something. Just in case…just [...]

label of a mutual fund makes no sense!

If you have seen the Sprite ad, you will appreciate this for sure! Mutual funds have a compulsion to raise money continuously – and this they can do only if their sales team is able to sell.
However, in a very funny way, ‘what sells is what gets sold’ – so they need to come out [...]

Re-negotiate your Home mortgage!

A few days ago India’s largest bank dropped its interest rates on home loans to 8%. This is nothing short of sensational – considering that at the same time one of the top Indian groups (let us say Bluest of Blue) are willing to borrow in the same market at 12% per annum!
However, I have [...]

Guide to personal finance: Lesson 101

A Few weeks ago I had done a post on how to look at your personal finances like a corporate would. The suggestions were to learn what is burn rate, savings rate, take charge of financial goals etc. However many people have written in to say all this is too complicated.
So I decided to tell [...]

Steps in buying life insurance

A few days ago I had done a post saying from whom you should not buy a life insurance policy, here is the sequel to that
Having said what CANNOT be the reasons NOT to buy from a set of people, lets look at what you can do to protect / save yourself from trouble:
1. Ask [...]

Subhiksha, Icici Ventures and Premji

A senior official in the corporate affairs ministry told ET that “Icici Ventures wants a probe covering the entire working of Subhiksha to uncover possible mismanagement”.
This is amazing. Icici ventures has also said that the accounts for June 2008 has not been presented to the Board of directors. And yet in Oct, 2008 they found [...]

Vote on account: what to expect?

I wrote this article a few days ago. However the tense is the only thing that has gone wrong…so here it is…
Soon a budget will be announced and the media will be all excited. There will be discussions, articles, chats, views on the budget.
One such program was on air a few days ago on Cnbc, [...]