Archive for January, 2010

Financial Planning: Theory vs. Practical

Last week I happened to meet a lady who is an IFA. She has been selling LIC policies for the past 10 years and has also added mutual funds, government schemes, general insurance, to her portfolio. She lives in a society that has about 130 houses and many of them are her customers.
She does not [...]

Scrutiny Retards performance?

http://www.subramoney.com/book-written-by-me/
Star Plus is perhaps the greatest cricket expert who has never played for India. Since they know everything about the game, they should be made the non playing captain of the team. Every ball bowled, every word spoken, every catch taken – and of course dropped, every injury is analysed threadbare.
Conclusion: Indian bowlers bowled badly [...]

Wrong career choice?

http://www.subramoney.com/book-written-by-me/
After spending 10 years in the ‘profession‘ of training here are some expensive learning:
Television is an entertainment source – not an education source.
To be good in the media you need to say something interesting / controversial. Largely you can say anything and be sure that it will not come back to haunt you, because the [...]

Corporate Governance is not easy

Somewhere in the quest for scale individualism goes for a toss. All doctors are urged to think in a particular way by the pharma industry. All Chartered Accountants are part of a body which either guides or prods them to think on same lines..somewhere the independent thinking individual is being smothered if not killed.
Look at [...]

Financial Planning: Micro and Macro

http://www.subramoney.com/book-written-by-me/
The word financial planning has now received a lot of attention. Thus whether it is a brokerage company or a credit card issuing bank everybody uses this word. It will not be surprising to see cell phone operators calling and offering ‘FP” services on the phone soon
FP is all encompassing and it is [...]

Epitaph of the Mutual Fund industry: 2011 or 2012?

A few days back I wrote a piece saying the “The future of the mutual fund industry is very B…”. Now you could interpret this B as bleak or bright! I have already written about the bright part, now let me write a little about the bleak part.
So here it is….
Since August, 2009 there has [...]

My investment mistakes – part 3

Now that you have heard about a few of my mistakes, let me tell you more! So here it is:
Overconfidence:
It took me about 20 years of being in the markets to realize that understanding markets is difficult if not impossible. It is not the first few trades that make you confident – it is the [...]

Must watch Rocket Singh!

 
One of the best sales men I know told me “You must watch Rocket Singh” – to me this is not a great advise – my movie watching is very, very little if at all. However I did watch Rocket Singh. I now feel all my ‘friends’ who are not in the sales profession – [...]

Investor Story: Adviser’s version

Dear Mr. Subra
I am writing this to you – but please do not disclose my name and email id – many of my clients read your blog. The ratio of articles that you write against the adviser is quite a lot, but you also write some articles favoring them. Hence I decided to write to [...]

FPO: NTPC

Now the government wants to do a follow on public offer in all its listed companies. This will help it garner resources (badly needed) to reduce the budget deficit.
However it cannot do what the ordinary promoter does – talking up the price, rigging it up and sending it on a frenzy, splitting the shares into [...]