In 1979 when I did my first trade, I had to walk to my broker’s house in the night and discuss what to buy and sell. Sure we both had phones at home (2 phones each actually) but most of the talk happened face to face. He would call around 5 pm or later to […]

I do attend mutual fund / life insurance meets and conclaves – but very rarely. So when I was accepting Mitra Joshi’s invite for the Mutual fund conclave, I was not sure whether I would go, but I did go yesterday. This was held at Softel Mumbai – the one at BKC. Let me first […]

You talk to the big brokerage firms and they keep wondering why are they still in the brokerage business. Some of the older players are now well established – like Kotak, Icici and of course Hdfc. However the role of the brokerage business in the success of banks like Axis, Standard Chartered, Hsbc, Idbi, is […]

Let us assume for a minute that you have only 2 asset classes – how much should be in equity and how much should be in debt. THAT IS THE MILLION DOLLAR question, that we need to answer while wondering what is asset allocation. So let us look at that. ULTIMATELY immaterial of what questionnaire […]

Assuming that you got about 8% interest in bank deposits over the past 10 years, and that you paid 30% tax on that. This means you got about 5.6% post tax from your bank EACH YEAR…. How much did you REALLY GET..well you got nominal return (5.6%) and the resultant inflation is here…so your real […]

I did a financial planning session at Pune (Deccan Gymkhana, courtesy of Prof Anil Agashe for the lovely location and the nice hall)…and it was well attended. Some of the interesting observations / comments… – almost all the people who were there were people who knew me because of www.subramoney.com – many of the people […]

In almost all the training sessions – whether it is a relationship managers training or a independent financial analyst’s training, one complaint comes through very loudly. It goes like this: “I have a client who invests 5 a month in a mutual fund regularly. However I am under tremendous pressure to sell him a unit […]