For all those people who think that doing business in India is worthwhile because we are an inexpensive destination, please think again. Let us go to the basics of Economics: there are 4 factors of production needed for an enterprise – land, labour, capital, and entrepreneurship. Land: by no stretch of imagination is land cheap […]

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Books, music, etc. are priced differently for different countries. This has been the norm for a very long time. Text books which are very expensive in the US or UK are available in India at eye catching prices. So can you buy in India and sell in the US? technically the answer is yes. Amazon […]

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Happened to watch Star Vijay Tv at about 6am today. One ad was for real estate – and one of the ‘idiots’ of 3 idiots was selling real estate. Did not pay much attention, but thought to myself ‘why the …..should these guys sell products that they do not understand’. Then i reconciled myself saying […]

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Real estate prices are rarely rational! It is just that there is not enough information available in a well organized manner, and people are resistant to change. Take a city like Mumbai. It is impossible to set up a barber shop, an inexpensive eatery (I mean selling dosa at Rs. 50), a general practice or […]

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I have never claimed that I can predict well. However having been a broker and having dealt with bankers, I made two predictions – both went wrong. 1. When the Standard Chartered IDR was lapped up by the Indian population, I had predicted on this blog and said ‘now there will be a spate of  […]

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Ok This is not about Friedman’s book…it is just that last week I got confirmation of this! In a complex world with a lot of barriers to information flow, it was possible to make money on information arbitrage. Not sure how many readers will believe that in the 1990s it was easy for foreign banks […]

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For the true blue speculator one more product is available – the Currency Derivatives. All brokerage houses now provide you with this new product – and is available with just a few clicks. So if you do not know anything about $, Euro, Pound, Jap Yen, ….you are still welcome to deal in EURINR (Euro […]

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