this article appeared in reuters india’s personal financial page…. If my students do not ask “When will the market touch 21000 again?”, I ask them the same question. The most optimistic answer I have got is 6 months and the most pessimistic answer I have got is 2 years. Very clearly short term memory is [...]
For most Americans, Christmas has been Hijacked. Or whatever was left of Christmas after the dreaded R word, the non-bail out of the auto giants, but the top most question is: In the fraud dictionary, Has Madoff replaced Ponzi? Every year, I watch, good, honest, hard-working people go and lose a lot of money [...]
To provide liquidity to the markets, the FED, the European authorities, along with their Asian counterparts have decided to swamp the banks with money. However, this is likely to come with strings (ropes?) attached. No money comes free – immaterial of whether it is called Debt or Equity. The authorities have put a lot of [...]
Have you ever been tempted by newsletters, sooth sayers, channels, websites offering you immense riches by “timing the market”? I bet you have been. Each year millions of people (worldwide) spend ’000s of dollars to subscribe to newsletters, email services, sms alerts, phone calls, etc. trying to beat the market. If you see the long [...]
Risk to a great extent is counter-intutive! When the index was 3000 (circa 2002) I would meet bank Relationship Managers and IFAs (Independent Financial Analysts) who would tell me “Sir, I only sell debt funds. They are so secure, and you know last year gilt funds yielded 19% p.a!”. I would gently probe and say [...]
There is a huge mafia out there pretending to create above market returns for all of us! They go by various names – fund manager, portfolio manager, equity analysts etc. If all of us get better than average returns, will the average itself not have gone up? So there are a few things you should [...]