Buying a financial product: using an agent

There are many people who prefer buying mutual funds, medical and life insurance and many financial products through an agent. Normal reasons why people use an agent are as follows: He helps with filling up the form He knows what is happening in the industry and will be able to give some useful advice He [...]

New Pension Products

Today sadly, there is no pension plan which meets all your requirements. For example Templeton and UTI (both asset management companies) have a pension plan – and it is a one size fits all type of a plan. Typically a pension plan should have various options at the ACCUMULATION stage – when a person is [...]

Buying cheap stocks!

The perennial search for quick money takes us through lot of unknown routes. It takes a lot of hard work, luck, government lobbying, team building – to create companies like Tata Steel, Hdfc, TCS, Infosys, Reliance, Honda Motors. It takes years, if not decades to create good companies too! However a few people feel (and [...]

Foreigners Investing and Market volatility!

  A finance ministry official says “If foreigners are allowed to invest directly in India, volatility will go down in Indian markets”. I am completely unable to understand this. Like I cannot understand what is wrong with Intra day or Intra month volatility! Markets have always been volatile – the question is how volatile that [...]

6 Important Rules for Retirees…and other Investors

There are some basic rules for investors and more importantly for Retirees: 1. What you do not understand, is not worth knowing: If a financial planner tells you ‘Sir, you do not understand this, I will explain it to you’ – please be IMPOLITE and ask him to …….. (unprintable!). NOBODY (repeat NOBODY) is interested [...]

Media advise…

I watched 5 minutes on a channel that was discussing Financial Advisors. An interesting suggestion came up – one of the panelists said an advisor should get say 20% of the profits and about 10-15% of the losses in a clients portfolio. Brilliant advise. If you do not know what a portfolio manager does and [...]