Thanks to my degree, having been a member at the exchanges (albeit corporate), and having been in training, I keep meeting CXOs of mutual funds, reporters and journalists, life insurance companies – and a couple of times even banks. Amazing how they can say the same thing… – invest for the long term -‘I am […]

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Either I am being very touchy about ULIPs or Endowment plans in general or too many pro-ulip articles are appearing in the print media also. The big worry about using numbers in an example is to know enough about statistics – mean, median, mode, standard deviation and NOISE. Noise is the distortion that is caused […]

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A couple of days ago I got a mail saying “Insurance is a waste of money. I am 62 and never needed it”. It is such an amazingly stupid statement I could not believe it. ‘I’ have not needed it does not mean ‘nobody’ needs it. So it is foolish to talk like this. It […]

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Why is it that in the case of Satyam and in the world wide mess it is largely the equity shareholder who is losing? Welcome to the world of moral hazard. When you lend money to a bank (which may be insolvent even as you are lending) or to a country (which technically cannot become […]

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Insurance – Life or General is largely about answering some questions like “What if….goes wrong”? The fundamental objective of insurance is to provide a means to offset the burden of financial loss. Think of insurance as a premium paid for “transfer of risk” premium. An alternative method of dealing with risk. You are paying an […]

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