Quick Edit: A sharp upswing. Rising indices. Yet, many investors find their portfolios lagging. Why? Portfolios are to be designed keeping the future in mind. Given the dynamic nature of economic activity, businesses which performed well a few years back are struggling now. If your portfolio was built in 2008…
Quick Edit: The journey from bear markets to bull markets is often short and swift. When markets move from one phase to another, they give very little time for investors to react. Investors often come on board very late for this very reason. Now is clearly not the time to…
Quick Edit: Watching business TV never looked more comic. Here were these acknowledged brains – global investment strategists, fund managers and analysts making sure-shot predictions of a terrible phase for the Indian markets just a few weeks back. The same people are now back with positive predictions for the indices.…
Buying insurance is no easy job. The maze of products that have been designed by insurance companies have made decision making a nightmare. Most products are sold to you with e devil hidden in the fine print. The hard sell by agents make it hard to judge the truth. Worse,…
Quick edit: The rupee at 49.50 Vs. the dollar. NIFTY at 5200. These would have been rubbished off as wishful thinking if one had dared to make a prediction on January 1, 2012. We actually had global strategists of foreign brokerages descend in Delhi and predict gloom and doom. Yet,…
The IPO and stock investing are almost synonymous to the investor. Investors view the IPO as the most preferred entry point into the stock market. The reasons are historic. The IPO had a history of delivering great returns if the investor stuck to quality companies. But, that was in a…
Habitual saving is an innately Indian trait. Most of us save a good part of our earnings. What’s a good part supposed to be? Typically, Indians save over 25% of what we earn. I do know people who save upward of 60% of what they earned for their entire work…
Imagine. You just hit 30. You’ve worked for 8 years in good jobs. Pay packs expanded through the period. Lifestyles were improving all through. You broke away from the tough struggles of life and found what you wanted. In fact, you always found what you wanted. It is the time…
Quick Edit: The market mood in early 2012 reminds us of the year 2001. Then, the tech crash of 2000 had scared investors away from equities as an asset class. The fear of more bad news and prolonged weakness in economic sentiment was pervasive. Nobody was sure where the new…
Year – ends have their own way of playing out on the investor psyche. The year end is not really an event of economic significance. Not much changes on the economic front when the calendar turns into a new year. Yet, there are different schools of analysis predicting how investor…
Success stories often sound like fairy tales where one is led to believe that sudden transformations change a person’s fortunes. But, in practice, transformation is a process. Most processes are slow, measured, and milestone-driven. Each little change that a person made to the process matters greatly to the outcome. But,…