Will a life insurance claim be denied if the insured died in an accident where he was the driver without a valid driver’s license or valid vehicle insurance? Thanks to a question by Ganapathy Krishnan at Facebook group, Asan Ideas for Wealth, I was able to obtain an authoritative answer to this question from the insurance…
Continue reading →Use this tool to analyse the consistency in the performance of your mutual fund holdings with respect to their benchmarks (72 indices from BSE and NSE). You can also use this to evaluate new funds that you want to invest in. This is a major update (version 5 ) to the freefincal mutual fund rolling…
Continue reading →Financial products get mis-sold every minute of every day. Interpretations of what constitutes miss-selling depend on who you ask. They range from persuasion (bending the rules) to outright fraud (breaking them). In this case, the victim is the buyer. There is yet another form of miss-selling where both the buyer and seller are victims. In this…
Continue reading →In this post, I discuss what investors need to know before reaching for Best/Top mutual funds with a past vs future performance study along the lines of the one made earlier: Mutual Fund Investing: Does Past Performance Matter? So this post is more of an update to that analysis. Let us assume that you make a lump…
Continue reading →This is an update to the fantastic Nifty One-stop shop created by Pranav Date. Now you can download historical total returns index (TRI) data (dividends assumed to be reinvested) of 52 NSE Indices. You can also download the price history, from 59 Indices, PE, PB and Div Yield data of 51 NSE Indices and the…
Continue reading →In this guest post, R. Srivatsan discusses the pros and cons of using a stock valuation technique known as Earnings Power Box, introduced by Hewitt Heiserman, Jr, in his book, “It’s Earnings That Count: Finding Stocks with Earnings Power for Long-Term Profits”. Regular readers maybe aware that Srivatsan has already introduced the technique in his first post: It’s…
Continue reading →Shall we try out the following experiment? Pick a fund that you invest in. Say Quantum Long Term Equity or PPFAS LTVF or HDFC Balanced. Enter all the transactions in that fund(s) in a portfolio tracker. Then add a couple of index mutual funds like Franklin Nifty Fund or ICICI Nifty Next 50 fund. Use the same…
Continue reading →The media is blaring at full blast about the number of jobs (not just IT) that could be lost in 2017 and beyond and how it could be “bigger” than 2008. Whether there is merit in such speculation remains to be seen. What should be clear to anyone working in a non-government establishment is that…
Continue reading →If you’ve been through the last few posts, you’ll know that my new book co-authored with Pranav Surya is out for pre-order and we’re running a crazy small experiment of eliminating the middleman (aka Amazon). This enables us to provide you the book at a discounted price of 180 as compared to 249 on Amazon…
Continue reading →In this post, my GameChanger co-author, Pranav Surya offers a sneak peak into the book. The hard copy is now available for pre-order for just Rs. 180 (offer closes Sunday 21st midnight) before it retails at Amazon Rs. 249 from Monday. We also have two exciting add-ons at a small additional cost. This will be announced…
Continue reading →It was when my seven-year-old son declared that he wanted to be a fruit seller that I realised that the …. er … apple has not fallen far from the tree! Yes, I too had similar aspirations and I nurtured it for years until I heard the plight of a pharmacist. In this post, I…
Continue reading →I am a typical middle-class Indian in terms of birth, upbringing and manner. My interest in money management and investing stems from despair and anguish and not interest or passion. In this post, I discuss my failures, shocks and how they acted as a catalyst to seek financial independence. Although driven my specific events, my…
Continue reading →The freefincal automated stock analyzer (screener.in edition) now has now auto-generates Hewitt Heiserman Jr.’s Earnings Power Box, thanks to efforts of R. Srivatsan, who explained how to identify good business from bad one using it: It’s Earnings That Count: Forget the next Infy; Can you identify the next Satyam? I had previously published a version that uses morningstar…
Continue reading →Between Jan 21st, 2008 and July 6th, 2009, the Sensex witnessed 11 single-day falls of 700+ points. The highest was 1,408.35 points on Jan 21st. In this post, I discuss the simple arguments put forth by Edgar E Peters to understand why such stock market crashes occur, in his book, Fractal Market Analysis. It is human nature to try…
Continue reading →In July 2016, while researching on the Nifty Smart Beta Indices, I accidentally realised that the Nifty Next 50 (formerly Nifty Jr) is one tough benchmark to beat. When I compiled the list of equity mutual fund benchmarks, I could not find any active mutual fund benchmarked to the Nifty Next 50! Now, if that…
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