Every day, more and more people are waking up to a grim reality – their medical insurance costs are sky rocketing. In this post, I discuss practical and reliable ways to lower medical insurance costs with an important caveat – there is no free lunch (you need to give up some to get some). Announcement:…
Continue reading →Axis Dynamic Equity Fund is yet another dynamic equity fund that proposes to tactically change its asset allocation to reduce risk (with no guarantee that the backtesting will work in the future). When Anish Mohan sent me the funds KIM*, his description piqued my interest to look deeper. Here is a description of its strategy….
Continue reading →A friend asked me this question: “I currently have an asset allocation of 60% equity and 40% fixed income. My retirement is many years away. Why can’t I continue to hold 60% equity after retirement too? In fact, all my life?”. Since the answer is not a simple “yes” or “no” and since it can…
Continue reading →So you think you have become financial literate by starting equity mutual fund SIPs assuming that they will beat inflation in the “long run”? Don’t get too comfortable with equity. Don’t assume those fairytale returns from DSP nanocap fund will last. This is how a real market crash “feels” like. Preparing for a presentation can be…
Continue reading →Here are some important business lessons from the box office collections of three movies released this year: The Mummy, Split and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. As a movie buff, I am also a box-office receipts buff and all money information is from www.boxofficemojo.com (as on June 28th 2017). Announcement: As readers may know…
Continue reading →In this post aimed at new mutual fund investors, I discuss the basic aspects of the mutual fund redemption process. Knowledge of this is crucial from the viewpoints of risk, reward, taxation and product selection. Experienced investors may find this information quite basic, but please do consider sharing this post to someone who may benefit…
Continue reading →Here is a short compilation of step by step guides and tools to screen stocks and identify financially sound and good businesses. 1: A guest post by the mature and level-headed Krishna Kishore: A Guide to Understanding Stock Screeners Krishna is a regular speaker at the Bangalore DIY investor meets. 2: A guest post by the erudite Indraneal…
Continue reading →Use this Excel sheet to automatically calculate rolling upside capture, downside capture and rolling returns for equity mutual funds by comparing them with 72 BSE/NSE Indices. While the rolling returns provide a consistency measure for overall reward (return), the upside/downside captures provide a consistency measure for outperformance during up-market periods and protection during down-market periods…
Continue reading →Under certain circumstances, long-term or short-term capital gains tax to be paid can be significantly reduced. It is not routinely possible and therefore important to recognize this possibility if and when it arises. This post stems from a discussion at Facebook Group Asan Ideas for Wealth, started by Subrat Dash, with the circumstances explained by…
Continue reading →Readers may be aware that I often use rolling returns, where anualized return is calculated between two dates and the calculation dates are shifted to the next possible business day. I have developed a rolling downside and upside capture calculator and before publishing it, would like to discuss what they are in simple terms. A…
Continue reading →Have you not read the mutual fund past performance disclaimer? Then how can we select mutual funds using past performance alone? In this post, I discuss this question asked by Swati Joshi. It is no secret many in the financial services dislike me. So their favorite approach to criticism is to claim that my “fund…
Continue reading →Here are two simple mutual fund screeners to automatically create a shortlist from a chosen mutual fund category. I have combined the monthly screener data – 3,5,7 year performance consistency and 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11Y SIP and lump sum data to create this screener. Do give this a go and let me know what you think. Why Did…
Continue reading →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…
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