I often wonder about who is a teacher? Or what defines a good teacher. People often expect a teacher to inspire and motivate. How exactly does a teacher do that? A teacher without passion can suck out the soul and spirit of eager young minds much like a dementor in the Harry Potter stories. Unfortunately, many join up as teachers because…
Continue reading →A financial instrument that lets you defer paying taxes until maturity is way superior to one where you need to report and pay tax on the income generated each year of investment. That is the single most important reason why debt mutual funds are superior to fixed deposits. This is an illustration of the power of…
Continue reading →There seems to be a common perception that those who invest via SIPs are expected to do nothing else but invest systematically. Thanks to certain “advisors” many investors believe that all one has to do to get “good returns” from equity is to continue a SIP through market ups and downs. Then it will all…
Continue reading →I have received repeated request to write about investment options available for NRIs. However, since it is an area that I know little about, I requested fee-only financial planner Melvin Joseph‘s help to list the best NRI investment options in India. -=-=-=-=-=-=- India has the largest population of people living abroad in the world. As…
Continue reading →Investing requires a target. The future needs of our family or financial goals serve as natural targets. Goal-based investing is a process in which invest according to the needs of the goals. The amount to be invested and where it will be invested will depend on the nature of the goal. Once the goal based…
Continue reading →Dear young earner, what do you wish to optimise? Your money? Or your time? Would you rather dig deeper and deeper into money management and learn “best” ways to “optimise” money management? Or would you rather spend some mandatory time in getting your finances in order and let it run in auto-pilot with periodic maintenance…
Continue reading →Here is a discussion on various types of insurance cover, like term insurance, health insurance, accident insurance and critical illness discussion. This is the video of Ashal’s forenoon talk at the 6th Bangalore Investing Workshop. For the first 1.5 hours of the workshop, the audience kept asking questions to Ashal about the above-mentioned insurance cover. The…
Continue reading →For a given financial goal, how do I determine the asset allocation? That is, how do I decide the amount of equity exposure and therefore, fixed income or debt exposure? Let us try and discuss this and use a calculator to see how different asset allocations will affect the future corpus intended for a financial…
Continue reading →Use this sheet to gauge the performance of equity mutual funds on a risk-adjusted basis for investment durations ranging from the past 1 year to the past 10 years. Version 6 now includes six nifty strategy indices (smart beta) for analysing mutual fund performance. The Nifty strategic indices are tougher benchmarks for mutual funds to beat….
Continue reading →My mother retired 13 years ago and started receiving a pension that was indexed to inflation. Not only did it increase twice a year, thanks to DA hikes, it also increased as a result of pay commissions. The average year on year growth of her pension is close to 13%. This is an astounding number…
Continue reading →The average, also known as the arithmetic average or the mean of a set of values is a nice and simple number that is easy to calculate and interpret. However, it not valid under all circumstances and must be used with caution. Given a set of numbers, we cannot blindly calculate the average – take the…
Continue reading →Are you worried the high expense ratios of active mutual funds? Are you looking for an index fund that has performed reasonably well with low expenses? Then you can consider a Nifty Next 50 index fund instead of active funds in the multi-cap category. Why? As pointed out in a series of posts on the Nifty Strategy…
Continue reading →Here is an Excel stock screener to scan & filter Indian stocks with multiple criteria. Cap-wise screening & sector-wise screening possible. It gets data from Value Research and allows the user to screen capitalization-wise and sector-wise. I have always wanted to build a stock screener and hence this sheet. I am well aware that they are…
Continue reading →Here is a free stock analysis spreadsheet that can automatically process balance sheet data from screener.in. This is the 12th edition of the freefincal automated stock analyzer. The previous versions used MorningStar.in financial data. However, since I received requests to make a spreadsheet that can process screener.in data, I thought I will give it a try….
Continue reading →Never hold your mutual fund units in demat form! In this post, Anish Mohan draws from personal experience to explain why dematerialisation is a terrible idea with no benefits whatsoever! What is Dematerialisation? Dematerialisation is the process by which a physical certificate of holding a share or bond or mutual fund unit is converted into an “electronic…
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