“Why should I invest in equity if it comes with no guarantees?!” A mighty fine question wouldn’t you say? In this post, I discuss the nature of stock market returns and why despite the lack of guarantees, it still a necessary investment avenue for some. First of all, let me make it clear that I am…
Continue reading →The basic ideas behind how to manage a personal portfolio are discussed with a focus on the appropriate benchmarks for taking action. Reactions to yesterday’s post, A Mutual Fund SIP is Hope, Not a Strategy!, revealed a disturbing aspect of how many investors approach mutual funds. They are not interested in the inconvenient truth that a…
Continue reading →Too many investors believe that keeping their SIP alive and running over the ‘long-term’ is all that is needed to get ‘good returns’ from equity and achieve all their financial goals. Now that might happen in a fairy tale, but not in real life. In real life, the SIP is a method of buying mutual…
Continue reading →Here is a step-by-step guide to plan for your child’s education and marriage. 1. When to start planning. The moment the pregnancy is confirmed! 2. What do to first? Evaluate your insurance cover and buy more if required. 3. How to evaluate insurance cover? Let us consider a couple with a two year old child….
Continue reading →Risk management is the key to investing in volatile instruments like equity (or gold). De-risking refers to a process of containing losses. This typically is achieved by targeting a better risk-adjusted return instead of a ‘better return’.De-risking can passive or active. Here are some simple steps to de-risk your investment portfolio Cautionary note: A mutual fund SIP…
Continue reading →The Nifty50 Value 20 Index or the NV 20 represents the 20 most liquid value blue chip stocks selected from the Nifty 50 index. The performance of this index is analysed and compared with the performance of actively managed large-cap mutual funds. Nifty50 Value 20 Index Selection Criterion The 50 stocks that are part of the…
Continue reading →Here is a compilation of past posts on how and when to generate inflation protected income with a lump sum for financial independence. This e-book can be used by early retirees, senior citizens and young earners who are trying to optimise income for their parents from their retirement benefits. This is the fourth such compilation. The…
Continue reading →P V Subramanyam, CA, author (retire rich) and blogger(subramoney.com) spoke on retirement planning to a group of about 50 people last year (May 29th 2015) at Chennai. Here are the videos (a re-post). Note: The videos were shot by me using a DSLR. The audio is decent without a headphone and pretty good with a headphone and…
Continue reading →‘Price discovery’ refers to the way in which the market arrives at a price for a commodity driven by supply and demand. The government is gradually moving towards a regime of 100% price discovery. That is, interests rates will be marked to market. I think it is high time we promote price discovery of our college…
Continue reading →A provided fund for the general public came into being by an act of parliament in “in the nineteenth Year of the Republic of India” (1968) and has since evolved with the Indian economy. In this post, let us consider the way in which the interest rates of the public provident fund (PPF) has changed…
Continue reading →The extension rules and options available for public provident fund accounts after maturity or after completion of 15 years are discussed. The national savings institute (NSI India) has a wonderful pdf rule booklet with all notifications and clarifications since inception, and this post is entirely based on that. The aim here is to consolidate my…
Continue reading →Here is a video description of how to select an equity mutual fund in under 30 minutes using the freefincal mutual fund screener (now in Mac!) and if necessary with the rolling returns calculator. The 5th version of the mutual fund screener was posted yesterday. I noticed a couple of bugs later. So I request…
Continue reading →Use this tool to automatically screen mutual funds based on returns and create a shortlist of consistent performers. The updated version corrects a bug and now includes Benchmark 1 to 12 year CAGRs. The tool grabs annual returns data from value research for different categories and calculates 12,11,10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2 and 1 year returns (CAGR corresponding to lump…
Continue reading →It is very common to see discussions on rent a house vs buy a house and pre-pay a home loan vs invest instead. Sooner or later, someone participating would utter the word ’emotional’ (or some variant of it). The rent vs buy choice is largely governed by emotions. The pre-pay vs invest choice is largely…
Continue reading →Why do so many look for a secondary source of income? Now that sounds like a dumb question is it not?! I would like to classify people who look for secondary income into three broad categories. I Some, make that many, do not earn enough and so want to earn more. II Some, make that many (but not…
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