If we invest in market-linked products like stocks, debt mutual funds, gold etc. it is a good idea to benchmark our returns with respect to the volatility associated with the instrument. This can be done with the an idea known as risk-adjusted returns. Unfortunately, this volatility is often referred to as ‘risk’. When we refer to…
Continue reading →A non-exhaustive list of mutual fund investing do’s, don’ts and myths. Updated Jan 25th 2016. Never buy mutual funds (or anything for that matter) from banks. They don’t care about us. All they care about is their commissions. So they will be happy to thrust just about any product (mutual fund, ULIPs, ….) down our throat…
Continue reading →May I request you to ask yourself when was the first time you encountered phrases like financial literacy, investor education, financial awareness etc.(If you have not, good for you!)? Then ask yourself who are the people who use these terms frequently and how many among them are product pushers? The product here being mutual funds,…
Continue reading →I am sick and tired of fluctuating equity returns. Why can’t I use recurring deposits and fixed deposits to build my retirement corpus? How would you answer such a question? I would say, Yes, you absolutely can do so! To make my point clearer, let us run through a specific retirement corpus calculation. A more…
Continue reading →Are we now in a bear market? The Senex has fallen 8% this month and 14% the last year. If you had invested a lump sum at the end of May 2014, it would given close to nothing or even a small loss. Does this mean we are in a bear market now? This is…
Continue reading →Download a free early retirement calculator for India with a checklist to retire early in India. You can also down a free e-book to plan early retirement. When I earlier asked “Is it possible to retire early in India?“, many readers assumed that I meant early retirement is not possible in India. All I wanted to…
Continue reading →This is a guest post by one of the earliest freefincal readers, Anish Mohan. In 2001, Anish, a profound believer in Swami Vivekananda abandoned his romance for communism and took up a job in the Indian software industry, where he witnessed the good days of post-liberalisation era, punctuated with events of the 2008 global crash. In…
Continue reading →Here are some less-understood facts about the National Pension Scheme (NPS). National Pension Scheme comes with no guarantees of returns. NPS is a mutual fund and carries with it all the risks associated with any old mutual fund. Read more: NPS investments are mutual fund investments! The aim of NPS is to generate a corpus…
Continue reading →Investing for long-term goals is governed by the following tenets. 1) Beat inflation either by investing more and/or with adequate exposure to volatile but productive assets. Preferably ‘and’, not ‘or’. 2) Understand the importance of containing volatility and that trying to maximise returns by being more aggressive is like trying to run a marathon like…
Continue reading →SEBI will soon make it possible for investors (shoppers?!) to buy mutual funds via e-commerce websites. A discussion on the pros and cons of such a move with a poll which I request you to participate in. Why are they doing it? One word – costs! If the cost of acquiring a customer is Rs…
Continue reading →Many years ago, I found, in an exchange of comments in a blog, a curious statement: ELSS funds have a lock-in period (of 3 years). Hence, the fund manager can operate without redemption pressure, resulting in better returns. No evidence was provided to prove or disprove this statement and I thought no further about it. A…
Continue reading →A review of Amit Trivedi’s new book, Riding The Roller Coaster -Lessons from financial market cycles we repeatedly forget. I was fortunate to listen to Amitji on March 1st 2015 at the Mumbai Investor Workshop. We were short of a speaker and Subra requested Amitji to speak on debt mutual funds. Amit Trivedi is a renowned…
Continue reading →When you get a home loan, are you really saving tax? Listen to Ashal Jauhari explain why it is an illusion to think that one can save tax by getting a home loan! Here are the videos of the third Chennai investor meet held on Sep. 2015. I was able to videograph only part of…
Continue reading →This is a guest post by Guhan Ramanan, a friend I got to know through the blog. I requested Guhan to share his money management journey and hence this post. Guhan is what I would call a ‘quick-to-understand’ investor.When he saw the value of managing money with a plan and in an organized way, a…
Continue reading →A simple way to understand a loan EMI calculation in terms of a lump sum investment and a monthly SIP is discussed in this post. This is applicable for all kinds of loans – home loan, car loan, personal loan etc. There is a close connection between investment mathematics and loan/mortgage mathematics. In fact, those…
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