In Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, the protagonist Arjun had a number. We wanted to hit the target corpus by 40, retire, and finally start living. It’s one of the most seductive ideas Bollywood ever put on screen, and it has quietly become the blueprint for an entire generation of Indian professionals. I meet Arjuns every…
Continue reading →This ETF screener tracks errors and differences (ETF return minus index return). It will help users evaluate how efficiently an ETF has tracked its underlying benchmark. The tracking error is the ETF’s standard deviation minus the index’s monthly return differences. The lower the tracking error, the more efficiently the ETF tracks the index. Unlike returns,…
Continue reading →We plan for inflation, longevity, and market crashes. We rarely plan for our own decline. For the last five years, I have spent a significant amount of time thinking about retirement planning. Not just the numbers, but the assumptions underneath them. Like most DIY investors, I started with the obvious questions. How much corpus would…
Continue reading →“Can you suggest a good international fund—or include one in my portfolio?” I hear some version of this question regularly in my work as a SEBI-registered investment adviser. Usually, I respond with another question: “If I hid the last three years of returns from you, would you still want to invest internationally?” Take a moment…
Continue reading →Why do content creators keep talking about Parag Parikh Flexicap? Because they know it will garner interest from both unitholders and bystanders. The best way to handle this is to avoid watching any financial content on social media or YouTube, so the algorithms think you don’t care. But that seems hard for most people. The…
Continue reading →The latest freefincal Equity Mutual Fund Performance Screener is now available. Use it to screen for equity mutual funds that consistently perform. You can screen based on fund category & benchmark to identify mutual funds that offer higher returns than the benchmark while maintaining lower risk. Inside, you get discounted links to our robo advisory…
Continue reading →This is an update on my mutual fund investing journey, which began on 19th June 2008. In the last three decades, I have gone from being a spendthrift to being in debt to financial independence. New community members can refer to these articles for an account. The Financial Arrow of Time and My Journey: Driven by the…
Continue reading →Edelweiss Nifty REITs & Realty Index Fund is an open-ended scheme that replicates/tracks the Nifty REITs & Realty Total Return Index. The scheme is currently in its NFO period. We discuss what an interested investor should consider before investing. To keep things simple, REITs (and invITs) generate cash flows from real estate properties with some…
Continue reading →This is a National Pension Scheme Fund Screener to shortlist consistently performing NPS schemes. You can also identify NPS schemes that offer a higher return than the benchmark while maintaining lower risk. This is similar in design to the freefincal Equity Mutual Fund Performance Screener. Inside, you get discounted links to our robo advisory tool…
Continue reading →We discuss a counterintuitive idea in retirement planning. The sooner you retire, the lower the retirement corpus necessary for financial freedom! But where is the catch? Let us consider a 30-year-old who wishes to plan for retirement. Let us call him Dagwood (a comic character created by cartoonist Chic Young). He wants to decide the…
Continue reading →A reader asks, How should I invest to secure the future of my newborn child? Our investing mantra is process-first, products-last. We create a financial plan suited to our needs, considering realistic inflation estimates. Then, we consider the necessary risk for the goal, the risk we can emotionally handle and determine an asset allocation (mix of…
Continue reading →A while ago, I made two videos (linked below) on the options for parents if their child is interested in science. Recently, I received a rather critical email in response. The essence was: Why are you recommending science as a career when the pay is so small?! The answer is quite simple: passion. If my…
Continue reading →We publish a list of stocks with low volatility and momentum each month. We provide data for BSE 500 and BSE 100 stocks. Update: Starting March 2026, the screening metrics have been significantly updated (details below). There are now three different screener files available. (1) Stocks with low volatility and momentum from the BSE 100…
Continue reading →Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, was once at a party, and his friend told him that their host had probably made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his famous novel in its entire lifetime. Heller didn’t flinch. “Yes,” he said, “but I have something he will never have. I have…
Continue reading →In a previous article, I discussed building a portfolio and backtesting against the Nifty 100 or Nifty 500. Investors don’t own just one fund—they own a portfolio. The real question isn’t whether Fund A beat Fund B, but whether your portfolio is actually delivering better outcomes than a simple benchmark like the Nifty 500. The…
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