The sooner you retire, lower the retirement corpus necessary for financial freedom!* * terms and conditions apply! Let us consider this counterintuitive aspect of retirement calculators in this post, which stems from Sudhindra Aithal’s comment on this topic in response to the low-stress retirement calculator. Let us consider a 30-year-old, Dagwood Bumstead who wishes to…
Continue reading →RBI surprised everyone by announcing a 0.25% reduction in repo rate (from 8%) yesterday. The market welcomed this news with a sharp rise. Several self-proclaimed long-term investors welcomed their prospective notional gains as enthusiastically as they despaired at their notional losses when the markets ‘crashed’ a few days ago Here is a perspective of ‘where…
Continue reading →This is a major update to the Excel Stock Analyzer. Company financial data is now automatically downloaded from Morning Star. and stock price history from Money control. Jignesh Acharya pointed out that there are issues with the Yahoo finance stock price downloader. Here are the main features of the analyzer This is a screenshot of…
Continue reading →Use this Excel tool to compare risk vs. reward in Indian stock investments. The index component of the stock price analyzer published yesterday has been removed to enable comparison between two stocks. The way I see it, this comparison tool can be used for any stocks irrespective of the sector they belong (unlike financial statements). Such…
Continue reading →Use this Excel sheet to analyze the risk vs. reward of investing in a stock in comparison with an index. The analysis is based on price history (adjusted for dividends, splits and bonuses) and is a spin-off the popular Mutual Fund Risk-return analyzer Two versions of the sheet are available: The ‘annual’ version in which risk…
Continue reading →MF Utility is a web-based transaction portal through which investors can invest in direct mutual funds offered by 25 (as of now) fund houses. Mr. V Ramesh, Managing Director and CEO of MF Utility, answers some common questions investors ask about the facility. This is the website of MF Utility: www.mfuindia.com Extract from investor page:…
Continue reading →Thanks mainly to personal finance bloggers, more and more individuals are recognising to the need to treat inflation as the benchmark for long-term goals. With this comes the inevitable realisation that investments that have an insurance component in them – endowment plans, money-back plans, traditional with-profit plans and market-linked ULIPs etc. are unlikely to help…
Continue reading →Each December, I conduct a personal financial audit. I take stock of my financial goals and other aspects of personal finance relevant to me. Last years audit can be found here. This year, as a forerunner to this post, I had written about how to conduct a personal financial audit and invited readers to conduct one themselves….
Continue reading →The Excel stock analyzer now has two spreadsheets based on Warren Buffett’s approach to stock valuation. The valuation sheets have been built from the ground up based on this article: Valuing Stocks the Warren Buffett Way The article mentions that more details can be found at: “Buffettology: The Previously Unexplained Techniques That Have Made Warren…
Continue reading →Use this Excel spreadsheet to analyze Indian stocks. I am trying to build a stock analyzer with which one can comprehensively analyze a stock, obtain fair value with different methods, obtain growth rates of different metrics and visualize them graphically. This is the first version of such an attempt. The sheet calculates ‘fair value’ of…
Continue reading →This is a sequel to the ‘step-by-step guide to long-term goal-based investing’ and is meant for those who have started investing for their long-term goals after, understanding how much to invest understanding how much to expect from each asset class used deciding on an asset allocation (how much in equity, how much in debt etc.) If…
Continue reading →Which is the single most important trait that characterizes a DIY (do it yourself) investor? 1) I for Individuality A person who rises above pigheadedness* and understands the steps necessary for wealth creation. However, once the basics are clear (asset allocation is all that is needed!), the person chooses a path defined by personal…
Continue reading →I am a movie buff. Here is a list of my favourite movies with a financial theme. This is an off-beat listing and is obviously non-exhaustive. When I ask myself to make a list, many wonderful movies escape my memory. This is all I could muster. All posters are from Wikipedia and all storylines and…
Continue reading →The primary stumbling block that prevents investors from achieving holistic fiscal health is mental clutter. Their minds are filled with the wrong questions. The right question is a prerequisite for finding the right answer. One such wrong question, and the flavour of the season is: Where should I invest to save tax? PPF or ELSS?…
Continue reading →Balaji Vaidyanath from Sundaram AMC where he works as a fund manager in its PMS wing spoke about, investment process and construction of an equity portfolio on 1st Nov. 2014, at the Chennai Investor Education Workshop on Financial Planning and Goal-based investing. The workshop was jointly organised by Srinivasan Sundararaman of MoneyKare, Wealth Managers, and myself and…
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