A reader asks, “Sir, I love travelling and would like to go abroad on holiday once in two years. How do I plan for this without affecting my other long-term investments? When we went this summer it was a disaster as I had to stop investing for my retirement for five months. I don’t want…
Continue reading →This article compares my stock portfolio with an equivalent investment in a Nifty index fund and the Nifty 100 Low Volatility 30 TR index. Before we begin, investors need to appreciate the context of these investments. I started direct equity investing only after achieving a comfortable level of financial independence and ensuring my son’s future…
Continue reading →A reader asks, “I understood the importance of asset allocation/annual rebalancing exercise from your old article. I see the below text by one of the leading BAFs (see link below) – When investors manually move their money between equity and debt, they could be subjected to taxes on the capital gains made in the short…
Continue reading →Many readers are shocked to see the results of a retirement planning exercise. The target corpus required is too high relative to what they imagined and so is the required investment amount. This leads to sleepless nights and panic. “Is there any hope for me?” asks one such reader. If you are not shocked at…
Continue reading →Many investors incorrectly believe that a mutual fund SIP is a “strategy to reduce risk”. Unfortunately, this is not the case. A SIP is merely an automated way to buy mutual fund units on the same date of each month. If the markets move up, long term SIP returns move up. If the market moves…
Continue reading →Mutual fund NAV risk is measured using the standard deviation. This can be thought of as the average deviation of a monthly return from the average monthly return. Higher the value, the higher the risk. Unfortunately, this is not an intuitive number like the return. So this begs the question, is it possible to classify…
Continue reading →The cost inflation index for the financial year 2022-2023 was recently announced. We compile 41 years of cost inflation index data to understand the devastating consequences of inflation and why our singular focus should be on beating inflation for our long term goals. The cost inflation index (CII) is not a measure of true price…
Continue reading →This is a debt mutual fund screener for fund selection, fund portfolio tracking and learning. It also includes hybrid funds that invest in bonds. It will satisfy investors who wish to invest in money market funds, banking and PSU funds etc. The credit quality of the bonds in the portfolio and the bond maturity profile…
Continue reading →As a follow-up to our detailed guide on How to enter mutual fund and share capital gains in ITR2 (or ITR3), we now present two examples of how to use mutual fund capital gains statement for LTCG and STCG entries in ITR. Salaried taxpayers should use ITR2 if they have capital gains to report. Businessmen…
Continue reading →In this step-by-step guide, we shall discuss how to enter capital gains from mutual funds or shares in ITR2 or ITR3. Salaried taxpayers must use ITR2 if they have any capital gains to declare. Businessmen and professionals must ITR3 for the same purpose. The capital gains schedule and filing procedures are identical in ITR2 and…
Continue reading →In this article, SEBI registered fee-only advisor Swapnil Kendhe discusses if passive investing aka index investing is suitable over the next 20-30 years in India. About the author: Swapnil is a SEBI Registered Investment Advisor and part of my fee-only financial planners’ list. You can learn more about him and his service via his website,…
Continue reading →When we select a mutual fund there are two implicit questions we would like answered. (1) How risky is this fund? (20 How risky is this fund relative to other funds? The mutual fund riskometer is supposed to give us a quick idea about this. Unfortunately, the riskometer has evolved into a cumbersome and unhelpful…
Continue reading →In this edition of the fund performance report, we look at SBI Equity Hybrid Fund. Launched in Dec 1995, the scheme has assets worth Rs. 50,266 Crores which is the largest among actively managed equity funds. Only SBI LIquid Fund, HDFC Liquid, SBI ETF Nifty and SBI ETF Sensex have higher AUMs as of May…
Continue reading →A reader on our Youtube Q & A session asked, ” Hi, First of all, congratulations on providing a platform for people to ask questions. Usecase: Let’s say I have a sum of 10 lacs to invest in the market for the long term(10+ years) for wealth maximization. I plan to park this money into…
Continue reading →This is an index fund screener based on tracking error and return difference wrt benchmarks. The screener will help a user evaluate how efficiently an index fund has tracked its underlying benchmark. It will also help a understand how tracking a midcap index or the Nifty 100, 500 is quite different from tracking the Sensex…
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