The Hyderabad investor workshop was held last Sunday (28th June). Here is a report with a few photographs.

The workshop was co-ordinated by Phani Rambhatla along with his friend Vijay Shivaji Rao.

Thanks to their efforts we were able to get a four-star hotel at a pretty decent price.

Right from the day it was announced, I was filled with a sense of trepidation.  In all the workshops held so far, there were a couple of other speakers besides me. For Hyderabad, I could not find anyone who fit my requirements.

So I decided to go it alone. Therefore, the workshop was the shortest: from 10 am to 1 pm.

This time I decided to try something new: ask participants to bring laptops and try out the Excel sheets I had e-mailed them a couple of days prior to the meet.

I prefer to catch the early morning flights out, just in case. The trouble is, I need to get up by 3 am. What if I don’t is a recurrent dream that I have!

Anyway, I did get up and when I reached the hotel, Phani joined me minutes later.

When we stepped into the conference room, I was pleasantly surprised to find most of the arrangements were in place. Vijay soon joined us and he deftly got the place meeting-ready.

About 42 people had registered for the meet.

I covered the following aspects:

1) benchmarks of money management

2) goal planning: need to beat inflation with returns and investment amount (Excel)

3) asset allocation and estimating net portfolio returns for goal planning (Excel)

4)  essential steps to build a robust financial castle

5) retirement planning (Excel)

6) using a financial planning sheet to estimate the total investment amount required (Excel)

7) Single portfolio vs. multiple portfolios (Excel)

8) Risk vs. returns

9) How to choose an equity mutual fund

10 ) A Q/A session

Like other workshops, there were many interesting questions throughout the talk.

Thank God my health held out.

It was a most satisfying experience. Thank you Phani, Vijay and all participants.

Like always, the participants taught me how to pitch ideas better and pace the talk, understand and respond intelligently to questions. There is a lot of scope for improvement, but I am happy to report that I am getting better.

Phani and Vijay arranged to get the talk videographed,. Thanks to several generous contributions from readers, the participants did not have to pay for this.

Will post this after the Chennai investor meet videos (hopefully the coming weekend)

Here are some photographs -thanks again to Phani.