The budget was announced last Friday and plenty has been written on it already.
Last year I had a couple of posts on the budget that looked at it from the government’s perspective (where the money came from and where it went) and I plan to that this year as well, but because of several emails and comments I decided to do a post on the budget that cover the personal finance aspect as well.
I thought of creating a graphic with some key things from the budget, as well as things that you need to refer to from time to time like the income tax slab.
With that in mind, here is an infographic with the 2012 budget highlights.
To me, these were the key things in the budget to be kept in mind from the perspective of an individual and I’m sure a lot of these will become topic of posts as well.
For instance, the Rajiv Gandhi Equity Savings Scheme is one that could do with a lot more details on who is eligible, how will they get the deduction and if this could be extended to equity mutual funds as well.
What do you make of this? Did I leave anything important?
Malathi Madhusudhan left the following comment on my post about LIC Jeevan Vriddhi and her comment nicely illustrates why a lot of people feel frustrated with insurance plus investment products even when they aren’t particularly bad.
Here is the comment:
Hello
I would like invest in LIC – Jeevan Vriddhi plan for Rs. 1,00,000 (one lac only). Not very clear about the returns, i.e. as an agent told, after 10 yrs of investment, we get the returns of 5 times, i.e hopefully it should be 5,00,000 / -(five lacs). IS IT CORRECT ???
Also please let me know, what about the death coverage ? i.e. if any death happens in 3 – 5 yrs, will the payment of 5,00000 get immediately or should we wait til 10 years .
Please clarify the details.
thank you
If you remember this product then you will very clearly see what’s going on in here. This product gives you an insurance coverage of 5 times and then at maturity, it gives you some returns.
Those returns are not 5 times your money, but rather the guaranteed part of it falls a little under double your money in 10 years.
Now, 5 times in 10 years doesn’t sound incredibly lot and that’s why it’s easy to see how it doesn’t immediately raise suspicion in regular folks but you can’t say the same thing about agents.
Surely, it is their responsibility to figure out the difference between returns and coverage, and if they don’t even do that then what good are they?
Raj, who left good counter points to my post asked how this is possible and if this agent is a crook or is really ignorant and my first reaction was – dishonest or incompetent – those are the only choices I have?
I think this comment and the situation nicely illustrates the problem with the whole insurance environment right now, something that Jitendra and Debasish Ray touched upon in the same thread as well.
When you ponder about these things for long you wonder about what role a blog plays in the midst of this environment, and I think more than a blog – a blog reader can make a lot of difference. This is because if you’re the kind of person who follows personal finance blogs you are probably the one in your family and circle of friends that are approached when people need a bit of advice related to money. If you are that person, then imagine how easy it is for you to help someone avoid making a mistake and make a better decision.
I’m really curious to know if you are that person and if you have experiences like this and what you think about the agent. Please do leave comments.
A lot of US carriers subsidize smartphones and sell them to customers with a contract, and the catch is that the phone can’t be used with another carrier.
In an Indian context, this would be something like Vodafone selling an iPhone for Rs. 10,000 but only if you sign a 2 year contract in which you pay Rs. 3,000 per month for the plan and the phone is locked to Vodafone which means it won’t work if you put a SIM from another carrier like Hutch.
If you’re bringing such a phone to India then unless you get it unlocked from the carrier you won’t be able to use it. The phone will simply not recognize the SIM you put into it.
If you know before hand that you’re going to bring a Blackberry from the US to India, then the best way to unlock is to call your carrier and ask for the unlock code and instructions. They will most likely give you the unlock code, especially if you’ve been using the phone for 3 months or more.
If you forget to do this and get the phone to India, then you will probably not be able to contact the customer support and rely on local means to unlock the phone.
I had to do this recently and was pleasantly surprised to find out that unlocking a Blackberry is very easy and you just need to have the unlock code.
I went to get it done through a store first but they wanted Rs. 800 and that just seemed very high so I returned to research this some more and try to unlock it on my own.
I saw that various sites sell the unlock codes for much more than Rs. 800 so at first it seemed like it may just be better to go back to the store and get it unlocked through them but then I stumbled upon some sellers at eBay and found that they were selling the unlock code for 99 cents.
I tried one seller first and they sent an unlock code that didn’t work. Then I tried another seller, and they sent two unlock codes (one of them the same as the code of the first seller) and this time the unlock worked!
So I was set up with the unlock code for less than $2 and after that it’s fairly easy to unlock it. There are several videos that show you how to do that and here is one that does a great job of explaining it.
The big thing I learned unlocking the Blackberry this way was that it is far easier than unlocking an iPhone and you shouldn’t pay more than 99 cents to buy the unlock code, and the best place to get it from is eBay.
Krishna left the following comment (slightly edited) a few days ago:
I am a techie and I am preparing myself to start investing in stocks. Google revealed your post & I really admire your work.It will be more helpful if there is a post describing investing for novices like me.
Regards,
KK
This is an interesting comment not only because of the nature of the question but also because of its timing. I wrote a post titled Why I continue to invest in stocks? in December of last year, and in that post I laid out the reasons that made me continue to invest in stocks in the pessimistic environment that existed then.
That title sounds fairly ridiculous today, but remember at that time and this is just 3 months ago, there was a lot of doom and gloom with respect to the situation in Europe and a lot of people were simply disgusted with the way stocks had dropped.
The common concern at the time was whether it made sense to continue with SIPs or should you sell all your stocks and invest in fixed deposits? Not many people were gearing up to invest in stocks because of all the pessimism that surrounded them and there were hardly any new entrants to the market.
From the time that I wrote the post to the time this comment appeared, the market had rose by some 15% and some smaller stocks had risen by a lot more than that.
I think it is important to remember the background here because a market that goes up rapidly draws a lot of first time investors who really are speculators at the time. I know that I was attracted to the market because of this and I know countless other individuals who were drawn to the market with the hope of a quick buck.
At this stage all you’re interested in is speculation and day trading, and you are getting quite the thrill out of it. You have no idea of fundamental analysis and you don’t care about any technical analysis as well.
I’ve seen people who stay at this stage for years, and you can easily identify people in this category by the the kind of reasons they give for why something will go up or down. The reason will always be rooted in something that they have personally seen like this share never goes under Rs. 80 or the share market does well before the budget or something similar to that, and this reason will usually sound very fantastical to anyone else.
You should try to get out of this stage as soon as possible losing as little money as possible. It’s very hard to convince anyone that they will lose money before they lose money so the next best thing I can say is that you should speculate with only small amounts of money and then don’t lose heart when you lose it because there is a better way to invest in the stock market.
At the end of the first stage, one of three things will happen –
You will blame the market for your failure, be disgusted by it and never put any money in it again.
 You will blame yourself for your ignorance and learn more formal methods of technical trading and trade.
You will blame yourself and learn about long term investing and investing in stocks through mutual funds and SIPs.
Normally, the people who blame the market for their failure are the people who have been at it for a few years, and keep trying the same thing over and over again and hope that this time they get different results even though this has never worked for them earlier.
If you fall under this category meaning you’ve traded for a number of years but have never read a book on trading then instead of blaming the market you should blame your process and get into doing something more structured – whether it is technical or fundamental analysis.
Far more people fall from the first stage to the second category and I think that’s because trading is a lot sexier than long term investing and the kick you get out of trading – you can never get out of buying and holding.
In this category you will find people who are familiar with things like Elliot Waves, Head and Shoulders Patterns, RSI, MACD and other technical analysis tools and I think trading like this is better than trading without any knowledge of technical trading at all but I am skeptical on how effective this is.
I’ve not seen any really successful technical traders but then I’m not the kind of person who knows many traders either. However, I do feel that it must be very hard to do a full time job and trade on the markets since you have to be in front of the terminal so often and it can’t be practical for someone with a regular day job to do that.
In any case, this has not worked for me so I’m biased against it and I wouldn’t recommend anyone with a regular job to get into technical trading. If you’re interested in this then there are far too many investment sites and blogs that cater to this and you should follow one of them and see if it works for you. If it doesn’t, then, well, try long term investing after that.
In my opinion it is far better to take a longer term approach to investing and get into the third category of investors. This blog is primarily geared towards long term investors and later in the week I will have a second part to this post on what this constitutes, and how a newbie can approach long term investing.
Index funds are a relatively small part of the overall mutual fund industry in India, and this is markedly different from the west, where index funds do quite well, and in fact the biggest fund in the US is an index fund (SPY) that tracks the popular S&P 500 index.
I think there are two aspects to this – the first is that actively managed funds have performed better than index funds in the past and people expect that to continue in the future as well, and secondly, index funds aren’t really low cost in India.
First, let’s look at some data to see why I say actively managed funds have performed better than index funds.
To get this data, I took the list of mutual funds from my post on the best balanced funds and saw how they performed vis-a-vis GS Nifty BeES which is the biggest index ETF right now, and is fairly low cost as well.
As you can see, with the exception of DSPR Balanced Fund and FT India Balanced Fund in the 3 year period, the balanced funds did better than the index fund in the 3 and 5 year periods. I’m sure there are plenty of other examples like this and in this environment it just isn’t possible for index funds to get popular.
The question then is why do active funds do better than index funds in India? I’ve seen several theories on this but none that seem very convincing. Perhaps the confluence of all the factors make them do better or it could be something that isn’t talked about at all right now.
The chief theory that I’ve heard a lot is that the markets in the west are so deep and developed that they are efficient to a large extent and it is difficult for stock pickers to find mis-pricings and benefit from them. Indian markets are not so efficient so stock pickers are still able to find undervalued stocks and benefit from owning them. While this may sound plausible, the thing that makes me a little wary of this theory is that markets in the west are quite volatile as well so people can take advantage of stock prices when they are low, plus there are a lot of hedge funds that do beat the market so it isn’t like the market is very efficient.
The second aspect is that of cost and tracking error of the index funds themselves. The whole point of an index fund is that it should be extremely low cost since there is no active management needed but that low cost hasn’t really materialized in the Indian market.
In March 2010 I did a list Nifty index funds and Sensex Index funds, and saw that a lot of them charge in excess of 1% recurring expenses and that’s simply too high for an index fund. Since then there have been funds that charge much lower expenses, most notably the IIFL Nifty ETF that has an expense ratio of 0.25% which is the lowest of any index ETF till date. The biggest Nifty ETF – Goldman Sachs Nifty BeES ETF is also a low cost ETF which has expenses of about 0.50% and has been around for a decade now, but as a category – the low cost has still not become a norm, and that makes a difference to the returns.
So, I would say that the two main benefits of investing in index funds – which is low costs and doing better than active funds have been more or less absent in India so far and it’s hard to say why. People who want the benefit of passive investing feel that by creating a SIP in an active mutual fund – you enjoy the same kind of benefit and the past returns show that it has been beneficial as well.
I don’t know whether this trend will change or not but keeping all this data in mind, it is hard to invest all your money in passive index funds.
We all know that investing in equities through mutual funds is a great option for an individual as mutual funds not only employ professional management but also have experience of investing in equities and are a safer and better bet as compared to directly investing in equities which have an inherent risk element attached with them.
A mutual fund employs highly qualified management, keeps a regular tab on the stock markets, buys and sells equities on our behalf and does everything to ensure that our money is put to best use while ensuring its safety. But what do mutual funds get in return for these services, in other words – how do mutual funds earn?
Many people have this feeling that it doesn’t matter how mutual funds earn till the time our money is growing in mutual funds. But the fact of the matter is that these mutual funds earn through your money only and mutual fund charges are an important factor while deciding whether to invest or not to invest in a specific mutual fund.
Let’s first have a look at the types of fees charged by mutual funds and then I’ll summarize the impact of these charges.
Types of Charges
There are 3 types of fees which are charged by the mutual funds and these are explained below:
Entry Load
Exit Load
Recurring Charges
Mutual Fund Charges
ENTRY LOAD – DISTRIBUTION EXPENSE
As the name suggests, this fees is charged by mutual funds at the time of investing in the mutual funds. However, this fee does not go into the pockets of the Asset Management Company and is rather paid as distribution fee to the mutual fund agent through which the investor has applied for subscription.
Prior to August 2009, different funds used to pay different amounts as commission to the agent which could sometimes be as high as 2.5% as well. However, in Aug. 2009 SEBI abolished any entry load to be collected by AMC’s to be paid to agents but this didn’t go well within the industry as agents who usually do a lot of marketing and selling on behalf of the company weren’t compensated for their services as a result of which they were not actively working and promoting mutual funds.
Several representations were made by AMC’s in the year 2010 and 2011 to allow them to collect Entry Load as the whole industry was suffering because of this norm and finally in August 2011, SEBI allowed AMC’s to collect Entry Load but limited this fee to a very nominal amount. The maximum fee permissible to be collected as entry load by AMC’s wef August 2011 is as follows
Particulars
Investment Amount
Commission Payable
First Time Investor
Less than Rs. 10,000
Nil
More than Rs. 10,000
Rs. 150
Existing Investor
Less than Rs. 10,000
Nil
More than Rs. 10,000
Rs. 100
In case of Systematic Investment Plan (SIP), where the total commitment towards the SIP is more than Rs. 10,000, a transaction charge of Rs. 100 will be levied payable in 4 equal installments starting from the 2nd to the 5th installment.
Points to be noted with respect to Entry Load
This entry load is payable only in case the investment is made through an agent. In case of direct application being received by the AMC, no entry load is to be collected.
This fee has to be properly reported in the mutual fund statement. For e.g. – If you are a first time investor and have made an investment of Rs. 20,000, you would be liable to pay Rs. 150 as entry load and your statement should report all these facts as:
Gross Investment                                                20,000
(Less) Entry Load                                                 __150
Net Investment                                                       19,850
As the Net Investment received by an AMC is only Rs. 19850, you would be allocated Mutual Fund units for this amount only and not for the whole Rs.20,000
Although these charges are collected by the AMC but are payable to the mutual fund agent and you are not liable to pay any other charges to the Mutual Fund Agents.
RECURRING CHARGES – EXPENSE RATIO
Recurring Charges are the charges which are collected by the AMC for professional portfolio management services provided to the investors. An AMC employs highly experienced and qualified staff whose prime concern is to take care of your investments and for providing such services the AMC collects fees which is also referred to as Expense Ratio.
There are a number of expenses which are incurred by AMC’s which have been mentioned below:
1. Fund Management Fees
At the discretion of the AMC subject toSEBI Guidelines
2. Marketing/ Selling Expense
3.Audit Fees
Based on Actual Expense
4.Registrar Fees
5.Trustee Fees
6.Custodian Fees
Over and above these above stated expenses which are incurred on an annual Basis, AMC’s also incur expense at the time of New Fund Offer. To encourage individuals to invest in a mutual fund, an AMC incurs many onetime marketing expenses at the time of launch of the mutual fund. SEBI has prescribed a maximum ceiling on such expense being 6% of the total net assets and these expenses are amortized over a period of 5 years.
However, SEBI has prescribed the maximum expense that may be charged by the AMC and they are based on the Average Weekly Net Assets of the AMC:-
Average Weekly Net Assets
Percentage Limit
Equity Scheme
Debt Scheme
First Rs. 100 Crore
2.50%
2.25%
Next Rs. 300 Crore
2.25%
2.00%
Next Rs. 300 Crore
2.00%
1.75%
On the Balance Assets
1.75%
1.50%
Assuming that an equity scheme generating 15% returns has net assets of Rs 100 crore, with the operating expense ratio at 2.50%, the effective return would be 12.5% (i.e. 15-2.5). Operating expenses are calculated on an annualized basis and are normally accrued on a daily basis and the NAV so computed is shown after deducting these Recurring Expenses.
EXIT LOAD
These are the charges which are liable to be paid in case an investor exits a fund before a specified time frame.
Mutual Funds have a long term horizon and invest with a long term view. However, if a large number of redemption is applied for within a short period of making the investment, it spoils the total corpus available with the mutual funds as a result of which they may have to make necessary changes to the whole portfolio.
To discourage investors from withdrawing funds within a short period, almost all mutual funds charge exit load of 1-3% based on the time within which an application for redemption is filed. They are usually in brackets of 6 months, 1 year etc. and the lower the time frame – the higher would be the exit load. There is no standard exit load fees charged by these AMC’s and it varies from scheme to scheme and is disclosed in the prospectus of every scheme.
Exit Load is also referred to as Back-End Load and the maximum fees that can be charged by Mutual Funds for premature withdrawal is 7%. However, most Mutual Funds charge exit load in the range of 1-3% depending on the time duration for which the funds were invested.
Mutual Fund Fees as a Deciding Factor
From this discussion it is clear that mutual funds charge recurring fees based on its asset base with the charges getting decreased as the fund corpus increases. Thus as the asset size increases, the expenses charge also decrease which would directly impact the NAV of a mutual fund scheme.
Please note that these are the maximum expense ratios permitted by SEBI and the actual may be a bit lower.
Although these charges keep changing from year to year, note that a difference of 1% expense ratio between 2 funds may turn out to be a difference of 10-15% over a period of 10 years. Moreover, it is also highly advisable to keep an eye on the exit load charged by these AMC’s while comparing two funds as different funds charge different exit loads.
The most fascinating story I read this week was about Sara Blakely who is a self made billionaire and has built the Spanx business from scratch through her grit and hard work. It’s an incredible and inspiring article and I really enjoyed going through it.
Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos is funding a clock that will be able to show time for the next 10,000 years and it’s an icon to long term thinking something which Jeff Bezos has always spoke of and is fundamental to the way Amazon operates.
On the same topic, Sandip Sabharwal writes on what would happen if the elephant starts moving.
Business Standard has an article on buybacks, and how there are 16 buybacks open in the market but only 5 of them show any reasonable volumes. CRISIL happens to be one of these companies which has completed 99% of their buyback, and that brings me to the next post.
Deepak Shenoy writes about the CRISIL buyback and how while it has bought back shares from the market on one hand, it has issued it as ESOPs on the other! So, the whole benefit of buybacks which is reducing the denominator of number of shares outstanding to boost earnings per share is totally nullified in this way.
There have been several interesting comments on the Suggest a Topic page while I was away and I am going to them up in the coming days as time permits.
For today, let’s look at P Thirani’s question.
I have been reading your posts in depth and as a professional the biggest problem I face is asking the right questions to my financial planner. I take my portfolio to him he asks some questions and makes some suggestions. A year down the lane…. same story. It would be of great help if you could tell what to ask a planer and how to asses his advice.
I think this should help lot of us.
Thanks
In order to assess how well my financial planner is doing I’d like to see how he advises me on things I know for certain as well as things I certainly expect. And I certainly expect holistic planning.
A financial planner should look at your financial and personal life situation holistically, and then advise you on all aspects of your money like saving, investing and insurance.
If my financial planner is not helping me find how much insurance I need, can’t help me with my tax situation (unless the tax situation is very complicated), is not helping me with my asset allocation, retirement planning and goal planning then I would not be very satisfied.
I’d be interested in financial planning only if it is comprehensive unless of course you are opting for something else like a goal based plan or some other thing like that.
The next thing I’d ask is the planner’s opinion on the kind of insurance I have. Now, this is to check an obvious red flag which is the planner’s outlook on commission based insurance plans which is unfortunately what most people own and also his thoughts on term insurance. If the planner doesn’t stress the need for insurance then that will send alarm bells ringing in my head. My assumption here is of course you have dependents who will benefit out of that insurance.
Next question will be about credit card debt – this is the worst kind of debt and I can’t see how you can build wealth if you pay heavy credit card interest every month. If my planner is not too concerned about the leak caused by credit card interest payments then that will raise some red flags for me as well.
Coming to my portfolio I would look for how much it has churned and if my planner has a habit of getting in and out of funds or buying new mutual funds which is again a red flag.
I’d also see if it is balanced or heavily weighted towards one asset. If I find that my planner has invested a lot of my money in one asset class like gold then that will be a cause of concern for me.
Among the products he has helped me invest in I would like to know what the cost of those are – if they are mutual funds then what’s the expense ratio on that and is anything with a lower cost available? In general, what is the rationale of investing in those funds and does that appeal to common sense.
I would also be interested in how much inaction does the planner favor – does he suggest a lot of new things every year or does he ask you to be patient and stick with tried and tested products. Stability and sticking with things that have proven to work inspire confidence in me.
I’d also be keen to see if advises things like borrowing money and punting in IPOs and that of course is a big red flag as far as I am concerned.
These are some things that come to my mind and while slightly cynical, I would say that the benefit of financial planning should be very evident and apparent to you and if they aren’t then you should explore alternatives.
A few years ago – IPOs were very fashionable and one way to make a sure profit was to invest in IPOs and then sell them on the first day. Then the Reliance Power IPO happened, a lot of people burned their fingers and the IPO listing gains game lost all its fizz. These days it is more common for IPOs to list at a discount than at a premium.
All the bond issues that have been coming in the last one year or so have created a small listing gains market for bond issues as well and I’ve lamented this ever since I read about the gray market premium build up for the SBI bond issue. That was the issue where investors made about Rs. 320 per Rs. 10,000 and were happy to report that they had made annualized returns of 76%!
At that time I wrote that it is ridiculous to say that you made annualized returns of 76% because there is no way to execute many of these type of transactions in a year and it is inevitable that you make some losses or don’t make enough profit. It’s just a one time hit – two times if you’re lucky, but then luck will run out.
It didn’t take very long for that outcome to unfold as the IIIFL and then the Mannapuram NCD listed at a discount, and you didn’t need any kind of special foresight to see that this will happen. Now, here I don’t mean that you would be able to predict which issue will list at a discount but rather know that in a string of such issues one or two are going to list at a discount and then wipe off all your earlier gains just like the stock IPOs.
I was reminded of this yesterday when Shiv left a comment about the lacklustre performance of the IRFC bonds that listed on Friday. Here are his comments.
The notification is yet to show up on the I-T Department’s website. It is Notification No. 13, dated March 6th, 2012 and it’ll appear on the below pasted link whenever I-T dept. uploads it:
Official first day figures are not out yet but the Retail response has been subdued due to a poor listing of IRFC Bonds. People who took financing for the IRFC issue have given more to their financiers and brokers than their actual profits post listing. The dreams they were shown by their brokers have not materialized and they are still selling their holdings in the secondary markets.
IRFC bonds got listed on friday, March 2nd and no they did not list at a discount but a very marginal premium of Rs. 10 odd. Closing price yday was Rs. 1005.08. Actually, after the success of NHAI bonds, many retail investors were made to invest in IRFC bonds via financing route. They were shown profits of Rs. 10000-15000 on listing. They paid Rs. 3000-5000 in financing for a Rs. 5 lakh application but the listing gains barely covered financing cost and brokerage. That is the reason many of them are not very keen on investing in REC bonds.
I think this serves as a good reminder to people who are looking to make quick bucks and feel like they can borrow money for a short while and flip an investment for a sure profit. This type of thing works only until it stops working and I believe that the only way to win these type of games is to avoid playing them.
“Thinking, Fast and Slow” is written by Daniel Kahneman who won the Nobel prize in Economics in 2002 and what’s most amazing about this is that he hasn’t taken a single economics course in his life, and is chiefly a research psychologist.
This is one of the most amazing books that I’ve ever read and everyone should try to read this at least once.
It deals with the way the brain thinks and describes it as being two distinct systems: System 1, which takes instant decisions or intuitive decisions like what’s 2 + 2 and System 2, which takes more deliberate decisions which needs analysis like how likely is it that it will rain tomorrow?
The central idea is that System 1, which deals with intuitive and instant decisions is called to action by the brain first and only if that system is unable to furnish an answer to the problem is System 2 called into action.
The book tells us how the brain tries to substitute a difficult question with a simple question and tries to answer the simple question instead of the correct one and shows many other fallacies of snap judgments.
Let me excerpt an interesting example from the book:
Half of them saw the puzzles in a small font in washed-out gray print. The puzzles were legible, but the font induced cognitive strain. The results tell a clear story: 90% of the students who saw the CRT in normal font made at least one mistake in the test, but the proportion dropped to 35% when the font was barely legible. You read this correctly: performance was better with the bad font. Cognitive strain, whatever its source, mobilizes System 2, which is more likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by System 1
So, while you would think that making a quiz hard to read will increase the number of mistakes, the exact opposite happened when they made the quiz hard to read!
Another example of this type:
Consider the following: “Will Mindik be a good leader? She is intelligent and strong…†An answer quickly came to your mind, and it was yes. You picked the best answer based on the very limited information available, but you jumped the gun. What if the next two adjectives were corrupt and cruel?
Snap judgments are just one part of the book, it deals with other issues about how the brain thinks and how it often leads us to wrong judgments and it has countless examples of biases and how people are fooled into making wrong decisions because of the way we are wired and notions and biases that we have. It talks about how small losses pain us much more than the pleasure given to us by small gains, how we frequently misunderstand probability, how we place overconfidence in our abilities and plenty of other things that lead to incorrect decisions in our daily life. It’s not possible to go into a lot of them in this post but you can read about quite a few of them in the Amazon review page of this book.
I’ve just finished reading this book and I’m going to read this book a second time again now, something I’ve never done before and I think this is a must read for everyone.
Hi Amlan
The notification is yet to show up on the I-T Department’s website. It is Notification No. 13, dated March 6th, 2012 and it’ll appear on the below pasted link whenever I-T dept. uploads it:
http://law.incometaxindia.gov.in/DIT/Notifications.aspx#
Official first day figures are not out yet but the Retail response has been subdued due to a poor listing of IRFC Bonds. People who took financing for the IRFC issue have given more to their financiers and brokers than their actual profits post listing. The dreams they were shown by their brokers have not materialized and they are still selling their holdings in the secondary markets.
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