November 2013 – OneMint

Tax-Free Bond Issues to be launched during November/December 2013

This post is written by Shiv Kukreja, who is a Certified Financial Planner and runs a financial planning firm, Ojas Capital in Delhi/NCR. He can be reached at [email protected]

With rising inflation and high fiscal deficit here in India, yields on government securities are also rising and high G-Sec yields bring along some good investment opportunities for the prospective tax-free bond investors. Many of the investors, who could not invest in the previous five tax-free bond issues of REC, HUDCO, IIFCL, PFC and NHPC, have been eagerly waiting for the new issues to get launched.

A few days back Ramadas asked me if I know when the next tax free bond issue will hit the market. Here is what he had to say:

Ramadas November 19, 2013 at 7:16 am

Hi Shiv

Do you know when next tax free bond issue will hit the market? I see IRFC has already filed prospectus with SEBI. NTPC and NHB are in the news. Any confirmed dates when next tax free bonds will be issued?

I have received many such queries in the past 15-20 days as many people have been asking this question on different posts.

As none of the companies has filed the final prospectus for its issue, nobody knows the exact opening dates of the upcoming tax free bond issues. But, with whatever information I have and based on the dates of filing of their draft shelf prospectus, here is the list of tax free bond issues which are going to hit the streets in the next one month or so.

IIFCL Issue – Last week of November – IIFCL announced earlier this month that it would launch the second tranche of its tax free bonds in the third or the fourth week of November. IIFCL has already raised around Rs. 4,200 crore out of Rs. 10,000 crore it has been allowed to raise from tax-free bonds this financial year.

HUDCO Issue – Last week of November – I have been told by a close associate that HUDCO is also planning to launch the second tranche of its tax-free bonds issue in the next 3-5 days time. The company could raise around Rs. 2,400 crore in the first tranche which got closed on October 14. HUDCO still has the authority to raise another Rs. 2,400 crore.

IRFC Issue – First week of December – IRFC filed the draft shelf prospectus with SEBI to raise Rs. 10,000 crore from its tax-free bonds issues on November 11. As observed in the past, it takes around 15-20 days for a company to launch its public issue from the date it files the draft shelf prospectus.

Also, as Shashwat shared it yesterday, an official of IRFC has told Deccan Herald that it is planning to launch its public issue in December. Taking a cue from it, I think IRFC issue should hit the streets in the first week of December.

NTPC Issue – First week of December – Just a few days after IRFC did it, NTPC also filed the draft shelf prospectus on November 15 to raise Rs. 1,750 crore from tax-free bonds. So, I expect NTPC issue also to hit either in the first week or the second week of December.

NHB Issue – Second week of December – Though NHB raised Rs. 900 crore from these bonds through private placement in August this year, it has taken more than usual time to do it through its public issue. But, now they have officially announced to launch its issue in the second week of December. I hope they do not delay it further.

NHAI Issue – Second half of December – Last month, NHAI announced its plan to raise funds through these bonds sometime in December. But, as the company has still not filed its draft shelf prospectus as yet, I do not see the issue hitting the streets before second half of December.

November was a dry month as far as tax free bond issues are concerned. But, if all these issues get launched sometime next month, it would really create a glut for these bonds in the market.

Thanks to the high interest rates scenario, these companies would find it less difficult to attract investors’ money to get invested in these bonds.

I’ll update this post as and when I have any information about any new issue getting launched and the coupon rates it is going to carry. If any of you get any kind of information, please share it here so that all of us benefit out of it.

Shriram City Union Finance NCDs Issue – November 2013

This post is written by Shiv Kukreja, who is a Certified Financial Planner and runs a financial planning firm, Ojas Capital in Delhi/NCR. He can be reached at [email protected]

As Muthoot Finance NCD issue gets preclosed on Monday, Shriram City Union Finance (SCUF) is also launching its issue of non-convertible debentures (NCDs) from the same day, November 25th. The company plans to raise Rs. 200 crore from the issue, including Rs. 100 crore of green shoe option.

SCUF has decided to offer an annual coupon rate of 11% for a period of 36 months, 11.25% for 48 months and 11.50% for 60 months to the retail investors and high networth individuals (HNIs).

Institutional investors, non-institutional investors, corporates etc. will be paid a lower rate of interest, which has been fixed at 10.75% per annum across all seven options, for all the tenures – 36 months, 48 months or 60 months.

It will be a month-long issue which is scheduled to close on December 24th i.e. Tuesday. As the issue size is small, the company has the option to preclose it as and when it gets oversubscribed. If it gets a poor response, the company may extend it also.

Retail investors category investing up to Rs. 5 lakh would get 40% pie of the issue. Individual investors investing more than Rs. 5 lakh in a single name would be categorised as HNIs and 40% of the issue size has been reserved for this category of investors also.

Categories of Investors & Allocation Ratio – The investors have been classified in the following four categories and each category will have a certain percentage fixed in the allotment:

Category I – Institutional Investors – 10% of the issue is reserved

Category II – Non-Institutional Investors & Corporates – 10% of the issue is reserved

Category III – High Networth Individuals including HUFs – 40% of the issue is reserved

Category IV – Resident Indian Individuals including HUFs – 40% of the issue is reserved

NCDs will be allotted on a first come first served basis.

NRI Not Allowed – Non-Resident Indians (NRIs), foreign nationals and qualified foreign investors (QFIs) among others are not eligible to invest in this issue.

Ratings & Nature of NCDs – The issue has been rated as ‘AA’ by CARE and all these NCDs are ‘Secured’ in nature. It indicates reasonable safety for your investment amount.

Listing, Demat & TDS – SCUF has proposed to list its NCDs on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) as well as on the National Stock Exchange (NSE). Investors have the option to apply these NCDs in physical form as well as demat form. However, trading of these NCDs will happen only in the demat form.

Interest earned on these NCDs is taxable as per the tax slab of the investor and TDS will be applicable if the interest amount exceeds Rs. 5,000 in a financial year. NCDs taken in the demat form will not attract any TDS on the interest income.

Minimum Investment – Minimum investment in this issue has been fixed as Rs. 10,000 i.e. 10 bonds of face value Rs. 1,000.

Performance of Last Year’s SCUF NCDs

As you can check from the table above, SCUF NCDs issued last year, with maturity periods of 36 months and 60 months, are trading at yields of 11.58% to 13.73%, much above the coupon rates offered in the current issue.

Also, with a private company being the issuer, it is always advisable to go for the least possible tenure offering attractive coupon/yield. As compared to the current issue, last year’s NCDs carry lower risk as the maturity period has become shortened.

Interest rates have also risen since its last issue. So, I would say if anybody wants to make an investment in SCUF NCDs, it is better to go for already listed NCDs rather than subscribing for them in the current issue.

Looking at the subscription figures of recent NCD issues of IIFL, Shriram Transport Finance, Muthoot Finance etc., it seems to me that the investors are not performing any due diligence before subscribing to these NCDs, rather these NCDs are getting sold to them by their brokers. Personally, I would avoid this issue for my own investments.

Application Form of Shriram City Union Finance NCDs

Note: As per SEBI guidelines, ‘Bidding’ is mandatory before banking the application form, else the application is liable to get rejected. For bidding of your application, any further info or to invest in SCUF NCDs, you can contact me at +919811797407

Double Your Money in 6 Years with Muthoot Finance NCDs – November 2013 Issue

This post is written by Shiv Kukreja, who is a Certified Financial Planner and runs a financial planning firm, Ojas Capital in Delhi/NCR. He can be reached at [email protected]

Muthoot Finance has again come out with a public issue of its secured and unsecured non-convertible debentures (NCDs) and it has been launched from today. This would be the second issue from Muthoot Finance this financial year after it raised Rs. 300 crore in September from its first issue.

The issue will remain open for two weeks to get closed on December 2nd i.e. first Monday of December. The company may extend the closing date of the issue or preclose it, depending on the response for the issue.

Most of the features of the current issue, including its coupon rates for the retail investors, are same as they were in the first issue. Let us first have a look at all of its features.

Size of the issue – The company plans to raise Rs. 300 crore from this issue as well, including the green shoe option of Rs. 150 crore.

Coupon Rates – Like Muthoot offered in its earlier issue as well, the company promises to double your investment amount in 6 years’ time i.e. 72 months with an effective yield of 12.25% per annum. But, NCDs issued under this option are ‘Unsecured’ in nature.

Apart from this option, it is offering coupon rates ranging from 11% to 12.25% with different maturity periods and different interest payment options as you can very well check from the table below.

Coupon Rates for Institutional Investors – This is one significant change Muthoot has made as compared to its first issue. Muthoot has decided to offer a lower rate of interest to the institutional investors and the difference is of 75 basis points (or 0.75%) across all the options, except option VII. The difference is of 0.25% only with option VII.

Categories of Investors & Allocation Ratio – The investors have been classified in the following three categories and as always, each category will have certain percentage fixed for the allotment:

Category I – Institutional Investors – 15% of the issue is reserved

Category II – Non-Institutional Investors & Corporates – 35% of the issue is reserved

Category III – Retail Individual Investors including HUFs – 50% of the issue is reserved

NCDs will be allotted on a first come first served basis in all these categories.

NRI Investment – Like its first issue, non-resident Indians (NRIs) are not allowed to invest in this issue as well.

Ratings & Nature of NCDs – There are two rating agencies involved in this issue – CRISIL and ICRA and both have assigned ‘AA-/Negative’ rating to this issue. All these NCDs are ‘Secured’ in nature, except NCDs issued under option XI which offer to double your money.

Listing, Demat & TDS – Muthoot has proposed to list its NCDs only on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). Investors will again have the option to apply these NCDs in physical form as well as demat form under options I to VI. Applicants cannot apply for allotment of these NCDs in physical form under options VII to XI i.e. these NCDs will be allotted only in dematerialised form under options VII to XI.

Again, the interest earned will be taxable as per the tax slab of the investor and TDS will be applicable if the interest amount exceeds Rs. 5,000. But, NCDs taken in the demat form will not attract any TDS on the interest income.

Minimum Investment – Minimum investment in this issue as well has been fixed as Rs. 10,000 i.e. 10 bonds of face value Rs. 1,000.

Muthoot NCDs, issued in the first issue this year, have allotment date of September 25th i.e. they were issued around two months back. As you can check from the table above, most of these NCDs are still trading below their face value.

Also, liquidity is very poor with these NCDs, especially under unpopular options like cumulative interest & annual interest options and also with longer duration options of 60 months & more.

Interest rates have also risen since then. So, if I need to invest my money in Muthoot NCDs, I would go for already listed NCDs rather than buying them from the company in this issue.

Also, gold financing sector overall is not doing that great, but Muthoot is a key player in this sector. Investors need to factor in all these variables before applying for these NCDs.

Application Form of Muthoot NCDs

India’s Export-Import Data – October 2013 – Trade Deficit, Gold Imports & Oil Imports

This post is written by Shiv Kukreja, who is a Certified Financial Planner and runs a financial planning firm, Ojas Capital in Delhi/NCR. He can be reached at [email protected]

After a brief rally in its value, Indian rupee has been falling again. Concerns of higher fiscal deficit, higher current account deficit and rising inflation have again started putting enormous pressure on the rupee, due to which it fell to 63.44 in today’s trade, before closing at 63.24 against the dollar.

Falling rupee makes our imports costlier and that ways we will again have a higher inflation, which in turn will result in higher interest rates. Yield on India’s benchmark 10-year govt bonds once again crossed the psychological mark of 9% today before closing at 8.95%. It indicates that we are in a difficult situation as far as cost of capital is concerned and it is going to put more pressure on corporates’ profitability figures.

For quite a long time now, India has been struggling to contain its trade deficit and current account deficit (CAD). Department of Commerce today released the trade deficit data for the month of October at $10.56 billion. While import figure stood at $37.83 billion, India exported goods & services worth $27.27 billion during last month.

Though the current trade deficit data is not scary, it is not great either. Gold imports have been tied at artificially lower levels by imposing steeply high import duties. Gold prices, which have been ruling significantly lower in the international markets at $1282/oz, are ruling at around Rs. 30,000 per 10 gram here in India. So, this way, current buyers are paying higher prices for gold just to benefit those people who earlier bought it cheaper and the government by paying higher taxes.

Moreover, infrastructure & capital goods sector are also bleeding here in India. So, our imports of heavy machineries & other capital goods are also in a state of crisis. That also must have contributed to lower imports.

(Note: Figures are in US $ billion)

Gold Imports in October were at $1.37 billion as compared to last month’s $0.8 billion and last year’s $6.78 billion. The lower this number remains, the better it is for the Indian economy. But, with the marriage season starting, it is expected to remain higher this month also.

Oil Imports in October came out at $15.22 billion as compared to last month’s $13.2 billion, an increase of 15.3% and last year’s $14.96 billion, a jump of 1.7%. Thanks to lower international crude prices and rupee appreciation in October, this figure came out lower. Slower economic activity should keep our oil imports in check in the coming few months also.

Exports in October stood at $27.27 billion as against last month’s exports of $27.68 billion, a decline of 1.5% and last year’s exports of $24.03 billion, a rise of 13.5%. Thanks to a steep depreciation in rupee, our exports have been rising for the past four months. With continued pressure on rupee, it is expected to see this momentum also to continue in the coming months.

India has set an export target of $325 billion for the current financial year. I think we should not rely only on services exports for this momentum to continue and diversify our exports by focusing on manufacturing & exporting quality products.

Imports in October stood at $37.83 billion as against last month’s imports of $34.44 billion, a jump of 9.8% and last year’s imports of $44.24 billion, a decline of 14.5%. This is a concern area for the Indian economy. We are becoming too dependent on products manufactured outside our country that it is becoming extremely difficult to contain our imports without some curbs being imposed.

Trade Deficit in October came out to be $10.56 billion, higher than last month’s $6.76 billion, but much lower than last year’s figure of $20.21 billion.

With import curbs working in our favour and exports keeping the momentum, India’s biggest worry of high current account deficit is finally coming under control. Now, the government should target keeping inflation and fiscal deficit under check. These two factors are potentially very dangerous to disturb all the financial calculations that the financial ministry has done for its current financial year.

How to screen companies for investing?

PP left the following comment on my investment cycle post:

PP November 8, 2013 at 5:43 pm [edit]

Hi Manshu,

Good post. Could you do a post on how you go about screening / evaluating companies (and deciding if its share price is under or over valued), and recommend steps that one should follow while doing it themselves?

Thanks!

My screening technique is very simple and inspired by Peter Lynch’s One Up On Wall Street where he talks about using the power of your common knowledge, and investing in companies you deal with every day.

Following these techniques has been profitable and fun for me. I believe it’s important for this to be fun because if you’re not a professional, you won’t be able to practice these techniques if they aren’t fun.

Who makes this great product?

I watched “Thor: Dark World” in 3D yesterday, and enjoyed it quite a bit. I have seen the last Thor movie as well, but at that time I didn’t notice Thor is a Marvel character. Before the movie, they played trailers of other upcoming movies with Marvel characters, and I made a mental note to look at Marvel to see if it may be a good buy.

Two other companies that caught my eye were IMAX, and I have bought and sold IMAX at a profit in the past, and RealD, which is the company that makes the 3D glasses for these movies. I have screened RealD earlier and avoided it because of the competition they face, and also the emphasis on re-use of 3D glasses.

Earlier in the day I spent a long time in the snaking queues of Banana Republic, and window shopped a Prada store because I can’t afford anything there. Both these companies seem to be excellent stock picks, and just keeping an eye out for popular products is a great way to screen companies.

You also read about trends like 3D printing and drones, and it is a good idea to see if there are any good companies operating in those areas. When I first learned about 3D printing, I thought it was a very new field, and it would be difficult to find any profitable companies operating in this area but then I discovered 3D Systems which has also been a very profitable stock for me.

Another way to screen companies is to see what enterprise software you use, and if there are any good companies operating in that field.

I was a regular reader of Business India and Business World, and they feature a lot of good companies that you can analyze further. I remember reading a glowing review of Jain Irrigation Systems in Business India many years ago and thinking about buying the stock — I never did, and the stock was a multi-bagger in the years to follow.

Reading about investments from others is also a good way to identify stocks. You can do this easier than ever before by using Twitter, and following people who are interested in investments.

Good ideas are all around you when you are actively seeking them.

Is it listed?

That’s the question I ask myself often. Yesterday I learned that Marvel is owned by Disney, and both Banana Republic and Prada are private companies that you can’t invest in.

That will be the case with a lot of companies but you have to go through them to find the ones that are listed and could be potential buys. If it is listed then you can go to the “Investor Relations” section on their website and read more about the company, if not, you move to the next idea.

Currently, I own seven stocks and one ETF. I’m a customer of six out of the seven companies, the only one that I don’t knowingly use the products of is Huntsman Corporation, which I bought a couple of years ago because it had a dividend yield of 4%, and steady financials. This stock is over 100% of my purchase price today, and I felt like this would be a good buy when I chanced upon it.

You obviously make mistakes in this process as well, and one good example is Primo Water that I sold at a 50% loss sometime last year. This is a company that sells water, and they ran into financial troubles last year.

Evaluating a company

Not every company that makes a good product will be a profitable company, and not every profitable company will result in a profitable stock. HLL and Infosys are good examples of these. These two stocks were the darlings of investors some years ago, but after a while they lost their favor with investors and were never able to give the returns they once did. They are still good companies that own great brands, and provide great service, but due to other factors they haven’t been great stocks for the past few years.

This is an important thing to understand because it is not very intuitive. My own understanding of this concept became very clear in running OneMint. OneMint is a good product that has benefited a lot of people, but at the same time it has a non existent business model and if it were a stock I wouldn’t invest in it. Just providing value to people is not enough, there has to be a good business model and a way to monetize that value or else the business will never be profitable.

Even if a business is profitable, you have to look at its valuation to see if that justifies the current price, and leaves room for growth.I’m going to do a follow up post on this sometime this week, and share some of my ideas on how to measure this.

Where are we in the fear and greed cycle?

An obvious question on yesterday’s post was where we are in the fear and greed cycle, and sure enough Ketki asked that question.

Here is the image I used yesterday.

To provide a quick answer, I believe we are somewhere between Hope and Optimism as far as Indian markets go, and a bit higher than that for the US markets, however as I stated yesterday that is my opinion and there is no way for me to know where we will be six months from now or twelve months from now.

This comment also brings me back to a question Santonu asked in the Suggest a Topic page.

Here is his question.

santonu October 26, 2013 at 8:07 am [edit]

Manshu ,you often write that you pick up stocks when market is down or stocks are at attarctive level.What is your strategy when market is high like these days ,sell or wait for further fall or keep idle

REPLY

There are a few things I do in a high market, but all of them stem from believing that the market runs in cycles and the length of those cycles can be quite unpredictable.

Roger Nusbaum put this very well in a recent post:

I think it is hugely beneficial to take a moment during a huge rally to remember that at some point the market will go down a lot again and create stress (fear) for a lot of people. Then like every other stress-inducing decline it will come back. The rate at which it bounces back might be fast or slow but it will come back.

When that next big decline comes your portfolio will either go down more than the market or less than the market and then it will recover at some rate that is either fast or slow.

If the above reads as being stupidly obvious, that is exactly the point because the above is how it actually works. Thinking about it in terms of A follows B matter of factly and of course repeatedly can go a long way to reducing whatever stress might come along from a large market decline.

So, given all this, here is what I do.

Sell the stocks that are high

When I buy a stock, I have a file that lists down its qualities and a fair price. If the company goes a lot higher than the price I have in my file, and this usually happens during up-markets, – I sell the stock. In the past year I have sold 3D Systems that went up quite a bit more than the fair value I assigned to it but unfortunately for me, it continued rising further even after I sold it.

Reduce purchases

I don’t stop purchases altogether because there is no way to know if I am right about the cycle or not, and how long it will last. I’m also not patient or brave enough to wait for crashes and only buy when there is panic. A recent example of a buy is Zynga which I think will do well in the years to come and I didn’t want to wait for a crash to buy it.

However, the money I put in the markets is a lot less than what I put in during panics.

Build on savings

I am sure a lot of us personal finance types have Excel files, Google Docs or online portfolio tools that help us keep a close track of our net-worth. In my case, I have a Google Spreadsheet that has my liquid net-worth and I find it motivating to see small up-ticks in it every month. By saving money and adding to it I find motivation, and energy that I’m heading in the right direction. So even if I’m not putting money in the market, it is getting put in my brokerage account and adding to that number, also, it is ready to use whenever I need.

Pay down debt

It is also very useful to pay down whatever debt you have in the form of car loans or home loans during these periods. The interest rate on these is high, and it is usually a good idea to pay them down so you can reduce the total number of EMIs. So far, I’ve been lucky enough to pre-pay every loan that I have taken, and periods of high markets are the best for this.

Build on your list of stocks

I find it interesting to look at companies, and the whole investment process thrills me, so I continue to build on my list of stocks that I could potentially invest in – screening companies that I come across in my daily life.

An interesting phenomenon that I have noted is that screening companies in high markets makes it a lot easier to invest in them in low markets. What happens is that valuation is very subjective, and when the market has assigned a price to a stock, your own valuation is biased by that and you tend to assign a number close to it.

When the market falls, and the stock halves (happens more frequently than you’d like) – it is a lot easier to now invest in this stock.

Conclusion

So these are some of my own ideas around the process of investing when the markets seem high. I hope you find them useful to your own process, and I’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Nifty highs – sustainable or another crash coming soon?

As the Nifty makes new life time highs, the consensus view is disbelief and incredulity that these numbers will sustain. There are a few voices that are predicting higher highs, but I think for the most part, the consensus view is that these numbers aren’t sustainable.

This reminds me of the US markets from a few months ago when the Dow first started making new highs. At that time the majority view was this wouldn’t last, and the Dow would come crashing down soon. As the Dow has continued to make new highs, people have stopped talking about crashes, and the news of new highs is no longer news.

I know this sounds like me saying the Indian markets will follow the same path and be even higher in a few months, but that’s not what I am saying.

And I’m certainly not saying the markets will be lower than today, or these numbers are unsustainable.

I have always believed that predicting the market is a fool’s errand, and is something best done by people who make more money appearing on TV or writing books than investing in the markets.

So, why make the parallel at the beginning for the post?

To emphasize that this type of thinking is typical for where we are right now. When the market make a new high when it has stumbled along the way for the past few years, skepticism will be the dominant emotion. The reasons for this skepticism may vary, but we have seen this far too often to not recognize it here.

I’m embedding this great image below that shows how the cycle of fear and greed goes.

Recognizing this is important because it ensures you avoid wasting your energy in trying to follow market experts’ predictions on which direction to follow but instead have a system to invest in the market that ignores the short term direction it takes.

In the long term, we all assume that the market rises, else we wouldn’t be in the market, but in the short term there is no way to predict how the market will behave. This cycle continues forever and the best way to work within this cycle and not be victimized by it is to ignore the noise and invest regularly and systematically.

That way you ensure that you make investments when the market is really low, and capitalize on them when the market rises, and also ensures that you don’t invest too much of your money in a lump sum during times of excitement, euphoria or thrill and permanently impair your capital.

Once you get into that habit, the next step is to take advantage of these highs and falls and book profits during euphoria and invest heavily during depressions. I wrote about this not too long ago in my post about SIPs not being the end in themselves.

The key idea is to recognize patterns in how the markets behave – in this instance, the emotions that are commonly associated with every cycle in every country of the world, and make them work to your benefit rather than being drowned in the noise about useless predictions about them.

Book Review: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

I finished reading “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life” written by Dilbert creator Scott Adams today, and I enjoyed it very much.

I have been reading Mr. Adams’s blog for several years now, and I have also read most of his earlier books, so it was no surprise to me that the message in the book resonated with me, and I was able to finish the book in a few hours.

The book is about how Mr. Adams achieved success, and he lists down the factors that contributed to his success. This may sound like a self help book, but is very different from any other self help book because of its unconventional message.

I will talk about three specific points from his book that I found particularly interesting and will sum up the book after that.

System versus Goals

One of his key ideas is that people shouldn’t have goals but instead rely on a system to achieve success. An example of a difference between a goal and a system is that a goal can be losing 25 kilos by the end of the year while a system can be getting into a routine of exercising 15 minutes every day.

For me a good example is the difference between having a target in terms of subscribers – say 15,000 OneMint subscribers by the end of the year or a system where I say I will set aside an hour for blogging every day.

The latter is a system whereby I am telling myself that I need to get in the habit of blocking an hour for blogging every day. If I’m not able to finish a post in that time, or I’m not able to answer all comments that is still fine because I was dedicated to the blog for that one hour and what you achieve within the hour will always vary.

This type of thinking is good for motivating me to write because often the idea of finishing a post is a lot more daunting than the idea of spending one hour on blogging.

I think this is a useful way to look at things, and I’m trying this idea out with blogging and a few other things.

Maximizing Energy

Another interesting idea in the book is about maximizing energy and doing things that make you feel positive and get your energy up which rubs off on other things that you do in your life.

This is something I can easily resonate with in terms of blogging. Many times I have thought that the time spent on blogging is better spent doing something else that has more tangible and direct rewards. But every time I take a break from blogging to focus on such a thing I fail. I don’t see any gain in my productivity in other aspects of my life and I feel that I’m just frittering away the time that I would have used for blogging. Blogging energizes me in a way that no other thing does, and that is then reflected in other things I do.

Affirmations

Affirmation is positive reinforcement by writing down your wish a few times every day. An example from the book, “I, Scott, will become a syndicated cartoonist.”

Mr. Adams state that these have worked for him, and this is perhaps one of the more controversial parts of the book which a lot of people will question, and a few may have just stopped reading the book altogether after coming across the part where he claims affirmations have worked for him.

My own view of these things is that our knowledge is so limited that we can’t rule anything out. Our minds are simply too small to comprehend the workings of the universe, so I have a healthy and distant respect for anything that sounds mysterious or magical. There is simply no way for me to say affirmations don’t work, and if they have worked for him, they may work for others as well.

Conclusion

I think everyone should read this book at least once to get exposed to the ideas in it because I think they are truly useful. Not everything may be acceptable to you, and everything needn’t be to be your time’s full worth. Even if you like one or two ideas and are able to implement them I think that will change your life in meaningful ways, and you shouldn’t deprive yourself of that opportunity.

Happy Diwali !!

No gyan, no complicated terms, no financial jargons today. It is the biggest festival of India and I hope everybody is in great festive mood. I am sure all of us are spending some quality times with our families and I wish we all have such great times everyday in our lives. May God give all of us healthy mind, healthy body, calm, joy, happiness, peace, wealth, wisdom and prosperity!

I won’t take much of your time and would like to end it here by extending thousands and thousands of Diwali wishes to you & your family, from OneMint, Manshu & me.

A very happy Diwali to all OneMint readers! May God bless you with peace, health & prosperity and fulfill all your desires! Thanks again! 🙂