Category: Links

I was unable to write a post this week due to some unplanned work that came up and took up all my time. This is likely to go on for this month, but I think I will be able to write during the month, though probably not the 6 posts in the week.

That said, I was able to read a little bit and here are 7 good links for your weekend reading. First, RRK does a cost comparison between ULIPs and mutual funds and finds that in some cases mutual fund costs can be higher than ULIPs.

I’ve spent some time going through this but haven’t even fully understood the ULIP costs. Even then, at this point I think it’s fair for me to concede that my notion that all ULIPs are terribly expensive is not true and while I still don’t see any value in owning them, after looking at this post I won’t be dismissing all of them with a shrug like I used to. Please read the comparison and tell me if I’m missing anything.

The big story in the coming weeks is going to be the Facebook IPO and here’s a good article on it in the WSJ.

Prof. Jayanth Varma writes about disclosing risks, and wonders if it wouldn’t be better to have this simple fact disclosed in all IPO documents.

Numerous studies covering many different countries have shown that over the long term, initial public offerings tend to underperform the rest of the stock market. Subscribing to these offerings can therefore be injurious to your wealth.

Digital Inspiration has an interesting post on how you really have 3 Facebook passwords and how Facebook allows 3 variations of your passwords to be accepted.

An unexpected story about rich Americans giving up their citizenship to avoid the taxman.

Berkshire Hathaway’s first quarter profits double.

Finally, the reviews of this men’s hair removal cream are the funniest thing I’ve read in quite some time!

Enjoy your weekend!

First up, this fascinating profile of Marc Andreessen who developed the first graphical browser, co-founded Netscape and is currently a venture capitalist invested in some of the most important technology companies in the world.

Next, an intriguing excerpt from a conversation between Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore where they discuss about the nature of Truth and whether it can exist independently from the human mind.

Moving on to sport and economics, an amazing article on the game theory of penalty kicks in football.

Now, here’s a start up focused on building more than an app, they are trying to mine asteroids for precious metals!

3-D printing does some amazing things, but mostly does some fun stuff, in another example of fun stuff, a team created a way to 3-D print any balloon shape that you wanted to.

The Psy Fi blog tells us about the 6% self inflicted trading tax.

Finally, enjoy this great Roomba ad, which went viral last week.

Have a good weekend!

I was amazed to learn that Anil Kumar Kapila, who must be a familiar name to a lot of you here has left more than 1,000 comments on Hemant’s blog. That’s a truly humongous number, and hats off to him for writing so much without expecting anything in return.

He did a very nice post with his own life story, and I think it makes a very good read.

Another fascinating story, this one a rags to riches story of four brothers who turned a road side fruit shop into a 150 crore rupee empire. A fascinating read.

Another interesting read, this one from a CNBC (America) journalist who writes about his long career in journalism and how technology has changed it, and how Twitter has made a very profound change in the way he does his job.

A very unusual iPhone app and experiment, one that tries to influence what you dream about!

Back to some money stuff, the FT writes about how foreign investors have stayed away from India so far this year.

Ajay Shah does an excellent post on why inflation may have moderated but the inflation crisis has not ended.

And finally, these beautiful animal pictures from The Telegraph.

Enjoy your weekend!

There is some great commentary on the current state of affairs of the army in this post titled Army intrigue and graft hits India’s defences, and it covers a lot of ground from the political players to General VK Singh and public sector problems that plague India’s defense procurements.

Next up, another serious problem, safety of women in the NCR area and how Gurgaon women have got an innovative idea in the form of a Girlcott. They will stop shopping from April 13 to April 15 to influence the private sector who in turn should influence the administration to take some steps to improve safety of women. I think this is just great and hope this idea succeeds. Here is their FB page if you are interested.

Next up, a small WSJ blog post on the origin and meaning of the word risk.

A slightly longer post by Professor Bakshi on a new way to measure risk – returns per units of stress.

Something that won’t surprise readers here – volumes in the stock market have dropped significantly after the budget as FIIs wait for clarification on some of the GAAR related points that they are concerned with.

Finally, this brilliant letter from Google’s CEO Larry Page in which he says how it’s easier to make progress on mega-ambitious goals than on less risky projects. Fascinating stuff.

Enjoy your weekend!

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.

Closer home, Financial Express opines that Rahul Gandhi’s drubbing may boost India.

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.

Finally, John Elliot laments jugaad in India.

Let’s start with Bemoneyaware’s post on mis-selling and mis-buying which is a comprehensive article with takes from many people on the subject. It has links to a lot of articles and viewpoints about the topic and the one thing that I’d like to say about this issue is that usually not enough responsibility is placed on buyers. I was thinking about this recently when people were making indignant remarks about the Reliance buyback, but the very same folks will be happy to buy shares from the market and flip it to Reliance for a small profit. Your greed is someone else’s opportunity.

Hemant has an excellent article on LIC Jeevan Ankur.

He is associated with the Financial Planners Guild and they are organizing a financial planning clinic in Gurgaon on the 5th February. This is an event where you can meet with some of the financial planners and ask questions and get inputs on financial planning. Here is the link with registration details.

An interesting look on North Korea as an investment destination. I had no idea that so many companies from different parts of the world were interested in investing in North Korea and was really surprised to hear that they have casinos for tourists.

Ajay Shah writes about his personal experience with an unusual way of charging his debit card at the petrol pump in consumer protection issues with payments.

HBR has a useful post on networking for introverts.

Finally, an interesting take on why are people friendly. 

Enjoy your weekend!

To start with, Jitendra Solanki writes about Apollo Munich Optima Restore which is a health insurance plan that has got some features which make it attractive relative to other plans.

Ranjan writes about a new IDBI portal to buy government securities from. This is the first of its kind and I will look at it in detail at some point in the future.

Prof. Jayanth Varma writes about the many different kinds of fixed exchange rate regimes. A crisp post with 4 examples of small countries that have fixed exchange rate regimes and have managed them successfully.

The Psy-Fi blog on how government debt is different from personal debt and what governments have done in the past when faced with a huge debt burden.

Paris rolls out the red carpet for Chinese tourists. A great piece on how the French are wooing Chinese tourists.

Bemoneyaware has a great article on the documents that are needed as part of a will. 

Finally, the most incredible thing I read and discovered this week was this piece about Sweden extending its democracy to Twittersphere.

The government of Sweden has the official Twitter account – @sweden and they’re allowing a citizen to tweet through that account for a week and this week the tweets are from Anna.

I’ve followed that account for three or four days and from what I can see there is no censorship at all. She’s tweeting out her mind and next week another Swede will get an opportunity to do that.

There are free countries, and then there are free countries.

Enjoy your weekend!

Yesterday I wrote about how things were getting quite in Europe, and today S&P downgraded a bunch of European countries!

The big name there is France, which is Europe’s second largest economy, but no longer a AAA country. They have downgraded 9 countries and affirmed the ratings of 7.

In Asia, the Japanese are using the Tsunami disaster to try out new things and one of the more incredible ideas is a 600 acre farm that will be wholly run by robots!

It was only a matter of time when this happened – Samsung, LG and Lenovo are launching TVs that can recognize hand gestures, faces and voice like Kinect – so very soon we will have TVs with no remotes!

Spiegel Online has a great piece on the Iran oil sanctions with a  great history on how oil sanctions have played out in the past, and this was a very insightful piece that I read this week.

Seth Godin talks about the first thing you do when you wake up and I must admit that I waste time in all of the ways he mentions.

At 7.7 millimeters – this is the smallest frog in the world – smaller than a tiny coin and the size of a house fly!

Finally, Rajeev Malik in Beyondbrics on saving India from its politicians.

Enjoy your weekend!

Update: There was an error in the post where I said S&P has downgraded 16 countries in all. They have downgraded 9 countries and affirmed the rating of 7.

The Economist has an interesting article on crowd wisdom which talks about how people decide which direction to move to when they see someone coming from the opposite direction, and they say that in France people step to the right to avoid a collision, while in most parts of Asia – people step to the left to avoid a collision. This has nothing to do with which side you drive because people drive on the left in London but step on the right to avoid a collision when walking.

The answer has to do with behavior which is also the topic of the second link in another interesting article on the behavioral economics of gift giving. It turns out that cash is the best gift, but you may not want to give such an impersonal gift – so try something expensive and useless if picking a gift for a girl and a gadget if looking for a gift for a guy!

Facebook is expected to come up with an IPO next year, and this WSJ story has some interesting details about how they are preparing for the IPO and things they want to watch out for like bowing to the short term expectations of shareholders.

I was surprised to read this article that said one political party in Iceland is suggesting that they adopt the Canadian dollar. It doesn’t look like this will happen and while it sounds very odd at first, when you think about it some more – if you are going to adopt something like the Euro why not adopt something more stable instead, right?

News of downgrades have become very common these days, so it was refreshing to see Moody’s praise Poland for managing inflation and maintaining a flexible exchange rate which combined with other things leads Moody’s to believe that Poland will grow rather than contract in 2012.

Something a bit less dramatic – Ranjan writes about Metlife’s Met Smart Child.

Finally, in a bit of relief India’s food inflation dips to 4 year lows.

Enjoy your Christmas weekend!

Update: Corrected the error pointed out by Ashok in his comment.

The best piece I’ve read on the Indian economic malaise is Shekhar Gupta’s editorial in the Indian Express where he talks about the various policy failures and self inflicted problems that are worsening the Indian economy.

I can’t think of even a single economic metric that has improved in the last two years, and if things continue to be this way then we’re in for some bad times ahead.

It is no surprise then that Morgan Stanley’s 2012 Indian outlook predicts a pre – crisis level growth. They forecast a 6.9% GDP growth rate in 2012, and while these estimates tend to go wrong and have to be revised several times – they do accurately reflect the gloomy scenario that we see today.

Beyondbrics reports on a dispute between Reliance Industries and the government which is in turn delaying BP’s participation in Reliance’s deepwater exploration.

China has had problems of its own this year, and their stock market has done quite badly (not as bad as Indian ones though), and that’s one reason why a hedge fund that shorted the credit of companies that will do badly in a Chinese slowdown has returned over 52% this year.

The problems of the BRIC countries are getting quite a lot of attention these days, and I see quite a few references of BRIC as Beyond Ridiculous Investment Concept on my Twitter feed these days.

Over at the US, they are fighting a bill that allows censorship of the internet, and several prominent American businessmen and investors have been writing about it for quite some time. Sergey Brin joined them yesterday.

Prof. Jayanth Varma gives a few examples of currency breakups.

Finally, a new theory on why we lost our fur.

Enjoy your weekend!