Category: Links

First off, The Big Picture has photos from the car collection of Ralph Lauren. The toys rich people have!

Next up, a very good account on how STPs are being misused by Dhirendra Kumar.

You might be aware that a new CPI has been announced, and Ajay Shah has an excellent post on it.

Hemant on plans with bonus – this is one of those mental accounting posts where you treat money from different sources differently.

I have written about the next stage of developing this thinking building on a post from Mark Wolfinger of Options for Rookies who wrote:

“If you have a profit, that profit is yours.  It does not belong to ‘the house.’  If the investment turns against you, and your $1,000 profit becomes a $600 profit, you lost $400.

I can hear the disbelief now.  “How can I have lost $400 when I earned a $600 profit?”…. Holding is a decision.  It’s a decision not to act.  Because you can exit the trade at it’s current price, that price represent the value of your trade.  This is marking to the market.”

Mark’s post about this is just great, and if this concept is new to you or just needs re-enforcement you can read it here.

Book review of Jaya: An Illustrated Retelling of the Mahabharata by Reema Sahay.

Finally, here’s some light humor from Mashable that will make you feel good about your Tweets.

Enjoy your weekend!

Hemant is running a contest on his site where he is going to give away one free copy of PERFIOS which is a personal finance software – the entry rules are easy (as they usually are in these contests), so if you are interested then do check out his post.

I’ve been playing around with the idea of building some kind of an automated planner on the site but that’s in initial stages, and I haven’t made much progress with it.

Investologic however has this free financial plan builder, which is a good start for someone who has some goals in mind, and wants to get a ball park on how much money is needed given the number of years ahead of him, inflation and returns numbers.

Roger Nusbaum has a good post on gold mania, and though his post is written from a US perspective I think the same is applicable in India as well.

A lot of people are getting carried away with gold purchases, and are totally convinced that it can never fall in value. While gold has its place in a portfolio, there’s no reason to go over board on it. It can go down in value just like any other asset so be careful. My own opinion on gold or silver hasn’t changed, and you can find it here if you’re interested.

I’ve saved the best for last.

I’m a big fan of Dilbert and it’s creator – Scott Adams, and have read his blog for a number of years now. Lately, he has been facing some trouble from people taking his quotes out of context and maligning his reputation.

He was trying to fight this by creating an alias and posting comments on blogs and websites where he was being attacked, but was forced to reveal his true identity by the site moderators.

He has written this brilliant post about the whole incident and his thoughts about it, and I think this provides a lot of insights on not only the thought process of celebrities who have to manage their reputation online, but also on how people think, on context, how something can be automatically loaded against you, perception vs reality and other things that affect us in our daily lives.

You can read the great post here.

Enjoy your weekend!

My links post is normally an aggregate of unrelated topics because I save good articles throughout the week, and then write this post sometime late Friday.

This week however I find that most links have the central theme of something big that pertains to India.

To start with I was going through the Census Website, and saw that India’s population was 238 million in 1900, and in the next 110 years it grew at 1.49% CAGR to 1.2 billion people.

The US had a population of 76 million in 1900 and it currently has a  population of 307 million, which shows that in the same period their population grew at ~1.28%.

If they had grown at 1.49% then their population would be about 386 million.

I was thinking about why India has such a large population a few months ago, and I don’t think I’ve seen this question addressed comprehensively anywhere. From this data I infer that there’s nothing extra-ordinary that happened in the last 100 years or after Independence, and we had quite a large base to begin with.

There are some other interesting nuggets of information on the census website, and the current report (pdf) itself is just 2 pages and very well laid out.

Next up is this speech by Dr. Subir Gokarn, Deputy Governor RBI on Sustainability of Economic Growth and Controlling Inflation.

The speech is quite brilliant: short, easy to read, with charts that offer explanation and is one of the best pieces I’ve read about the balance between growth and inflation in the country. The bottom line is that inflation must be controlled for higher economic growth, and high inflation does in fact pose a risk to high economic growth.

Beyond BRICS on a BCG report about how Indian insurance market is set to become the largest after America and China.

Some other links now:

Great post explaining the concept of Margins by Fred Wilson.

Kid Dynamite on how the NASDAQ 100 Index is going to change shortly, and how it evolved.  This is an important post for people who recently invested or are looking to invest in the MOST Shares NASDAQ 100 Index.

Finally, Hemant on 10 best ways of managing personal finance.

Enjoy your weekend!

Here are some good links I found this week. Before I get to the posts let me share a new site I discovered a couple of weeks ago.

The site is called MoneySights, and it’s a pretty good resource for doing stock and mutual fund research.

The look and feel is brilliant, and there is good data there as well. Play with it and let me know what you think.

This week’s links:

Franklin Templeton Family Solutions review by Hemant.

How can an investor get a common account statement at Value Research.

Cheaters causing crashes at Fundoo Professor

Of Mice and Templeton Moments at Psy – Fi Blog.

Enjoy your weekend!

Ranjan Varma has started Rupee Camp which is a personal finance workshop meant to be a structured program to provide people with money skills. I’ve obviously not attended this so I don’t know how good it is but I do like Ranjan’s blog, so I thought I’d let OneMint readers know about his initiative. The workshop will be  held in Mumbai and the cost is Rs. 3,000. If you are interested in this kind of thing then head over to his blog and check it out.

On to some news now – first up – India abstained from voting for use of force in Libya. India was not alone in this as BRIC + Germany also abstained.

From what I can understand the reasons for abstaining is that information coming out of Libya is not credible, and there isn’t enough clarity on who will do what once the resolution is carried out.

On a totally different note India imported $623 million worth of oil from Libya last year, and about $17 billion dollars worth of oil from Saudi Arabia. The numbers are probably not directly comparable because of the high quality of sweet crude that Libya produces.

On to some more national news – the Indian government has armed itself with an internet kill switch or the power to shut off the internet under the IT Act of 2008. This is quite ridiculous not only because it is against the very idea of our democracy, but also because it doesn’t sound practical at all.

RBI raised the repo and reverse repo by 25 basis points or 0.25% this week, and their guidance indicates that more hikes can be expected in the future. Earlier this week I tweeted out that Repo is the rate at which liquidity is injected and reverse repo is the rate at which it is absorbed by the RBI, and that might be a short and useful thing to remember as these terms are used more frequently in the future.

Have a good weekend!

First up this week is the news that the Indian per capita income rose by 14.5% during 2009-10 to Rs. 46,492 at current prices or Rs. 40,605 in 2004-05 prices. The rural per capita income is Rs. 16,327 and urban is Rs. 44,223. That’s a pretty big divide, and the fact that 74% of the population lives in rural areas makes it worse.

One way to deal with this is to make things simpler for entrepreneurs and small business owners to carry out their business. There are millions of way to do that, and one thing that the government did in that direction was to make it slightly simpler for Americans to get an India visa. They are not required to produce a birth certificate anymore!

How will this help raise the per capita income?

If more Americans come here – on business or pleasure – they will spend more money, which will then benefit some Indian in one way or another. When I was in Goa last – I met someone from Italy who wanted to stay in India every year for 6 months or so, but wasn’t able to because of visa limitations. That’s just insane!

Let’s look at something sane now – Roger Nusbaum’s piece about the importance of saving, and how at a certain points in your life savings rate can become more important than your investing returns.

I haven’t written enough about the thrift aspect of personal finance lately, and I think I need to do a post on this in the coming week, and probably illustrate some of the points that Roger makes in an Indian context.

Moving along, let’s look at an insurance piece now -  Hemant’s views on LIC Samridhi Plus – it’s a hard – hitting article and if you were thinking about this policy then I strongly recommend you read it.

Finally, NYT on Japan’s tragedy – our thoughts and prayers are with them, and I hope for the least damage to them.

This week a press release from the PIB (Press Information Bureau) of India which states that India is targeting exports worth $450 billion by 2014 really caught my eye. Exports are expected to hit $225 billion in 2010 – 11, so they are talking about doubling this in 3 years.

That’s a great target, and I hope we are successful in it. I haven’t read the strategy paper yet, just the press release, but having a target like this is itself quite good because even if you get close to that you have still done quite well.

Another press release – this time from the blog of Union Minister of State for Sports and Affairs – yeah that’s right – Mr. Ajay Maken does have a blog.

For the 2012 London Olympics – 10 categories have been identified in which India’s prospects of winning a medal are better than the rest, and there is a focus to train and win some medals in these categories. It’ll be really great if we do well (relatively speaking) in the London Olympics. All the best to Mr. Maken and his team, and I’d like to hear from readers if they have ever heard of any focused preparation for the Olympics prior to this.

I think this is another first – Mukesh Ambani – India’s richest man worries about the other India.

John Elliott on the current budget: Finance Minister in a time warp as India’s success story wobbles.

Now, on to some personal finance – Ranjan Varma on mental accounting v/s getting real.

Hemant Beniwal on how to identify when your financial planner doesn’t have your best interest at heart.

I’ll end with this WSJ link about the Indians with most Klout on Twitter. I wasn’t surprised to know that I don’t follow any of these folks, but it makes for interesting reading nonetheless. BTW I’m on Twitter too.

When I started out on OneMint it had 6 subscribers for what seemed like a very long time.

I used to check my Feedburner account everyday, and there it was  – a big 6 – I used to wonder what I need to do get the seventh subscriber.

Then I did a guest post at another website, and the number increased to 15, but I can never forget that 6.

That’s why when I launched the forum I was hoping that it doesn’t get stuck at six, but it quite easily passed that number, and as it stands today – there are 49 members right now, and it’s growing steadily.

Please join the forum, and ask any questions you may have. I say any questions because lately I’ve fielded quite a few questions about blogging itself, so I know some of you are interested in things outside finance, and you’re welcome to ask those questions too.

As long as the discussion is civil – all topics are welcome.

With that said, let’s move to some great links from this week.

First up is this great piece by Ajay Shah on how jittery regimes fix prices. A lot of you ask about which blogs to follow, and Ajay Shah who is a leading Indian economist has the best economics blog in an Indian context in my opinion, and you should definitely give him a try.

Libya has allowed India to land two AI flights there everyday for 10 days and assist in evacuation of the 18,000 Indians present there.

The budget is of course the big news these days, but somehow I’ve never been able to get that interested in it. Regardless, I’m really interested in seeing FDI open in Indian multi brand retail.

My hope is that it will bring in large investments in cold storage, food distribution, and in the long run bring down food prices as well, so I was quite happy to see that the WSJ blog has a piece that says the Indian budget could have some good news for the retail sector in this regard.

And finally an interesting post from TFL about 7 different types of investors. I think I fall under the regular category. Check it out for yourself to see where you fall or better still create a category yourself.

Enjoy your weekend!

One of the things that amazed me most about the Egypt uprising was that they shut down the internet. They just shut it off. I couldn’t believe that was possible but the Egyptian government just did it!

Then I was even more amazed to learn that the people actually favor the military, and that the military is going to try and steer the country towards democracy. They can get absolute control, but they will do what’s good for their country – I sure hope it happens.

But the thing that I find most amazing is how it all started in Tunisia with one frustrated young man burning himself alive, and how quickly it has spread to other countries with no one able to predict what is going to happen.

Here is a very good piece from the Economist titled The Autumn of Patriarchs which gives a very good account of what happened in Egypt.

Bahrain is engulfed in a lot of tension right now, and this NYT article provides a very good account on what’s going on there right now, and how the military is firing on its own people. The situation there is improving though, and today’s NYT has accounts of the army pulling back.

Bahrain is not alone in its strife though; this brief Reuters article reports grim news from Libya.

Closer to home, here is John Elliot’s excellent piece on the rare press conference by Dr. Manmohan Singh.

I guess people everywhere are tired of their governments and weirdest example of this that I’ve come across in a while is in Brazil where a clown has won the election, and that too with a landslide!

His election slogan was “It can’t get any worse” and he planned to do nothing more than report how other politicians spent their time!

Here is the Reuters piece on that.

Just so that I have one link relevant to the topics I usually discuss here I’m going to share Hemant Beniwal’s piece on the Reliance Gold Mutual Fund – this piece has great info on the mutual fund, and more than that it has got a lot of insight on why you’re mostly on your own when it comes to managing your finances.

Oh, and I almost forgot to congratulate the Indian team for their first win of the world cup. Sreesanth was the only real hope Bangladesh had after India made 370, but luckily he didn’t get to bowl his full quota today.

Some time during the last week OneMint crossed 5,000 subscribers, and I’m really happy about that.

However, at the same time – I realize that some of you don’t read the email newsletter, and simply delete it every day, and would like to unsubscribe.

If you want to unsubscribe, simply reply to this email asking me to unsubscribe, and I’ll remove you from the mailing list.

Now, on to some good links this week.

India’s government has a spineless reshuffle @ Riding the Elephant

The magic of buy and hold vs trend @ The Big Picture

Cartoon: Free gift from insurance agent @ Smart Singh

Buying term insurance online is cool @ Ranjan Varma

Deciphering and solving the inflation crisis @ Ajay Shah

Aadhaar hits another milestone @ PIB Press Releases

Enjoy your weekend!