Updates

A few updates this week

1. Had a bird photography contest in office. I volunteered for activities like collecting snaps, getting it printed on A3, etc. I submitted one of my own. The result of the contest in my view was a cropper – Dr M B Krishna, the judge selected a caged bird pic as one of the winners, which to me was shocking! IMHO, only 1 pic of the top 3 deserved the award. Caged bird pics deserve no place before the bottom. Learnt a lot from this event…like the need to calibrate the monitor. The A3 print of my snap looked slightly different in color from my monitor.
2. Maybe, I should think of an advanced course in post processing.
3. Stock market has moved up nicely. Nifty PE has moved up close to 21. Maybe people should lock in their profits at least a bit by selling atleast a portion of their folios.
4. Had the worst time driving in the last 2 years. A drain got damaged on Bannerghatta road near Oracle / Accenture causing massive disruption of traffic. I took 2 hours to cover 6 Km on June 4th. The worst thing was the way how the cops handled the whole thing. Pathetic.
5. Shocked to know that most of the bullet-proof jackets that our Mumbai cops used were actually nowhere near bullet proof. Another scam cooking?
6. Everywhere I go, people ask me about the impact of recession on software techies. I am getting bored of this question!
7. I dont know why, but this question has appeared so many times in the last few days in my mind. If I weren’t a software guy, what would I have been (or like to be)?

Financial journey since May 2007

Well, I seem to be blogging very little about finance these days. My time is mostly consumed by my new interests.. photography, bird watching and wildlife.

It is a surprise even to me as to how a strongly left-brain oriented person like me has taken to right-brain activities like photography and birding (ok.. they are not entirely right-brain).

But finance has been a favorite topic since a long time. As a kid I used to love monopoly. As a student, I loved math and numbers. Now as a BI (business intelligence) expert, I love charts. I like to ponder over monthly savings ratios, net worth growth rate, expense pie charts, etc. Though I am struggling to balance a few unrelated interests, it is but natural for me to keep returning to my financial interests.

I decided to break the jinx and blog a bit on finance, on my journey since May 2007. (Please read my disclaimer too).

Why May 2007? Because I made a major change in my investment style at that time. I consciously made a decision to go passive, go large cap. Index funds (actually exchange traded funds) were in. Most of my individual stocks were sold. Active stock picking was mostly out except for a few niche holdings. Mutual funds too were reduced to a few concentrated large cap holdings. I chose steady performers (like Franklin India taxshield, HDFC Equity) over star performers. I chose to focus more on my career and kept my finances on auto-run. I opted for SIP’s, made regular purchases of Nifty Bees and slept peacefully most of the time.

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If cash is king… GnuCash is the emperor

Thanks to Gnucash. My financial tracking is so much easier and simpler these days.

If you haven’t downloaded it yet, I urge you to do it today!!!

Now!!! Here.

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Fire your MF agent!

Do you invest in mutual funds?

And more importantly, do you invest through an agent or a broker?

Fire him! Save money!

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Indexing

I have been thinking on these lines recently. Why should I not index a part of my folio and let it sleep for a few years?

I might actually do so, with 20% of my equity folio or so! I was reading about William Ruane of Sequoia and his answers struck in my mind. And also Warrens advice on the same lines makes a lot of sense.

I intend to add at least 1 index fund probably tracking NIFTY.

And read this good line today quoted by Albert Hettinger!

“Don’t use margin. If you’re smart, you would never need to borrow money in the first place. If you’re dumb, you may go broke.”