Friday, August 31st, 2018
About a year ago we had done a post on the shrinking Alpha in large cap mutual funds. Globally, there has been a shift of financial flows from active to passive management because of the inability of active managers to outperform their benchmarks consistently after fees. For a long time India was able to buck this […]
Thursday, August 30th, 2018
Interesting commentary from across the web in the last few weeks: REITs vs. other asset classes and vs. private real estate – Verdad A portfolio is not a plan – The Reformed Broker The flurry of stock buybacks and their implications – Ajit Ranade Its hard to be an Intelligent Investor – Validea Urjit […]
Wednesday, August 29th, 2018
The NPA problems have been brewing for a number of years. Along the way the RBI and the government have tried various schemes for banks to find a resolution to bad assets. Each of these schemes had fancy acronyms, such as CDR, SDR, S4A, JLF etc., which were wound up because they did not have […]
Tuesday, August 28th, 2018
I came across this video of Mohnish Pabrai talking about marketing and branding. It was an interesting talk and he made some great points: Marketing can be an exact science: there are “laws of marketing”. It’s important to know what these are If you go any industry or sector, you will see […]
Monday, August 27th, 2018
There has been a lot of buzz about the potential for financials in India and investors have been willing to pay a huge premium for well managed private financial institutions. Taking note of this, there has been a rush for such companies to list on the bourses. Already a number of NBFCs, insurers and asset […]
Friday, August 24th, 2018
One of the financial goals that I find most common and top-of-mind for my clients is that of saving and providing for their children’s education. This is especially true for college education and beyond. The Mint paper had a nice graphic to capture this: In my own experience, the amounts that parents do spend ends […]
Thursday, August 23rd, 2018
The global financial crisis was known for the crash of housing prices in the USA trigged by an unsustainable mortgage market. But since then, central banks have kept interest rates artificially low through quantitative easing. This has lead to investors and savers reaching for other avenues to get higher returns. The flow of funds has […]
Wednesday, August 22nd, 2018
Amazon was started in 1995 and today, about two decades later, it completely dominates the US e-commerce market. The Visual Capitalist has a great chart that captures this: What is even more impressive is that the company is growing really fast even though it is so massive. The company continues to take a larger […]
Tuesday, August 21st, 2018
Interesting discussion at a16z on the blockchain as an evolution of open source code. Some of my take aways: The analogy of open source code to a city: Essentially in an open source environment, you have the blue prints to the building blocks like the “power grid” and the “road network” etc. If you […]
Monday, August 20th, 2018
Interesting commentary from across the web in the last few weeks: Anoop Vijaykumar – How many investments will survive? – Capital Mind Annotated reading list of Indian Bankruptcy reform – The Leap Blog The role of housing and equity prices on inequality – Urbanomics Five niches that could still survive active management – Barry […]