THINKCOMPOUNDING

Finished reading this book. Definitely worth reading. House of Huawei tells the story of how Huawei became one of the most powerful technology companies in the world. The book begins with the life of its founder, Ren Zhengfei , who grew up in poverty in China and later worked as an engineer in the Chinese military. In 1987, he started Huawei in Shenzhen with a small group of employees. In the beginning, the company mainly sold imported telecom equipment from foreign companie

Stock markets and mutual funds have been testing investors’ patience for the last 18 months, from September 2024 until now. Equity mutual funds  invest in stocks, so when we talk about stocks, we are also talking about equity mutual funds . Major stock market indices like Sensex, Nifty, Midcap, and Smallcap touched all-time highs around September 2024 and have been moving sideways in a range since then. This phase is testing investors’ patience. Is it normal for markets to mo

Gold price has shot up over the last one year or so. Do you feel missed out? I got a few enquiries to buy gold via the mutual fund route. I suggested that they not get affected by last one year return. It can create FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), hindsight bias and force them to make wrong decisions. I suggested they look at the longer-term picture and take a bird’s eye view of the situation.   I thought of sharing the facts and figures to give investors better clarity to enable

1.    Constant SIP Some of us start SIPs for a certain amount and don’t increase the SIP amount each year along with our salary increments. If the SIP is not increased every year, it will result in a far lower corpus at the end of the investment period. You can check the below table for details. Year SIP amount Assumed return p.a Invested amount Current market value at year end 1 20000 12%              2,40,000 ₹ 2,55,330 2 20000 12%               4,80,000 ₹ 5,41,300 3 20000

Let’s see how we can achieve a 10 crore corpus step-by-step. Let us go one step at a time instead of directly thinking about achieving 10...

Finished reading this book.   Author explains what went wrong with capitalism in US and other developed Europeans countries. U.S debt, U.S fiscal deficit as a % of GDP has been increasing continuously because of near zero interest rates and virtually free money. US Fed reserve created billions of dollars & later trillions of dollars of easy money, by buying all kinds of bonds & releasing money into the system. Bailouts by US govt. didn’t allow weak companies to go bankrupt. E

Finished reading these books   Ram   Story starts with the war between Dashrath and Raavan in Karachapa, a trading town. Dashrath loses the war badly and Ram was born on the same day. In his life time, this was Dashrath’s first defeat. This makes everyone think that Ram’s birth is a bad omen. Ram’s life started on a bad note thus. However, this didn’t make him stray away from the dharmic path.   Book contains very good discussions between Ram and his Guru Brahmarishi Vashisht

Finished reading this book   Author provides in depth view of boom and bust cycles in American stock markets during 1970-2003, covers how euphoria is built up in certain sectors and trap all clad of investors. Book talks about the behavior of retail investors, institutional investors, mutual fund managers, insurance companies, endowment funds, 401(k) investments / investors’ during the bear and bull markets and bubble phases of the US markets. It’s interesting to study invest

Finished reading this book   I have heard a number of sub-stories of Mahabharata and Ramayana from my grandmother and watched few movies based on these epics. These stories were fascinating but learnings from these stories and movies were in bits and pieces. The only thing I needed was putting it all together, in a simple, regular story book like this one. This book does just that. C. Rajagopalachari, the learned man that he was, has done a commendable job in putting this com

Finished reading this book   This is the biography of 19th century oil baron, John D Rockefeller Sr, who was the founder of Standard Oil. Many of the today's oil exploration, refinery & distribution companies were once subsidiaries of Standard Oil. Exon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell,   Chevron, British Petroleum etc. were all subsidiaries of Standard Oil.   Rockefeller had a trouble childhood because of his father who was a vagabond, bigamist and a con medical practitioner. Rockef

Recently, one of my clients' mutual fund portfolio has crossed the 2 crore mark. I met him in 2016 in an 'Investor Education Program'...

If someone told you that a mutual fund scheme has delivered 15% CAGR (Compounded Annual Growth Rate) over a 15-year period, have you ever wondered how this return had played out over the years and how the journey of this return had been year on year? I will explain this basic concept in this blog.   I have taken example of a real mutual fund scheme launched in April 1997. In the below table, column 2 shows absolute return given by this scheme each calendar year (Jan – Dec). A

Have you ever wondered who is working on your money invested in Mutual funds? To start with, your money in mutual funds is managed by...

Finished reading this book   The author, Yuval Noah Harari’s first book Sapiens  was good. I find the second book Homo Deus  not so interesting, monotonous and repetitive. He talks about the possibilities of how the future of mankind may look like and how humans might evolve to super humans.   Author didn’t delve deeply into any concept. It was kind of theoretical superficial knowledge. And his knowledge about certain aspects of humans such as consciousness, soul etc. seems t

If you got some surplus money, is it better to pre-pay home loan or is it better to invest the money in equity mutual funds? Let’s find...

Sometimes, we fall sick. I heard that fever is good because it removes toxins from the body and kills infections. But when we have fever,...

Finished reading this book.   Book explains the origin of Arunachala (red hill) in Tiruvannamalai and the significance of Arunachala in accordance with Skanda Purana. Book also explains the significance of Pradakshina around Arunachala.   In ancient days, a fight arose between Brahma and Vishnu, who were both born from a part of Shiva. Then, Shiva manifested himself in the form of a column of effulgence in order to remove their delusion. Upon their further request, Shiva in t

Finished reading this book. Author served as Indian high commissioner to Pakistan from 2017 to 2020. This book is a product of in-depth research by the author on India-Pakistan relations from the view of a diplomat based on his discussions & interactions with PMs, HMs, FMs, foreign and past diplomats and his own study. For people who didn't live during the partition years and in post-independence years, who are wondering why India and Pakistan are still fighting for Kashmir a

I keep getting queries like ‘Is NPS good?’ ‘Can we invest in NPS for retirement?’ ‘ Is NPS better or Equity mutual funds better ?’ I thought of answering these questions through this write-up. However, let me clarify that this is not a comprehensive write-up on NPS . NPS (National Pension System) The National Pension System is a defined-contribution pension system in India regulated by the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority. NPS is basically to encourage you to

I met this young lady in 2015. She was pro real estate. We discussed about mutual funds at length. She was not fully convinced about mutual