Many people have been asking me this question…’You say all this…but where do you invest?’. Well very clearly I invest only in equities. Other than a small amount in debt (which should be say next 4-5 years household expenses) + some money in PPF and planning to open a Senior Citizen Yojana a/c for my […]
I got a few calls in the morning (late last evening perhaps) saying ‘OMG I missed the SBI bonds issue…now I will get a much smaller allotment than what I had thought’. Let me correct you Ma’am. You will NOT GET ANYTHING if you applied on Tuesday, because the issue was fully subscribed on Monday […]
To augment its Tier II capital State bank of India is coming out with a micro issue of Rs. 500 crores. I am deliberately calling this a micro issue, because there is a huge appetite for such coupon rates (9.2% to 9.5%) from such a great borrower (a AAA rating through the life of the […]
When it comes to buying any asset – I am using the word loosely there is a tendency to borrow. Borrowing actually helps you immediately by allowing you to buy beyond your means. The problem with most things we buy is that once we buy it, it ceases to hold any attraction for us. That […]
I was wondering whether the title should have a ‘?’ after the word status, then decided against it ! Any other country in the world with the same statistics as USA would have been down graded..a few notches. However all the credit rating companies (you have to smirk when you talk about them) are based […]
Training as a CA has many advantages (and a few disadvantages perhaps). One of the advantages is you get skeptical about numbers, and you get to question conclusions/views drawn from numbers. I remember one life insurance company giving me their settled claims to received claims ratio. Smartly it included maturity claims, investment products, pension plans….suddenly […]
When we do a class on debt markets one important class is that of Debt Rating. There we say the highest and the best borrower is rated AAA. However we do not even ask – the Sovereign debt is not rated. It is supposed to be above default. When the Japenese companies were running huge […]