When the economy is not doing well or when a company is not doing well, there is tremendous pressure to reduce costs. The accountants are normally the worst persons to come up with suggestions to reduce costs. They will find simple, stupid costs and act like they have done something great. The normal suggestions are: […]
I met a well to do Financial Advisor, or rather should I say almost Ex-Financial advisor. He is in the business of mutual fund distribution, given up life insurance and general insurance distribution, does not entertain clients any more for direct equity, and does financial hand-holding for SMEs. He tried his hand at fee based […]
A few days back I wrote a piece on ‘Young, Glamorous, Riskless and Broke’. This was about the kids born in the 1980s. Let us take a kid born in 1987 – would have graduated in 2007-8 and finished his/her MBA in 2009. This was not a great season to graduate, but would have found […]
Well well. Once upon a time long long ago we heard about Arithmetic Mean, Geometric Mean, Harmonic Mean and Standard Deviation. Then we promptly forgot how to use them. People keep asking me ‘When should I use AM and when GM? For relationship managers this is a very important question. AM is very useful when […]
I know very intelligent people, very close to me, very successful, very humble – and many of them are Sathya Sai Baba bhakts. One thing I have learnt in life is ‘criticising is easy’ but ‘delivering is difficult’. When I have to criticise somebody I look at ‘what would have I done’ and ‘given the […]
It is always in retrospect that you can have fun about trends. On one fine day – March 9, 2009 that the US markets had hit their low. Check your brokerage account for transactions around that time. The S&P was below 700, the Great Goldman Sachs was predicting a Dow less than 400, Cnbc was […]
To provide liquidity to the markets, the FED, the European authorities, along with their Asian counterparts have decided to swamp the banks with money. However, this is likely to come with strings (ropes?) attached. No money comes free – immaterial of whether it is called Debt or Equity. The authorities have put a lot of […]