Voluntary Retirement Offer – Evaluation: For whatever reasons – voluntary retirement offers are now quite common and most people do not have a choice. However, if you do have a choice, see how to make the best of it. If you are given a VRS offer at age 45 and you have a transferable skill […]
FMPs have had a great relationship with Asset management companies and with the investors. Fixed Maturity Plans (FMPs) were initially instruments which were mutual funds with ‘banklike’ products. You could buy a FMP with maturity ranging from 30 days to 180 days. Then a couple of FMPs were launched with 300 days maturity, then 366 […]
A couple of weeks back I had written a post about how the slow down will hurt some industries. Fairly clearly those companies (industries) which have a high cash burn ratio – and who cannot reduce fixed costs will bleed first. Financial services industry – life insurance, broking retail, general retail – are all vulnerable. […]
I must consider my self very, very lucky. During the Harshad Mehta Boom, I bought an office space for personal usage. When the index reached 21000 I had no reason to sell. However just luckily I decided to get out of some very high price earning stocks like Tata Power, L&T, Hdfc, and invest in […]
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 […]
Financial analysts try to determine the value of a stock by calculating a company’s discounted “free cash flow”. This is based on a series of computer models with assumptions about future sales, earnings and growth rates. These models are only as good as the programmers and analysts that build them. What you end up with […]
When it comes to analysing corporate performance, individual investors are surely at a disadvantage. You will find it difficult to know how many cars Tata Motors will make in 2009, how many hotel rooms Indian Hotels will be able to sell in Europe, etc. However the “international” fund manager has access to all this and […]