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A few days ago a good friend of mine forwarded me the product brochure of a Structured Product. The product was marketed with the following justification : Back testing of the product performance has shown that:    (i) There is a 81.02% probability that the absolute returns of the product will be 60% and above.    (ii) There is […]

The Union Government in its wisdom, introduced a Long Term Capital Gain (LTCG) tax on equity shares in its budget for the financial year 2018-19. My attempt in this blog is to elaborate on how should investors respond to the introduction of this tax. The words in the detailed text regarding the tax rate in

Simple interest is one in which the interest is paid out at regular intervals. In compound interest, the interest is not paid out at regular intervals, but instead added to the principal and the subsequent period interest is then charged on the modified larger principal. In other words there is interest charged upon the unpaid

It is the time of the year to take stock of how things have panned out in the financial year gone by. Clients have a choice of three benchmarks to choose. The first benchmark being a low risk benchmark such as the SBI one year FD rate/CPI rate of inflation +2%, the second being the

SEBI has invited comments to its recently published “Consultation Paper on Amendments to SEBI (Investment Adviser) Regulations 2013”. It is not clear whether the contents of this consultation paper released on the 2nd January 2018 is over and above the contents of the two earlier consultation papers put out on the same subject in October

A number of clients have written in asking for our comments on the “Bail In” clause mentioned in clause 52 of the Financial Resolution and Deposit Insurance Bill (2017) tabled before the Joint Parliamentary Committee in August this year. The “Bail In” clause gives power to a body called the “Resolution Corporation”” appointed through the powers of

In the current financial year, risky portfolios managed by us and benchmarked to market indices such as the BSE SENSEX price index or the BSE Small Cap Price Index have been severely under-performing. While I have been witnessing this underperformance since January this year, I felt it would be prudent to give this sometime before

The CFA Society of India had recently conducted a Value Investing Summit in Delhi. Eager to listen to the best minds in the industry, I enrolled for the conference in which Mr. Raamdeo Agrawal of Motilal Oswal was one of the speakers. Mr. Agrawal in his inimitable style presented his journey as a presentation titled

In mid July, I had the good fortune of being a part of a panel discussion on robo-advisory in India. I was the only representative of a bricks and mortar fee only Investment Adviser on the panel. I was invited onto the panel to provide a perspective of how a fee only Investment Adviser in

The subject of this month’s blog is a shameless copy of a chapter from the book Complications by Dr. Atul Gawande. The book provides a fascinating insight into the error prone world of doctors. In the chapter “When doctors make mistakes”, Dr. Gawande takes us through a near fatal incident involving a patient for whom he was