As I read a series of great posts this late Wednesday, I thought I’d do a quick middle of the week links post. Let me begin by highlighting this article by Paul Krugman who talks very strongly about taking on China for its manipulation to keep its currency low. Next up is a post in the Harvard Business Review, where they talk about companies over-pricing their stuff in China. Great stuff; here is an excerpt: 2. Consumers, increasingly, buy products that are status symbols. Starbucks has d...

There is a lot of interest in gold ETFs and other such proxies of gold, and I think a large part of it is the convenience that comes along with buying assets electronically. However, when you buy something which is a proxy of something else, you pay for transaction costs, and start losing control on how much you gain (or even lose) by the price movement of the underlying asset. This is something you should think about when planning to buy paper assets. To me, if someone wants to go long gold &#8...

Continuing with a one day old tradition – I will talk about something I wrote in the past and leverage user comments to build on the concept. Some time ago I wrote about using Moneycontrol to track your mutual funds NAV. This post was a response to a large number of comments I was getting from people who wanted to know the NAV of their mutual fund. Abhishek responded with a comment telling me that Rediff has a portfolio, which is a lot better than Moneycontrol, and I ended up reviewing the...

I wrote about the Quantum gold savings fund yesterday, which is a fund of funds, and said that I couldn’t think of a situation in which I would want to invest in this fund. That was because it is a fund of funds that simply invests in another ETF that I can directly buy myself. In that post I asked if you could think of any reasons of getting into such a fund, and I got an interesting comment about investing in this fund as an indirect way to set up a Systematic Investment Plan (SIP)  on...

I recently wrote about a fund of funds scheme – HSBC Brazil Equity fund, and today I am going to cover the Quantum gold savings fund, which is another fund of funds scheme that will primarily be invested in the Quantum Gold Fund ETF. As I have probably stated a gazillion times already – a fund of funds scheme incurs double expenses. Once – of the fund itself, and then of the underlying fund as well. However, in the case of this fund – the expenses section of the prospect...

Although it’s about a month since my vacation ended – I am still not completely in the groove, and wanted to do some light reading during the weekend. For some reason, I picked up Wuthering Heights – which is an old novel, and finished it in about a couple of sittings. I loved it; enjoyed it immensely. The plot is a dark one, and there are tragedies abound in the novel. Bad things happen all the time, and this is usually not the kind of stuff that interests me. I was wondering ...

I wrote about the NMDC FPO a few days ago, and I wanted to follow up on that with a post about the company, and hoped that the price band is set by the time I am ready to publish the next post, – and although the NSE website still states the price is to be determined, BS reports that the NMDC FPO price range has been set up between Rs. 300 – Rs. 350. The stock closed at Rs. 398.50, and it will be interesting to see how soon it comes within the range of Rs. 300 – 350, if it doe...

I start this week’s link edition by highlighting another links post by Bad Money Advice. This is not the first time I am doing this, and you only have to go through his post to understand why. Among other interesting stuff – WSJ talks about how Buffet’s gains beat every mutual fund for the past 45 years. Out of the two closest mutual funds, one was run by Peter Lynch for a long period of time, and that was part of the reason why it did so well. Business Week reports how Brazil ...

Image by State Records NSW The NMDC Follow-on Public Offer (FPO) is going to be the next big disinvestment by the Indian government. The low retail subscription to previous IPOs and FPOs coupled with the need to raise funds from disinvestment to plug the fiscal deficit is prompting the government to sweeten its deal for retail participants. The red herring prospectus of the NMDC FPO states that retail participants will get a 5% discount on the price set during the book – building process,...

Image by Thai Jasmine I wrote about how you can’t use an Amazon gift card to buy another gift card some time ago, and today there was a similar question on Target gift cards. I had a feeling they wouldn’t allow you to buy another gift card with one you already have, but didn’t know for sure. I placed a call to Target’s customer care, and they told me that they too don’t allow customers to buy one gift card with another. It was not too surprising because it looks li...

Dewan Housing Finance Limited (DHFL) is offering fixed deposits at an interest of 9% per annum. This is certainly much higher than the fixed deposit rates that most banks offer. If you are a shareholder of DHFL then you get an additional 0.25%, and I didn’t find any text that specified that you had to be a shareholder for at least x number of years, or anything to that effect. So, you could buy DHFL shares and bump up the yield by a bit. A higher interest rate means that the risk is also sligh...

I recently wrote about the Hang Seng BeEs ETF, which will give Indian investors a chance to invest in Hong Kong equities, and shortly after-wards, I came across the HSBC Brazil Equity Fund, which is an open ended fund of fund schemes that targets Brazil. Brazil based funds came into focus some time ago, when Brazil won the bid for hosting the 2016 Olympics, and at that time I had compiled a list of Brazil ETFs available for American investors. As far as I know, currently there are no funds in In...

Wishing all readers of OneMint a very happy Holi. Have a blast and make sure that color doesn’t come off for at least a week Image by Marco Bellucci Share this on del.icio.us Digg this! Share this on Reddit Buzz up! Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon Share this on Technorati Share this on Facebook Tweet This! ...

After a fairly long  gap, I am back with weekly links. In the past I used to call this – “Interesting Reads” but that got a bit boring, so now I am going to pick up a few words from the posts and use them for a title. That should spice it up a little. Let me start off by pointing you towards this story that Weakonomics picked up about a Kiwi girl selling her virginity to pay for college. The final price for it – 30,000 US Dollars! Bad Money Advice included this story in ...

The Indian budget was positively received by most people today, and it has got a bit of good news for people who pay income tax. The tax slabs have changed, and it translates into a Rs.50,000 savings for incomes up to Rs. 8 lakhs. Any amount over that will continue to be taxed at the earlier rate. The new slab is as follows: Income up to 1.6 lakhs: 0 From 1.6 to 5 lakhs: 10% 5 to 8 lakhs: 20% Above 8 lakhs: 30% This is a welcome change and if you compare it with the earlier slab – someone ...

You did your math.  You know how much you need to save for retirement.  Now what?  Do you just keep all your savings in a box under your mattress?  What about in the freezer?  A savings account at the bank?  None of these let your money work for you while you save it.  Let’s go over a few popular retirement saving options.  After we do, we’ll talk about how early withdrawal affects your savings.  Tax deferred savings options include: 401(s)s at work Annuities IRAs 401(k)s are empl...

SEBI (the market regulator in India) banned mutual fund entry loads last August, and I read an interesting piece in WSJ about its possible ramifications today. Mutual Fund entry loads were expressed as a percentage, and were deducted from the money you invested in the mutual fund. It was used to pay commission to the distributor (mutual fund agent, insurance agent, broker, financial planner, bank agents etc.) who sold you the fund. Example: Entry load of a fund is 2% and you invest 10,000 in it,...

Although a few days old; I missed this story somehow. Nevertheless, there is some bit of good news for Indians who have money in a savings account. For some twisted reason, banks used to take the minimum balance of your account between the 10th and last day of the month, and calculated interest on that. So, if you had a low balance on one day but a decent amount for the rest of the month – your interest would still be calculated based on the lowest balance. Example: You have 40,000 from F...

I am really glad to see that most new IPOs coming in the Indian market have really low retail participation. I am happy about that because every IPO has been very aggressively priced of late, and in my opinion there aren’t many good deals for the investing public. In fact, I can’t remember the last IPO that was priced decently. This is true of private as well as government companies. The just concluded Rural Electrification Corporation (REC) FPO, and the NTPC FPO — both got lu...

The Business Standard has a story about program / algorithmic / high frequency trading gathering steam that caught my eye today. The story reminded me of the High Frequency Trading uproar in the US a few months ago, and I think India is going down the same path as far as this type of trading is concerned. Program or algorithmic trading is automated trading that is done by computers without any manual intervention, and is done at high speeds. From Business Standard: Algorithmic trading uses strat...