Archive of posts from December 2021
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Difficulties Of Predicting The Stock Market
Every time we talk about the stock market, we either say it is overvalued or undervalued or fairly valued. The valuation may depend on many macro economic factors. One of them is GDP. Normally one would expect market value to be inline with GDP. So if GDP is up, market cap will be up, which basically means stock market is up. However, that is rarely true. Either the market is running ahead of GDP or the GDP is ahead of the market. And the worst part is that it is extremely difficult to predict when the trends will reverse.
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Migrating From WordPress to Jekyll - Other Things
I already explained a few things about how I migrated from WordPress to Jekyll. A few basic things that come for free in WordPress are not available out of the box in Jekyll. Comments section is one example and you already know that I am now using Commento as the comments engine. Another thing that came for free with WordPress was pagination which was missing from Jekyll in the basic form. A few other things that one could add to WordPress using plugins was setting up analytics, rss feeds, site-map, ads, subscription service etc. Here is how I went about adding some of those features in Jekyll.
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Stock Market Is Down, I Mean Up
Just three days ago I was planning to write a post on how Sensex dropped 1190 points. In fact it went down as much as 1879 points at the lowest point in the day. But then I thought, what is the point of writing the post. It will be back up again the next day. Which is precisely what happened for the next 3 days. The stock market was moving up without a break. This has been pretty much how things were for the past several months now. One or two days the market might fall on some random news. Then it will continue on its upwards march for several days. There is absolutely no need to worry about any fall it seems.
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More Resources On Stoicism
A while ago, I wrote a post on Stoicism. The reason I wrote the post is because a few people ask me for resources on Stoicism and I don’t have anything handy. For a while now, I have been collecting some resources (mostly videos), that I wanted to share with the readers of my blog. I could not list out all the resources in the previous post, so I am continuing it with this one. Before I start, I want to let you know that I don’t think Stoicism is better than any other philosophies. I am not recommending that you follow or understand it. If you are curious, then these resources may help you. If you already like a philosophy, you should just stick to it.
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Random News On HNIs and Cryptocurrencies Bill
I have been accumulating some random news that I found interesting over the past few weeks. So thought I’d share my views on them. On the one hand, Indian government is coming up with a bill that may ban or regulate cryptocurrencies and on the other hand we have a major bank announcing that they are embracing cryptocurrencies. Both of these happened on the same day! What contrasting news. Then, one news article mentions very HNIs are not investing much in mutual funds while another one mentions a lot of interest in equities from them. That is not very contrasting because one mentions mutual funds, and the other direct equities, but still it is interesting.
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Commento As Comments Engine In Jekyll
Last time I wrote about my adventures with moving comments engine from Disqus to Remark42. This is a continuation of that story. While I liked pretty much everything about Remark42, one thing that did not work out for me was spam protection. Remark42 does not have, or at least it did not have a proper automated spam protection mechanism in place at the time I tried it out. With the default WordPress comments engine, you could add Akismet for spam protection. I could not figure out any way to install spam filters in Remark42. The only way would be to hold the comments for approval. Then I have to approve each comment manually. This would be too much work for me. Not that I get a lot of comments on the blog, but still, why should a human take care of such things when an automated system could do it for me?
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On Meditation and Equanimity
A couple of habits that I have been trying to inculcate for a while are meditation and equanimity. While I got a little better when it comes to equanimity, I have not made even the slightest progress when it comes to meditation. It is not like I have started trying meditation in the recent past. I have been trying it for a really long time. But just on and off each time not able to make any progress and eventually giving up. I know there are different forms of meditation. I tried a couple of them including focusing on breathing, and trying to empty the mind. Neither helped. I was never able to see inside myself nor could I get any insights into the true nature of reality. Of course meditation needs a lot of practice. May be I am doing it wrong. I have no idea.
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How Much Did Franklin Ultra Short Term Fund Return
It has been more than a year and a half since Franklin Templeton India sent out that email letting investors know that it is winding up six debt mutual funds. There was a lot of uncertainty at the time and many people were worried that they might lose their investments. Nothing of that sort has happened and we got back most of it. There is still some more to come, but at least people are confident that they will get back their full investment. That is also the reason that we don’t hear much in the news about Franklin anymore. Back in the day you would hear about it pretty much every other week.
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Acer Aspire 7 After Two Months
It has been exactly 2 months since I purchased my new laptop - Acer Aspire 7. During these two months I upgraded the laptop and have discovered a few interesting things about it. So this is a quick post on what I noticed about the laptop which might help you make the decision of whether to purchase the laptop or not. If you already purchased it, then my findings might help you fix some issues or maybe you can let me know how I can fix mine :).
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