Posts tagged with "stocks"
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Changes After Retirement
It is interesting how things change after you have achieved some goals. Take for example my goal of early retirement. When I was still in the journey of accumulating wealth to eventually retire, I was hell bent on learning everything about investments and stocks. At the time I started with the basics like having adequate insurance and emergency funds etc. Then I taught myself about asset classes, asset allocation and rebalancing. Next I moved on to learning about macro economics, market cycles and behavioral economics taking several classes on Coursera, EdX and Udacity. Eventually took a class in accounting and finance as well. The hope was that I will eventually be able to analyze businesses and invest in stocks directly.
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What Is With The Index Fund NFOs?
Have you seen the number of NFOs being launched my mutual fund houses in the recent past? What happened? I am not really sure why, but in the last few days my inbox has been receiving all kinds of emails about a new fund offer (NFO) all of which were are for index funds or ETFs. Seems like passive investment is the vogue these days. How did it come into fashion all of a sudden? May be the fund houses think that active funds will not perform well and want to launch some passive funds. Perhaps they wanted to help investors make money. I am just kidding of course.
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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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What Was My Savings Rate
A lot of times while talking to people about my early retirement, I get to the point of someone wanting to know what percent of my income I was saving. Unfortunately I never tracked that metric. So I wanted to find that out myself which is what this post is all about. The information may not be very accurate but it should be a ballpark figure and has sufficient details in it. The reason for inaccuracy is primarily because I don’t want to track down all my investments and income to the minutest detail. That would take too much time. In fact I don’t even remember my salary information and used my ITR (income tax returns) as a guideline. Then I had to go through my CAMS statement to figure out my investments every year. Hope this helps answer the question about my savings rate.
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Maximize Investment Returns (While Taking On Some Risk)
With more powers come more responsibilities. Err... I meant to say, with more returns come more risks. Most new investors want to maximize their investment returns with minimal risk. But that is hardly possible. Instead, in this post I will talk about how you can increase your returns but buy taking more calculated risk. I say calculated risk because you will not take blind risk, but instead use a proper method to improve your chances of increasing your returns.
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Sensex Touches New High!
Ok, I confess I am late to the party. But it seems like the Indian stock market is enjoying new highs every other day. Is this sustainable? Who know? Does anyone know why the stock market is touching new highs even as the economy has not recovered and many things are still unknown? No one knows. But that does not stop one from making wild guesses. The most common and obvious theory is that the market is buoyant on the news that a vaccine may soon come. I don't know why that should be a good reason to hit new highs.
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How NOT To Invest in Stocks
Since I started this blog, a few people have been asking me if I will give stock tips. Others asked if I had invested in stocks and that is how I made enough money to retire. So I thought I should clarify a few things to my readers through this post. First, I don't give stock tips because I don't know how stock markets work and more importantly I don't know how to value a company. I have always wanted to learn how to value a businesses, but never got around to doing it. Next, I had invested only once in one stock and that is all my experience in stock investment.
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Be Strategic About When to Quit
While I was able to reach my financial goal by end of 2017, I actually retired on Jun 29, 2018. The timing of my exit has nothing to do with my finances, it was just strategic. And I will tell you why it is important to time your exit properly.
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