Indian households, looking for a safe space to put their money in, have been hurtling from crisis-to-crisis past few years. Banks have failed, debt funds saw uncharacteristically deep losses and in March 2020, we saw six debt funds frozen. People who trusted nobody and kept cash under the mattress, lost it during demonetisation. The latest...
The full-page ads are back. So are the stories in some parts of the media where “experts” are advising you to take advantage of the low interest rates and bargain basement prices to invest in real estate. The real estate corporate brokers are pushing the narrative of aisa mauka phir kahan milega (when will you get...
As much as $2.8 trillion, or money almost equal to the GDP of India, was available to buy shares of Alibaba Jack Ma’s Ant Group last week, making the $34.4 billion IPO, which has now run into trouble with the Chinese regulators, hugely oversubscribed. Ant is a Chinese company that began life as an escrow account to facilitate...
It is almost as if you can see the conflict: there is the desire to do the right thing by the customer, but the DNA of an institution that does not believe in consumer rights comes in the way. The insurance regulator is torn with this dichotomy, of watching its capital market counterpart take giant...
The closer you examine the financial sector, the more you get to believe that parts of the industry believe that if there is a way to do something wrong, why do it the right way? Not for all the firms in the market, but a few aggressive ones. And these cause regulators to go on...
How to get rich. These four words tickle the aspirations of anybody who is not living in a cave having given up on maya or this world of illusion! The usual answers to this question deal with tips, some stocks, some real estate that is changing from agri to commercial very soon, some new crypto...
An average person needs between 10 and 15 financial products to manage the complexity of contemporary life. A few decades ago, when the government was the main employer and would guarantee returns, it was easy to just leave it to the government to fix your life if you were lucky enough to be in the...
As an investor in a multi-cap fund, you could be feeling really confused about the uproar caused by the 11 September 2020 Sebi circular on making these funds more ‘true-to-label’. What happened is this: the circular changed the earlier rule of allowing a multi-cap fund to invest across market caps as they liked and has...
The decision of India’s Employees’ Provident Fund Organization (EPFO) board to split its payout for 2019-20 into two parts—8.15% from its bond investments right now and 0.35% from its equity investments later this year—was unprecedented alright. But it was no big surprise, given the poor performance of its stock portfolio. Provident fund (PF) subscribers should...