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When Naren talks, We Listen

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                           Sankaran Naren is the Executive Director and Chief Investment Officer (CIO) at ICICI Prudential Asset Management Company (AMC), since October 2004, initially as a fund manager and then as CIO (from 2011 onward), overseeing investments and flagship fund strategies.  He handles a mind blogging sum 10,65,83,00,00,000 (around 1 lac 10 thousand Crores) in just the four flagship funds with a return profile as below  -  Healthy Reminder - A humble 30K SIP over 15 Years will grow to 2 crores if the SIP compounds at 15%, Here Naren has done better that 15 in almost all the funds So when a giant like Naren talks, We listen and Here's what we heard him say -  Lets begin with Risk, Everybody today is so hunki-dori, Where does the Risk actually lie - Its with People buying High PE stocks and giving exit to Promotors Alright, then I think Gold is not Risky, Here's his opinion on Gold ...

An Underperforming Stock

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                 Imagine Its Mar 2020, the Covid is at its peak, the Market has crushed. Anything and everything that you bought at that point would be a multi-bagger, 50X, 20X & 5X and what not!                But Markets are markets and aren't we all supremely lucky! Now Imagine buying a wonderful company that had given stellar returns and had barely fallen in Covid crash. We run our minds and say - Hey this is well known company, its products are great and look it hardly corrected even in such might Market crash-  This should be great company to buy and of course you buy!  Bingo, you hit jackpot.  But no Bingo! 5 Years later, here's how the Stock returns look like -  A grand return of 1.83% from Covid Lows! We can as well curse ourselves for not simply doing a RD which might of fetched us a return much higher. Enlighten me! how can a stock perform this bad since Covi...

Is RETIREMENT really a choice today?!

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     Lets roll back a decade or two - the early stages of  Information Technology or Information technology-enabled boom. I belong to that decade. I graduated, had a fairly good english language proficiency. This enabled me to get a job in one of the earlier GCCs established in our country. Over the past decade and half, this job with the regular promotions and increments, helped me  steadily  migrate economic classes. Today I have a decent standard of living, a standard which a decade and half back, I would assume "luxury" given my economic strata. This must be true for most of us who passed out in 2000s - 2010s.  And all of this happened because of a single reason - "the labour arbitrage" - availability of cheap "skilled' labor in our country viz-a-viz the cost of doing the activity in the parent nation of the employing country (The US, Europe & Australia to some extent).       With this backdrop most of us have lifestyle that...

Habits

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We happened to come across this wonderful piece about habits in the book - Atomic Habits... by James Clear. It resonated so much with us and it looked so true as well. We just would not take the thought out of our mind once we read it. Please read it for yourself, before I continue my charade -          Remember what our own Charlie Munger Said - "Invert, always Invert" James above talks about continuing a habit but when it comes to personal finance, forming a habit itself is a big challenge and here's our "inverted" version how to simply - Start the habit of savings  Just try to do it twice - start immediately to save for next 2 months.  If you start once, you had get back to it twice naturally. Just make sure the 1st one happens, the 2nd one will happen automatically in a row. Maybe you'll struggle with your finances for the 1st month but you'll follow up with a plan for the 2nd month. You can't be perfect but You can avoid "not starting at ...

Sports, History, Expectations & Experiences

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 Whats the connection between Sports, History and Expectations and more importantly with what our line of business is - "Wealth Creation". Well, you will figure out soon. 1st lets cover the history part of the story. Below are the 3, 5 & 10 Year Returns of the Nifty50, Nifty Midcap 150 & Nifty Smallcap 250. Quite handsome returns aren't they?  Now lets talk Sports and more specifically 2 sportsperson -  Alastair Cook  - the Test Great Yuvaraj - The White ball Wonder Cook was a test match great & Yuvi was a white ball wonder, made for big tournaments. Both have achieved so much in the respective formats. Imagine, if these two had a conversation what would that go like -  Well it happened in May 2015 when all of Yuvraj's heroics were a little history but he was still hot property in IPL and Cook has just gone past 10,000 Test runs -  So, here's a winner of 2 World Cups, Man of the Series in one of them talking to one who never even got the chance ...

The Tariffs that affect us

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 The buzz word for the last few months has been - "Tariffs" In the last few months, there has been so much written, spoken and discussed about tariffs. On the day the tariffs were announced the market tanked. There has been so much drama and thorough entertainment. However, if you look at the actual Nfty movement - Nifty was 23,250 a day before tariffs were announced and today it is 24,750 up roughly 6.5%,that's a full year's interest on my FD! There have been quite a few of us who have taken decision to participate or not to participate due to Tariff  'Trump'-trums. So much for hardly a movement on the needle!               Time to remind you that at Droplet we always write about Personal Finance. Given that Tariff is the buzz word, its the perfect time for us to inform our readers about the tariffs that actually affect their personal finances, the rest is - Just entertainment.  #1 Starting Late  Tariff      ...

What is Harmful ?

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  Knowledge is commoditized today. For anything and everything, we refer google. These are times, even when we have an ailment, we do not go to the doctor 1 st , we google 1st then go to the doctor and tell the doctor what’s our probable problem based on the symptoms we have.   So much so that a Doctor came up with a funny fee structure like below -  Is this limited only to “Others” and “Medical advice”. No, When I put myself in that scene, I am too like that. Each time I have to decide about something, Either I will discuss about it with close associates and then Google or the other way around but googling is not going away! When I think about it, I google more to vet the information I have got from others and I have never vetted the information google gave me! It seems I trust google more just like most others around me.  So the last week IPL started and I was asked to initiate Fantasy league Mails we play within our office. The game is all about predicting the w...