Inflation, Tax and Savings Rate

With a 5+% Inflation Rate and a Tax Rate of 30%, a Savings account earning 5% is really earning you a negative interest rate. One very good reason to keep my USD in the US besides of course the high value of the Rupee, where atleast the Returns will not be taxed while I am not in the US earning any money. The big question though is if the money is safe there!!!

Another nice plugin

iMacro is another nice to use tool that helps automate tasks on the browser. For now using it as a quick check of all my favorite sites without me having to type in the site names.



For now, it looks like this has a lot of bugs. Once it starts working perfectly, I see a lot more utility of this Mozilla Add-On. How about some automated testing of web based applications? Anything you do in your browser can now be automated.

Testing Scribefire Plugin to Blogs

One click away from posting to my blog from any browser window. Maybe I'll start posting more often from now on. Don't blame me if there is more junk on my blog. Blame Scribefire

Powered by ScribeFire.

Stocks or Mutual Funds

From my brief three year stint in the Equity Market - MFs win hands down. I've made a lot of money in Stocks - some big gainers were Infosys, I-Flex, SRF and Tata Teleservices (to some extent). But some bigger losers were Gujarat NRE Coke, Arvind Remedies (atleast as a percentage of Investment) and Bongaigaon Refinery. Overall in three years of spending hours buying and selling shares, I'm almost dead even when really the Market has almost trebled. And the only one who's gotten rich from this is the ICICI Company and its Shareholders of which I am also one since I have about 10 shares of ICICI Bank. But unfortunately of the thousands of rupees I might have lost as brokerage to ICICI, I might have ended getting one rupee back.

Am I really that bad at Stocks? The truth is I am. I still don't know how to read a financial statement. Most of my buys are based on gossips in the News Columns spread by experts with vested interests or just gut feel about a company's value based on past history. Some of the shares have been really lucky for me in the sense that my gut feel decisions have worked out.

I had a short stint with the Derivatives Market early last year; but burnt way too much money on one tragic day to continue. I decided that I would learn more about it and come back. Still haven't gotten the time to do so.

So some time late last year, I decided that enough is enough. Stocks are not what I am made for. Mutual Funds is the way to go. Atleast there are some experts managing my money for me. And these experts will do better than this amateur gambler. In the last six months, I've had returns of about 12 percent which translates into 24% per annum. I know the true test is in the long term return on investment. But it is looking good so far.

Another powerful tool that I just started using is the use of SIP (Systemic Investment Plan) where you invest a fixed amount in a Mutual Fund on a recurring basis (Monthly/Semi-Annually/Annually). The best part about this is that the only thing you need to ensure is that the amount is there to be invested and that I do whenever I get my salary by allocating that amount. There is no question of timing the market and this will ensure that your investments grow along with atleast near the average growth of the Market.

And since the Indian markets are booming, hopefully my investments too will. Atleast so far my Mutual Fund Investments are far outperforming the Stocks Investments over the last few months.

HKUST Interview

Interesting experience. Highly professional interview. Quite a lot of information exchanged. End of the Interview - both of us had the Information we went into the Interview to find out about. I had a few more questions - but since I had other sources to the information and I didn't want the questions to be mis-interpreted, I decided to give it a pass.

The minute Chris came on the line, I got an idea of what GD meant when he said Chinese and English don't go together. Had a little difficulty trying to understand him initially. But then as the Interview progressed, I got better at it. And towards the end of the half-hour interview, I was using the communication gap to gain time on some questions.

To quote Pushpa on what I should expect from a HKUST Interview - "The HKUST interview would be unlike the ISB interviews, where people are hell bent on showcasing their ultimate intellectual prowess rather than knowing yours".

It truly was. This was an interview that was all about me, my experiences, my aspirations, my plan after MBA and if I fit into their school. Irrespective of whether I make it through and irrespective of whether I take up the offer if and when I get it, my image of HKUST as a professional B-School has risen.

And this isn't really a bad school. It specializes in Finance and being in the Financial Capital of the Asia-Pacific - HK is a big plus. It has pretty good diversity and it looks like already about 4-5 Indians have enrolled in the program.

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You might also want to read the following posts:
Here I come HKUST
BLR to KL to HK
Finally Over First Semester
and other HKUST posts
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