The other day, my friend was com-plaining that her husband leaves for work at 10am and is back home at 5pm! This is probably five less hours than he has always stayed out of the house. The downturn had meant lighter days at the office, so he would just leave late for office and come home early. She wasn’t perturbed by the fact that he had much less work, but was unhappy that he was bored. He...

Is mutual fund performance driven by skilful stock picking or solely by the market direction?

Fund houses and their managers claim special expertise in stock-picking skills and various strategies of portfolio construction that they apply to earn market-beating returns. Unfortunately, this is merely an ideal. Most funds cannot achieve market-beating results consistently. The majority of funds...

Newspapers are agog with speculation about why oil giant Chevron, which had a 5% stake in Reliance Petroleum (RPL), decided not to hike it to 29%. In fact, one newspaper even went on to say that “the decision to go ahead with the merger appears to have been accelerated after US oil giant Chevron decided not to hike its 5% stake in RPL to 29%. This happened after RPL and Chevron failed to sign...