INVESTOR INTEREST


A survey points to the overwhelming outperformance by emerging market indices over the actively-managed funds investing in places like India This magazine has consistently argued that index funds are among the best options available for investors looking to invest in the stock market for the...

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Look beyond the big spenders, reminds Shreedhar Kanetkar Bypass capital-intensive companies,” says Charles H Brandes. “Often the cash flow of such companies is insufficient to provide a satisfactory return while still maintaining a plant at competitive levels. These companies must regularly...

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EIH Hotels is a direct beneficiary of business boom... Hotels have been on a high given the rising number of business and leisure travelers in India. Room rates are stable to rising and occupancy has been at peak levels. This combination of volume and price strength has led to hotel companies...

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FUND BASHING I would like to begin by complementing Money Life for the excellent work you guys are doing. The articles are indeed very well researched and the efforts ‘show’. Keep it up. However, I have observed in the past few issues that a constant topic of discussion is the...

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The ultimate dream of every investor is to buy stocks that will multiply not just two or three times, but many times, over a period. That is what stocks like Gujarat Ambuja or Infosys in India or Microsoft and GE in US have done for investors. They are household names today and were...

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Is the fall in gold and rise in stocks interlinked? In May, Sensex was at 12,600, gold was at $720 an ounce and crude oil was well over $70 a barrel. We said oil prices will fall, gold is not worth buying as an investment (except in those rare periods when inflation is higher than interest...

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The pluralism of experience that… financiers bring to bear in their decisions gives a wide range of entrepreneurial ideas a chance of insightful evaluation,” says Edmund S. Phelps, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in economics. In an article published the day after the Nobel award was announced,...

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Debashis Basu points out the lessons for a trader in Amaranth’s $6 billion blow up In late September and early October, Amaranth Advisors, a US-based hedge fund went under. It had a large exposure in the natural gas futures market and was wrong-footed when gas prices tumbled. The total loss? A...

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ML Research Desk 03 November 2006
These stocks are unique. From aircraft to ayurvedic medicine, from power trading to printing press, from winery to bar coding - they are one of their kind among the listed stocks. Know them and know how to play them. Analysis by ML Research Desk "Widely accepted academic and professional...

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Sometime at the end of August 2006, I used my Bobcard for the first time to make a $19 payment for my yahoo plus account. I had not used the card for almost a year since it was issued to me; a debit card served my needs except for on-line payments. During that period, I had zero...

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Capital protection fund is a new gimmick by mutual funds to attract money from you. Stay away from them In the 1990s, there were mutual funds that offered guaranteed returns. Every single one of these funds lost a substantial part of their capital. Amazingly, the regulator, Securities and...

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Looking for some thrill? A roller-coaster ride in an amusement park would be a cheaper and better alternative than this fund Mutual funds are getting more daring, coming out with schemes that defy all logic. ING Vysya has launched a three-year close-ended fund that will churn its portfolio,...

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Compulsory IPO grading will become a useful tool to evaluate investment New offerings are the biggest draw in the stock markets for retail investors. In the old days, dilutions by foreign companies created wealth for investors, albeit through a system akin to a lucky draw. With the advent of...

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The world’s second largest hedge fund is run on an interesting philosophy Bridgewater Associates is probably the world’s second largest hedge fund group. Its single-manager fund had assets of $20.9 billion on June 30, 2006 according the magazine Alpha beaten narrowly by Goldman Sachs which had...

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This book is all about the nuts and bolts of investing science - if it can be called a science at all. The cornerstone of that science is modern portfolio theory (MPT), which is used by financial institutions worldwide, from the giant Wall Street firms to small financial advisors, to plan and...

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Analysis by ML Research Desk 26 October 2006
Monthly Income Plans have disappointed over three months, six months and one year. Are MIPs worth buying at all? Has the possibility of excess returns gone out of this asset class? Analysis by ML Research Desk Mutual funds are known to capitalise on market fads and fancies to garner money...

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DSP-Merrill Lynch has just filed an offer document to launch a mutual scheme that would invest in gold-based exchange traded funds. It becomes the third fund house after UTI and Benchmark to seek permission to launch gold funds. The fund idea is novel but would it make sense to go for it as and...

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ML Research Desk 12 October 2006
How about stocks whose earnings are growing fast but their valuations are still reasonable? Call them bargain growth stocks. Our stock screen picked up some of these stocks and looked at them closely. Are these worth buying? ML Research Desk Analyses It is rare to find fast-growing...

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Not so fast. But with global growth expected to be muted, commodity prices will go sideways The commodities markets underwent one of their huge periodic selloffs in mid-September which has badly hit oil and precious metals. Crude futures prices, which was $27 in July 2001, had hit $78 in...

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The market is fully valued and Japanese money may be contracting again. The risks have gone up. But then, we have entered the six best months for stocks As we had predicted two months ago, a situation of benign interest rates and inflation have lifted stocks worldwide. The only speck on the...

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