A blog on my views on management and leadership.
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It's all about money, honey!!
A very interesting event is on these days. Professors of India’s elite institutes IITs and IIMs are protesting in unique ways like day long fasting to protest what they are calling an injury to their autonomy of recruiting good teachers and pay scales. I think this is a farce. This is just a way to arm twist the HRD ministry to increase their salaries. I have nothing against the IITs, IIMs. In fact, I have had the opportunity to study in one of them. But, what make those institutes great are its students and not so much its faculty. If you gather together some of the best academic brains in the country in one place, you don’t really need excellent teachers to produce great results. In fact, excluding very few of the faculty most others are of very ordinary standard. But then again, that’s true of every university, college in the country. That is one of the main reasons why we have not seen any great research work come out of the IIT/IIM system. Whatever good comes out the institutes is courtesy the efforts of the students.
Their contention is that they are not hankering after money and that they should be differentiated from others of their ilk because they are a superior breed. It would be very easy to call their bluff. The HRD ministry should ask them publicly that they would be positively differentiated and their salary would be more than their peers in the university system by one rupee. If this hankering is not for money, the teachers should accept that and continue with their work. But, if, as everyone suspects, it is about money, then their lie will be caught!!
The BSE Sensex – the default benchmark for the Indian equity market – touched 12,000 on Friday last week. There is a sense of euphoria, disbelief and caution in people depending on which group they belong to. There are people who have been waiting for a correction from 6000 and are amazed to see the sensex at double that. There are others who are perennial optimists and expect the market to continue giving them the returns in the way it has in the last 3 years. Milestones like 12000 are a nice point to just stand back and access the overall situation. So, what is the reality of the day? Today, the price of oil is hovering around $70 with the political situation in Iran not getting a whole lot better. Don’t think its going to come down in a while. Interest rates are showing signs of hardening. Prices of gold, silver, steel, aluminium, copper, zinc and sugar are in multi year highs. Real estate prices are going through the roof. So, in a way all asset classes are seeing handsome app...
The first step to any long term investment plan is to understand where we are at present. So, to start with you need to list down your existing networth. For example, you can have a list as follows: Provident Fund 100,000 PPF 50,000 Bank FD 50,000 Mutual Funds-Equity 150,000 Mutual Funds-Debt 50,000 Cash In Savings Account 30,000 House 2,000,000 Housing Loan -4,000,000 Others 0 Total -1,570,000 A couple of things to note here. 1. I am not calculating the value of any gold/silver jewellery that you may be having. Indians, typically are not very keen on selling their family gold/silver so it really does not count as investment. You can think of it as an additional bonus if you do have gold/silver. 2. I am including the housing loan you may have as a negative here under the assumption that that is your primary home and not a second home bought for investment purpose. Also, I am ...
In Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, a study done by Anders Ericsson on violinists shows that it takes about 10000 (ten thousand) hours of practice to become an expert at something. When I read this for the first time, I was fascinated by the fact that it takes such a long time of dedicated effort to become really good at something. Today, I was reading a book on trading strategies and it mentioned that a traders life is divided into decades. The first decade he makes his mistakes, the second decade he makes his money and the third decade he enjoys the money. That set me calculating and trying to tie Gladwell with the traders cycle. If a person spends 3 hours per day for 5 days a week for 52 weeks a year, he will need about 13 years to be an expert at trading. And that is assuming that he is passionate about it in the first place. So, now we know, why we haev so many people failing as traders. It's just that they have not served their time as yet!!
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