Book Review - Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything

Last week I completed Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything. It is a good book that tries to cover in one sweep the evolution of natural sciences. It starts of from the creation of the universe and goes on to explain the universe, planetary systems and other celestial phenomenon. It then moves on and covers diverse topics like Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Geology. It takes the user through a journey of how each of these subjects of study evolved over a period of time and also it's more illustrious practitioners.
The book has very nice glimpses, in the form of anecdotes, into the lives of great scientists. It is a very good read and is sure to engage readers who are scientifically inclined.

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Oil, Liquidity and the Sensex @ 12K

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...

Porfolio Structuring (PS) Step 1: Evaluate Current Status

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 ...

13 years to become an expert

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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