holdyourthoughts

After nearly ten years in the markets, I started tracking my portfolio as a fund this February. The idea was that if I was not making better returns than the index then it is better to invest in index funds and concentrate on other things in life. I started with a NAV of Rs. 10. The objective of the fund is to outperform the Sensex on a long (3 years plus) term with securities chosen primarily with a focus towards value and mid and small cap. The idea is to have a concentrated portfolio of between 5-12 stocks at any given point in time with a investment horizon of an average of 3 years. So far, as you can see from the chart, the Primal Value Fund has managed to outperform the Sensex. Sensex return has been 10.04% and the funds return has been 15.54%. So far so good. I will try and update the performance on a quarterly or half yearly basis. Also providing the current portfolio and percentage allocation.

Timothy Ferris' The Four Hour Workweek is a book devoted to people who do not want to spend the rest of their lives working in their cubicles. It makes a case for automating your cashflow so that you are no longer dependent on your job. It introduces the concept of freedom as one where you are both free from money and time pressures. Just having a great deal of money is not enough to be really rich, according to Ferris. You also need to have a lot of time to do all the things your heart desires. Ferris makes a very compelling case for setting up some business major components of which can be outsourced to generate the free cash flow. He then goes into how to setup a "outsourced" business and life. The book in this stage becomes a bit "silly" at times. Ferris, when he wrote this book was a 30-something person without a family. So, going away to foreign countries and staying extended periods may be possible for him but is practically not possible for most people. ...

This is an excellent collection of quotes from mostly contemporary American personalities. What is good about the book is that most of the selected quotes are relatively fresh and are not overly quoted everywhere else!! There were only two complaints I had were that i) the quotes are all lumped together and not grouped into categories so looking up a specific quote at a later point in time would be very very challenging and ii) the quotes are not really for the "professional" only, they are equally applicable to life in general. In fact, that is why this book makes it such a good read.

I bought a new ebook reader. It is the Infibeam PI (www.infibeam.com/PI) . I have seen and used both the Amazon Kindle and Sony ebook reader. The main reason I selected the PI is because it was available in India. I did not have to wait for weeks to get my hands on it. I will not go into detailed comparisons between the three readers I have used. The reason I bought the ebook is to read books. Although that sounds rather a stupid thing to say, I found some features on Kindle quite superfluous to book reading. Like the space consuming keyboard. I dont know of any book which comes with a keyboard, so why should an ebook come with one. If I have to surf the net, I will use my laptop to do it. The whole buying process was easy and seamless. Delivery happened within 3 working days. The only regret I had was my father was not there to see this. He was pretty excited with the concept of an ebook reader and I had entrusted him with the duty of checking the condition of the parcel when it arriv...