Month: October 2011

I think one of the more interesting things that have happened during this market fall and the panic that surrounds is it that there is a lot more hysteria than the actual downfall itself.

It seems to me that the parallels to the 2008 crash are quite exaggerated, and personally things don’t seem nearly as bad as they were during the Lehman crash.

The Nifty has fallen a little over 20% and the Dow has fallen less than 5% for the year, but when you look at all the doom and gloom stories you would feel that the fall must be much steeper.

This sentiment made me curious to see how the major world stock markets have performed year till date. The worst that I could find was Greece that has fallen about 46% and the only one that I could see positive was New Zealand with about 1.7% gain this year.

The best source for global stock market indices data is Bloomberg, and I used data from there combined with mapping tools from Chartsbin to create this world map that shows how the major market indices fared this year.

Looking at this data on a map nicely illustrates three points:

1. Europe’s woes.
2. Emerging markets have fallen a lot more than the developed ones.
3. Maps are cooler than graphs.

via chartsbin.com

Also, here is the raw data in a tabular format if you wanted to use this for something else. This can also make for an easy reference for the names and countries of major stock market indices in the world, and here is the link to the Google Spreadsheet.

As always I am interested to hear what you say, but this time I’m also interested to hear from you if this data surprised you and if you felt that the fall was really a lot more than the 20 odd percent that we have seen yet?

India Infoline is going to launch a Nifty ETF soon, and the NFO has opened on the September 28 2011, and will close on the October 12 2011.

This is going to be the 14th Nifty Index fund (I have a list of 13 other Nifty Index funds and ETFs here), and to compete in such a crowded space – India Infoline has come up with the lowest expenses of any ETF so far.

The IIFL Nifty ETF will charge 0.25% expenses which is lower than the 0.50% currently charged by the Benchmark Nifty ETF.

This is great because the expenses charged by the sponsor or mutual fund eats into the returns of the mutual fund / ETF, so the lower the expenses – the better it is.

It will be like other Nifty ETFs in all other respects meaning it will own stocks in the same composition as the S&P CNX Nifty and try to track the performance of the Nifty as best as it can.

There will always be some difference between the performance of an index fund or an index ETF and the underlying index (usually the fund under-performing the index) because of expenses, and the fact that the fund can’t own 100% of the underlying asset, and has to put aside some money for redemption, and expenses etc. Kiran had done a pretty detailed analysis of this phenomenon some time ago, and I recommend reading that.

There is no need to buy the IIFL Nifty ETF in the NFO period since you don’t get any benefit of investing in ETFs or mutual funds in that period, and it’s much better to buy it after it has listed and has been around for some time.

I would say that you need to wait a little while before investing in this even after listing because you want to make sure that there are good volumes in the IIFL Nifty ETF, and you don’t get stuck in an illiquid ETF of liquid underlying. I see that the Nifty BeeS which has expenses of 0.50% has about Rs. 650 crores under management, so I would personally feel comfortable investing in IIFL Nifty ETF only if it managed to reach at least a third of that amount, and until then pay a little extra to hold the bigger fund.

Since this is a fairly straight forward product I can’t think of including any more details, so please leave a comment with any questions or thoughts you have, and I will respond to them.

After creating a list of the dividend yields of the largest 100 companies in India – I now move on to the dividend yields of the next 100 companies, and this data belongs to companies 101 – 200 on the BSE 200 Index.

Like last time – I’ll first present a list of the companies that are yielding more than 2% and then the entire list. Getting an idea from @UnuUnc on Twitter – I have also created a Google Docs Spreadsheet of this data that you can access here, and that has the list of all of the 200 shares.

Initially, I thought I would stop at 200, but I have gotten really curious about this information now, and would like to cover all the companies in the BSE 500 Index. 

That means a little over 300 companies more. That’s because in comparing the BSE 200 and BSE 500 indices – I see that the first 126 companies are the same, but thereafter the composition changes somewhat so I will also include those companies that haven’t been included in this table (and are in the top 200 list of BSE 500).

But all that is for a later time, for now, here is the list of all stocks yielding more than 2%.

A word about these companies – I see a lot of companies over the 3% yield in this list than there were in the 100 list, and I also see a lot of banks here as well. The market has fallen a bit since I created my last list so to some extent that may be the cause for the +3% yields.

Now, here is the list with the highest dividend yields in the BSE 200 index.

Update: Added Ashok Leyland per comment.

Here is the complete list.