Opinion – OneMint

Reliance Jio 4G Plan Tariffs – How disruptive would it be for Airtel & Idea?

Reliance Industries today announced the tariffs of its 4G services during its Annual General Meeting (AGM) in Mumbai. The services, which are to be carried out in the name of Reliance Jio, would be commercially launched on September 5th. Whatever got announced today during this AGM with respect to Reliance Jio, its tariffs and the company’s plans to carry out its operations was extremely exciting for the Indian consumers.

But, it was a very bad day as far as the stock prices of Airtel, Idea, Reliance Communications and even Reliance Industries itself are concerned. Idea stock suffered the most of the brunt and closed down 10.49% at Rs. 83.65. Anil Ambani’s Reliance Communications was next in line with a fall of 8.99% at Rs. 49.10. While Bharti Airtel, the largest telecom service provider in India, suffered 6.27% fall in its share price to Rs. 310.85, Reliance itself got hammered by 2.91% to close the day at Rs. 1029.20.

So, what made these big companies fall so much in a single day of trading? The answer is – all Reliance Jio services, including voice calling, 4G data usage, SMS services etc. will be absolutely free for all its subscribers for almost four months before they get paid w.e.f. January 1, 2017. Even when these services become paid from January 1, voice calling would remain free across all its plans and there would be disruptive 4G tariffs, which are termed by Mukesh Ambani as the World’s cheapest data tariffs at Rs. 50 per GB of data.

Reliance Jio’s tariffs are termed as disruptive and on the face of it they are truly intimidating for the incumbent telecom players. So, what are the Reliance Jio 4G plan tariffs which have made the existing players to rework their future strategies? Here you have the tariffs the consumers will have to pay to avail Reliance Jio services:

Postpaid Tariff Plans

Prepaid Tariff Plans

Base plan of Rs. 149

A consumer will get:

1) 300 MB 4G data

2) Free Unlimited local/ISD voice calls

3) Free Jio app subscription worth Rs. 1,250

4) Free 100 local/STD SMS

Effective cost per GB of data – Rs. 508

Rs. 499 Pack

A consumer will get:

1) 4 GB 4G data + Unlimited 4G data during night

2) Free Unlimited local/ISD voice calls

3) Free Jio app subscription worth Rs. 1,250

4) Free unlimited local/STD SMS

5) 8 GB JioNet WiFi Hotspot access

Effective cost per GB of data – Rs. 124.75

Rs. 999 Pack

A consumer will get:

1) 10 GB 4G data + Unlimited 4G data during night

2) Free Unlimited local/ISD voice calls

3) Free Jio app subscription worth Rs. 1,250

4) Free unlimited local/STD SMS

5) 20 GB JioNet WiFi Hotspot access

Effective cost per GB of data – Rs. 99.9

Rs. 1,499 Pack

A consumer will get:

1) 20 GB 4G data + Unlimited 4G data during night

2) Free Unlimited local/ISD voice calls

3) Free Jio app subscription worth Rs. 1,250

4) Free unlimited local/STD SMS

5) 40 GB JioNet WiFi Hotspot access

Effective cost per GB of data – Rs. 75

Rs. 2,499 Pack

A consumer will get:

1) 35 GB 4G data + Unlimited 4G data during night

2) Free Unlimited local/ISD voice calls

3) Free Jio app subscription worth Rs. 1,250

4) Free unlimited local/STD SMS

5) 70 GB JioNet WiFi Hotspot access

Effective cost per GB of data – Rs. 71.4

Rs. 3,999 Pack

A consumer will get:

1) 60 GB 4G data + Unlimited 4G data during night

2) Free Unlimited local/ISD voice calls

3) Free Jio app subscription worth Rs. 1,250

4) Free unlimited local/STD SMS

5) 120 GB JioNet WiFi Hotspot access

Effective cost per GB of data – Rs. 66.65

Rs. 4,999 Pack

A consumer will get:

1) 75 GB 4G data + Unlimited 4G data during night

2) Free Unlimited local/ISD voice calls

3) Free Jio app subscription worth Rs. 1,250

4) Free unlimited local/STD SMS

5) 150 GB JioNet WiFi Hotspot access

Effective cost per GB of data – Rs. 66.65

Is it really disruptive and will it affect you?

I think an average Indian telecom consumer does not want to spend more than Rs. 300 for its monthly voice calling and data usage. Airtel reported its average revenue per user (ARPU) to be Rs. 196 during its first quarter results in July 2016. As against Rs. 50/GB of data as announced by Jio, the cheapest Rs. 149 data pack would effectively cost you Rs. 508 per GB of data, but also provides you free unlimited voice calling.

As you can check from the plans above, even a Rs. 4,999 plan does not bring down cost per GB of data to Rs. 50. So, tariffs here are presented in a manner which sound music to your ears, but eventually they could end up higher. Incumbent players Airtel, Idea, Vodafone and RCom have sufficient time to act or react to these tariffs. Whether these tariffs would add to the overall growth of the telecom sector or to the woes of its existing players, that is something only time will tell. But, one thing is certain, the consumers here in India are going to enjoy some highly competitive data tariffs in the months to come.

Modi’s India – How will the next few years fare?

In the past few days whenever I’ve thought of PM Modi’s first year – the thought of President Obama’s two terms have also come to mind.

The strong parallels between the two are inheriting a really bad economy, and coming to power with a lot of fan fare, hope and optimism.

The other parallel is that both made campaign promises that could never be delivered for such is the nature of campaign promises.

I think it is a reality of politics that things said during campaigns are akin to stretch goals that can hardly ever be met. For instance, I don’t think anyone seriously thought Congress could spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure which is something they promised during their campaign. However, the nature of the two campaigns made people expect that a lot will be delivered.

Things have gradually improved in the US under President Obama, and US has probably had the best recovery of any nation after the Great Recession. This didn’t always seem to be the case, and in fact a lot of people will still disagree with the statement that the US has in fact benefitted from his presidency even now.

I believe that things have gradually improved under PM Modi as well and while they have taken some bad steps like pushing a Land Bill which is unfair to the landowner , not doing enough to allay investor fears on retrospective taxation, or playing with the idea of making people disclose foreign travel on their income tax forms, they have taken some good steps as well, and perhaps the most significant among them are delivering a scam free year, and moving legislation on various issues which are all work in progress.

They are obviously aided by external factors (fall in commodity prices) like they have been hampered by external factors (bad monsoons) but on the whole – the government is functioning, and that unfortunately is the only bar they had to cross since the last government screwed up things so badly.

I believe that under the current administration, aided and hindered by external factors as well as the federal government structure, and a vociferous opposition — the country will continue to do much better than it did in the ten years of the previous government’s rule. This will always be less than what Modi promised during this campaign but unless things change dramatically, it will always be more than what Congress can deliver under Rahul Gandhi, and therefore I feel Modi will get a second term much like Obama, and at the end of the decade, when you look back you will see that things are better than they were at the beginning of the decade even if they aren’t as good as you expected them to be.

One income tax change that the Narendra Modi government needs to bring

I don’t know how many readers will recognize this headline, but it is just one word changed from a recent headline in an ET article. The article in question talks about six changes they’d like to see and going through that article reminded of the very first draft of the Direct Tax Code which came out in 2009.

That draft was the best draft of DTC that came out, and it was great for its simplicity and potential effectiveness. It proposed the following tax slabs which I thought was one of the best things about it.

Up to Rs. 1,60,000 – Nil
Rs. 1,60,000 – Rs. 10,00,000 – 10%
Rs. 10,00,000 – Rs. 25,00,000 – 20%
Above Rs. 25,00,000 – 30%

If there is just one change I’d like the government to make, it will be this change. Raise the tax slabs for almost everyone, and let people benefit from the lower taxes.

However, this is a simplistic view because it doesn’t tell you where the shortfall is going to be met from and that is a problem because the Indian government isn’t exactly loaded with money.

What I would do is get rid of all tax exemptions under Section 80C and save the government some money there. I think this will be very good for most people whether they know it or not, and in most cases they wouldn’t actually know it.

In looking through portfolios of several people along the years, I’ve realized that the number one cause for problems is buying tax saving products towards the end of February and March. When the taxman comes knocking, they reach out to their relatives and friends in a bid to buy something that will save tax.

Usually, that something is sold to them, and that something has got high commissions, opaque returns, and long lock-ins. The beauty of this combination is that it allows you sell the same crap year after year without the customer understanding what’s going on.

This is a really big problem, and people are losing a lot of money because of it without realizing it, and in a lot of instances the entire category of financial products is getting a bad rep because of this, and then people are just turned away from everything altogether which makes the situation even worse for them.

I changed the one word from that headline because I felt the solutions that were being proposed there and elsewhere don’t attack the root of the problem and maybe to some extent even extend it because they don’t offer simplification and removal of the poor incentives that exist in the financial industry today.

Update: Corrected tax rate for the above Rs. 25,00,000 slab.

Thoughts on retrospective taxation

The market has been doing quite well the past few months, and the hope is that the new government brings out policies, and clears roadblocks that further encourage investment, and in turn encourages FII money in the country, and help the overall economy as well.

With today’s globalized economy, it is no surprise that foreign governments and companies take as much interest in Indian policies as Indian companies themselves take, and one of the issues that has been coming up recently is retrospective taxation.

The most prominent example is the Vodafone case where the tax authorities wanted to charge capital gains on Vodafone’s acquisition of Hutchison Essar; the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Vodafone, and then the Indian government decided to change the laws relating to capital gains taxation accruing from cross border acquisitions where an Indian subsidiary is involved, and make that rule applicable retrospectively from 1962.

Since then Vodafone has decided to take this case to international arbitration as the dispute wasn’t getting resolved by other means.

The Japanese government has also brought up this issue recently with the Financial Express reporting that Japan has asked the current government to drop a $3 billion retrospective tax bill on Mitsubishi and Honda.

Retrospective taxation is a bad idea and I hope the current government abandons the pursuit of tax revenues in this manner. This is changing the rules of the game after the game has long started and is grossly unfair. Imagine the uproar if someone raised the current income tax rate by 5% and made that retrospectively effective from the past 10 years, such a thing would never pass, then why force a foreign corporation to pay such a tax? For people who support the amendment saying it plugged a loophole, I think that is very weak ground – you can certainly plug a loophole for future purposes but it is incredibly unfair to plug a loophole retrospectively especially when that involves working around a Supreme Court judgement.

This is high handed behavior that certainly doesn’t encourage a positive investment environment, and sacrifices good long term policies and economic system for a short term gain to cover the revenue deficit, which it anyway failed to do.

There is a tide in the affairs of men

The extent and comprehensiveness of Mr. Modi and BJP’s victory has surprised everyone, and raised the hopes from his government even more than they already were.

Indeed, when one party gets a clear majority in 30 years — hopes and expectations are bound to be high, and when that majority is driven by a leader who appears to be strong willed, and transformational, that just adds tremendously to everyone’s expectations.

The current generation has never been so passionate about politics, and the highest ever turnout shows how important people thought these elections were, and how deeply they felt about it.

Now that the results are out, and Mr. Modi has a thumping majority – people want to see changes, and see those changes fast.

The very nature of democracies makes it hard for them to move fast, and my sense is that you will not see a lot of sweeping changes very quickly, and the inflation rate that has been terribly high in the last few years will remain high for some time to come.

You would probably see small things, and indeed the absence of some things that will tell you things are headed in the right direction.

The absence of certain actions is perhaps as important as the presence of some actions. For example – you don’t want to see the finance ministry interfering with how the RBI works, as it is one of the few institutions in the country that is doing a good job.

You don’t want to see the tax authorities going after corporates — foreign or domestic with retrospective changes to rules, and changing the rules of the game long after it started.

You definitely don’t want to see the government announcing a policy, then backtracking on it, and causing confusion among all involved.

And you certainly don’t want to hear politicians talk about regulating social media.

The number of things you want to see happen is perhaps endless, and range from big things like allowing FDI in retail, initiating massive infrastructure projects with private partnership, bringing back the Direct Tax Code, cutting oil subsidies, or relatively smaller things like picking up the disinvestment pace, and bringing changes to visa rules boosting tourism in the country.

Ultimately, everything good or bad will be reflected in numbers and a year from now, you can look at the current account deficit, or the fiscal deficit, the inflation numbers, or even something simpler like the forex reserves or the Rupee Dollar exchange rate to see how things are faring, and those numbers will tell you the whole story.

This is a great win for Mr. Modi, and he certainly recognizes this as the tide that will let him travel far, let’s just hope the country isn’t confined to shallow waters when he does that.

The mind boggling valuation of WhatsApp

I was dumbfounded by the incredible price that Facebook paid for WhatsApp earlier in the day today. For those of you who still haven’t heard the news, Facebook paid an incredible $19 billion for WhatsApp today!

Those are American Dollars, not Zimbabwean!

It is hard to fathom how big this number is and even harder to think that a company with just 55 people can be valued at so much!

At today’s exchange rate, there are only 15 Indian companies that are worth more than WhatsApp, and I know these comparisons are a bit ridiculous but WhatsApp is worth more than the GDP of Nepal!

The thing that most amazes me about WhatsApp however is not the price but the number of employees and the realization that scale means quite a different thing these days than it used to a few years ago, and a lot of companies are supporting billions of transactions per day without having to spend insane amounts of money on infrastructure. I’ve recently bought some shares in Salesforce.com which is a pioneer in cloud computing, and they support a ridiculous number of transactions per second as well. They crossed a billion transactions a day mark about two years ago. Twitter routinely discusses their high transaction volume, and Facebook is talking about 3 billion users!

Finally, in terms of user experience, it seems like Facebook is not looking to show ads on WhatsApp right away, but they may want to make you tie the account to your Facebook in addition to your phone number, and then all your data sent through WhatsApp is stored with them as well, and that’s nothing to be excited about.

Great Online Shopping Festival (GOSF) 2013 – A Google Initiative

This post is written by Shiv Kukreja, who is a Certified Financial Planner and runs a financial planning firm, Ojas Capital in Delhi/NCR. He can be reached at skukreja@investitude.co.in

I was in South Extension market of South Delhi this weekend and as the winter season has started gathering pace here in North India, I was looking forward to shop for some winter clothing, like a couple of sweatshirts and a jacket or a sweater.

I went to various stores to explore options like Nike, Adidas, Puma, UCB, Pantaloons, Levi’s etc., but, either I did not find the kind of boring/dull clothes I wear or I found them quite costly i.e. beyond my spending budget.

Though I liked a couple of sweatshirts, one from Nike costing Rs. 1,795 and one from Puma costing Rs. 1,599, but then I gave it a thought to try for some online offers from Flipkart or Myntra or any other online store.

I came back home, searched them on internet and to my disappointment, I did not find any good deal. After wasting 15-20 minutes here and there, I came back to my regular Q&A session here on OneMint.

After answering a few queries here, my attention went to an ad on this website itself, which claimed to carry the details of India’s biggest online discount shopping of 2013. It has been named Great Online Shopping Festival (GOSF) 2013 and launched by Google.

I clicked on the ad and found certain details about it. I got to know that the initiative will remain ‘ON’ for a three days period starting today, December 11th and will end on December 13th and most of the leading online brands are going to participate in the shopping festival. I somehow convinced myself to wait for 2-3 days time and try my luck to get one or two good deals in the shopping festival.

As I was working till late night yesterday or early morning today, once again my attention went to a Flipkart ad on this website, which has decided to participate in GOSF this year. As it was already December 11, I went to visit Flipkart again to check if there is any offer which I can avail of.

Initially, I was positively surprised to see Flat 30% on Men’s Clothing, but then I found it is not there on Nike sweatshirt which I liked in the South Ex Part II market. I again felt cheated and disappointed. Then I tried my luck with some other companies or some other products like sweatshirts/sweaters from Puma or Adidas.

While doing that, I got to know that if I order 3 products or more, I’ll be eligible for a flat 30% discount. I selected 2 sweatshirts, one from Nike, one from Puma, and a Puma sweater and proceeded to checkout. This time I was happy to get a flat 30% discount on my shopping cart i.e. Rs. 1,380 discount on my shopping worth Rs. 4,597.

As a human nature, I got greedy and asked myself to check other online stores also, like Myntra and Jabong. I went to Myntra and got offered a discount of flat 35% without any minimum order requirement and Jabong had it as flat 40% with minimum order of Rs. 2,499 or flat 36% with shopping of any amount. While Myntra wanted me to pay VAT extra on the discounted amount, Jabong went one step ahead to bear VAT itself.

To cut the long story short, I finally ordered 3 sweatshirts from Myntra – one for myself, one for my brother and one for my friend. My total bill value came out to be Rs. 3,274, including VAT of Rs. 155.90 and after a discount of Rs. 1,678.95 on the before discount value of Rs. 4,797. What’s more, I got a “Puma Unisex Black & Grey Fundamentals Sports Duffle Bag” absolutely free as my before discount bill crossed Rs. 3,999 mark.

Now, I am also considering a couple of Nike sweatshirts worth Rs. 1,795 each from Jabong, which is going to entitle me a flat 40% discount to make it cost Rs. 1,077 each after discount. I’ll take the final decision after I finish writing this post.

This was my story about GOSF and my experience with the discounts on offer was extremely satisfactory. As every rupee saved is equal to every rupee earned, my idea with this post was to highlight some of the offers you can avail of in this shopping festival. So, here are some of them which I could notice to be worth considering:

Flipkart Offers in GOSF

* Flat 30% off on Men’s & Women’s clothing on purchase of 3 products or more. There are certain items which carry flat 30% off and don’t require you to do shopping of minimum 3 products.

* Flat 30% + Extra 30% off on Men’s Footwear on a purchase worth Rs. 2,999 or more OR Flat 30% + Extra 25% off on Men’s Footwear on a purchase worth Rs. 1,999 or more.

* Amex Cards Offer – Extra 10% off (up to Rs. 3,000) on purchases of Rs. 5,000 or more. This 10% is over & above your normal discount.

Myntra Offers in GOSF

* Flat 35% off on everything bought online with Coupon Code GOSF35. No minimum purchase required. Flat 40% off on selected brands.

* Holiday voucher worth Rs. 5,999 free with shopping worth Rs. 4,999 or more.

* VAT is charged extra after discount.

Jabong Offers in GOSF

* Flat 40% off on minimum purchase worth Rs. 2,499 with Coupon Code GOSF40

* Flat 36% off without any minimum purchase with Coupon Code GOSF36

* Flat 40% off + Extra 40% off on certain items

Yebhi Offers in GOSF

* Flat 33.33% off on minimum purchase of Rs. 1,499 with Coupon Code GOSF33

Airtel Offers in GOSF

* Get a Wi-Fi modem free on purchase of a broadband plan of 4 Mbps or more

* Get a 4G dongle free with Rs. 2,999 or 3,999 advance rental plans

* Get 25% extra data on 3G and 2G data packs

Croma Retail Offers in GOSF

* Additional 10% discount up to Rs. 2,500 on every purchase with Coupon Code GOSF2013

eBay India Offers in GOSF

* Apple iPhone 5C for Rs. 37,990

* HDFC Credit Cards Offer – Extra 15% off (up to Rs. 1,500) with Coupon Code 15HDFCEBAY

GOSF is an initiative by Google and there are many online participants across different sectors taking part in this online mega festival, like Snapdeal, yatra.com, goibibo, tradus.com, Amazon India etc. As it is a marketing initiative, some people are positioning it to be India’s answer to Cyber Monday in the United States.

As I am writing for this post, the official website for GOSF has been down. I don’t know if that is due to some technical reasons or if the euphoria is so great for a Google site to handle such traffic.

I found this initiative to be quite interesting as the kind of discounts/offers it is currently offering, before the peak winter season, normally start pouring in from the second half of January here in North India when the season is about to end. I could avail one of these offers to the best of my expectations. Would you like to go for any? Check out and share your experiences.

Where are we in the fear and greed cycle?

An obvious question on yesterday’s post was where we are in the fear and greed cycle, and sure enough Ketki asked that question.

Here is the image I used yesterday.

To provide a quick answer, I believe we are somewhere between Hope and Optimism as far as Indian markets go, and a bit higher than that for the US markets, however as I stated yesterday that is my opinion and there is no way for me to know where we will be six months from now or twelve months from now.

This comment also brings me back to a question Santonu asked in the Suggest a Topic page.

Here is his question.

santonu October 26, 2013 at 8:07 am [edit]

Manshu ,you often write that you pick up stocks when market is down or stocks are at attarctive level.What is your strategy when market is high like these days ,sell or wait for further fall or keep idle

REPLY

There are a few things I do in a high market, but all of them stem from believing that the market runs in cycles and the length of those cycles can be quite unpredictable.

Roger Nusbaum put this very well in a recent post:

I think it is hugely beneficial to take a moment during a huge rally to remember that at some point the market will go down a lot again and create stress (fear) for a lot of people. Then like every other stress-inducing decline it will come back. The rate at which it bounces back might be fast or slow but it will come back.

When that next big decline comes your portfolio will either go down more than the market or less than the market and then it will recover at some rate that is either fast or slow.

If the above reads as being stupidly obvious, that is exactly the point because the above is how it actually works. Thinking about it in terms of A follows B matter of factly and of course repeatedly can go a long way to reducing whatever stress might come along from a large market decline.

So, given all this, here is what I do.

Sell the stocks that are high

When I buy a stock, I have a file that lists down its qualities and a fair price. If the company goes a lot higher than the price I have in my file, and this usually happens during up-markets, – I sell the stock. In the past year I have sold 3D Systems that went up quite a bit more than the fair value I assigned to it but unfortunately for me, it continued rising further even after I sold it.

Reduce purchases

I don’t stop purchases altogether because there is no way to know if I am right about the cycle or not, and how long it will last. I’m also not patient or brave enough to wait for crashes and only buy when there is panic. A recent example of a buy is Zynga which I think will do well in the years to come and I didn’t want to wait for a crash to buy it.

However, the money I put in the markets is a lot less than what I put in during panics.

Build on savings

I am sure a lot of us personal finance types have Excel files, Google Docs or online portfolio tools that help us keep a close track of our net-worth. In my case, I have a Google Spreadsheet that has my liquid net-worth and I find it motivating to see small up-ticks in it every month. By saving money and adding to it I find motivation, and energy that I’m heading in the right direction. So even if I’m not putting money in the market, it is getting put in my brokerage account and adding to that number, also, it is ready to use whenever I need.

Pay down debt

It is also very useful to pay down whatever debt you have in the form of car loans or home loans during these periods. The interest rate on these is high, and it is usually a good idea to pay them down so you can reduce the total number of EMIs. So far, I’ve been lucky enough to pre-pay every loan that I have taken, and periods of high markets are the best for this.

Build on your list of stocks

I find it interesting to look at companies, and the whole investment process thrills me, so I continue to build on my list of stocks that I could potentially invest in – screening companies that I come across in my daily life.

An interesting phenomenon that I have noted is that screening companies in high markets makes it a lot easier to invest in them in low markets. What happens is that valuation is very subjective, and when the market has assigned a price to a stock, your own valuation is biased by that and you tend to assign a number close to it.

When the market falls, and the stock halves (happens more frequently than you’d like) – it is a lot easier to now invest in this stock.

Conclusion

So these are some of my own ideas around the process of investing when the markets seem high. I hope you find them useful to your own process, and I’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Nifty highs – sustainable or another crash coming soon?

As the Nifty makes new life time highs, the consensus view is disbelief and incredulity that these numbers will sustain. There are a few voices that are predicting higher highs, but I think for the most part, the consensus view is that these numbers aren’t sustainable.

This reminds me of the US markets from a few months ago when the Dow first started making new highs. At that time the majority view was this wouldn’t last, and the Dow would come crashing down soon. As the Dow has continued to make new highs, people have stopped talking about crashes, and the news of new highs is no longer news.

I know this sounds like me saying the Indian markets will follow the same path and be even higher in a few months, but that’s not what I am saying.

And I’m certainly not saying the markets will be lower than today, or these numbers are unsustainable.

I have always believed that predicting the market is a fool’s errand, and is something best done by people who make more money appearing on TV or writing books than investing in the markets.

So, why make the parallel at the beginning for the post?

To emphasize that this type of thinking is typical for where we are right now. When the market make a new high when it has stumbled along the way for the past few years, skepticism will be the dominant emotion. The reasons for this skepticism may vary, but we have seen this far too often to not recognize it here.

I’m embedding this great image below that shows how the cycle of fear and greed goes.

Recognizing this is important because it ensures you avoid wasting your energy in trying to follow market experts’ predictions on which direction to follow but instead have a system to invest in the market that ignores the short term direction it takes.

In the long term, we all assume that the market rises, else we wouldn’t be in the market, but in the short term there is no way to predict how the market will behave. This cycle continues forever and the best way to work within this cycle and not be victimized by it is to ignore the noise and invest regularly and systematically.

That way you ensure that you make investments when the market is really low, and capitalize on them when the market rises, and also ensures that you don’t invest too much of your money in a lump sum during times of excitement, euphoria or thrill and permanently impair your capital.

Once you get into that habit, the next step is to take advantage of these highs and falls and book profits during euphoria and invest heavily during depressions. I wrote about this not too long ago in my post about SIPs not being the end in themselves.

The key idea is to recognize patterns in how the markets behave – in this instance, the emotions that are commonly associated with every cycle in every country of the world, and make them work to your benefit rather than being drowned in the noise about useless predictions about them.

Happy Diwali !!

No gyan, no complicated terms, no financial jargons today. It is the biggest festival of India and I hope everybody is in great festive mood. I am sure all of us are spending some quality times with our families and I wish we all have such great times everyday in our lives. May God give all of us healthy mind, healthy body, calm, joy, happiness, peace, wealth, wisdom and prosperity!

I won’t take much of your time and would like to end it here by extending thousands and thousands of Diwali wishes to you & your family, from OneMint, Manshu & me.

A very happy Diwali to all OneMint readers! May God bless you with peace, health & prosperity and fulfill all your desires! Thanks again! 🙂