Mahant!

I write something that I am no master at all to write. I happened to write because a situation made me to. I may be correct or wrong, not my decision to make. I would assume I am wrong, in expectation of more knowledge and guidance. If this is of any use to you, we are only too happy about that. As I said this is not mine to write and for all purpose, I didn't. A Walk in A Dream First and foremost what is that in which we are all here. Scientists call it universe, people generally call it the world, astronomers call it a planet, geologists call crust etc, but what exactly is this and where did this come from. The Primary point to note is that this world exists for You because You are here to see it. If You were not here to see it, then this how will You know if this world even existed? Let’s take some examples. Assume you are on a vacation and one day when you are taking a stroll in a wooded enclave and come across a handicrafts shop. Now that we have seen the shop we know that suc...

RBI's latest attempt to introduce gold-linked investment avenues must be applauded.  Gold is an incredible source of protection in our inflationary financial system. Among all investments of gold, it is the physical gold investments which will give the maximum return over long term. However, not every body needs a physical investments and not in excess of some amounts of protection. The present gold-linked products available are ETFs and gold funds (MFs). These are directly linked to the price of gold and has no fixed return component, even though that is not the primary motive of this investment. There are plenty of people who are looking to buy gold as well as looking for a fixed savings account type returns. Certainly, these returns can and should be less than the normal interest rates.  Frankly, no bank will be able to offer a interest rate deposit on gold, with the interest payment to be made in fiat and principal in gold. Simply put, inflation-adjusted bank is guaranteed...

Expanding from the idea from my monthly note to investors going in: [WIP] "One of the biggest marketing lie ever told to a retail trader and investor is that they can easily trade the stock markets or whatever markets by learning a few things here and there. They are frequently told that with good investor education they can start earning money in the markets. What a wonderful illusion! Imagine a banker, doctor or a teacher punting markets as pass-time observing few simple rules and making tons of money. Make a million in your lunch hour!  If only learning and trading markets were that easy*. Professionals who have spent decades and years honing their skills at the game are still learning that - full time, and here you have a "Cinderella dream" that learning a tiny-bity can make somebody a great trader and investor. What a lie! Its not just a coincidence that this lie gains ground more and more when the online trading picks up steam. Its easy to sell the online trading s...

Aam Admi, the good people of Mango county, finally have a party. Its got to be seen if it will indeed work for their betterment.  I have been critical of Arvind Kejirwal in past ( here ) and also hopeful that he will be able to give some direction ( here and here ), but at the end of the day, I am still very unsure how this will pan out. What is very crucial here is not to put the entire weight of Anti-Corruption success and expectations of Kejriwal's party, for India and Indians cannot take the risk of one party leading and executing on this crucial front.  Totally agree with this article at Firstpost. Though there are differences in the way corruption-solutions are viewed, the biggest risk is in their views on rest of the issues. And this is going to be their biggest chink in armor  From Firstpost "Kejriwal and Bhushan look around them, see mass poverty as a result of failed socialist policies over 65 years – and conclude that what India  needs is yet more of...

You can look at the sun or the moon, but can you make out any details of its composition? Now assume you are studying an satellite or exo-planet few million light years away, what chance do we have studying it in the way we would have studied the sun or moon? Now, think of it as studying a far off planet with new technologies, you can change your lenses and camera to study different aspects of the planet. You can change to infrared to understand its thermal composition or to spectral analysis to understand its atmospheric analysis. You can study its different aspects by using different and specific tools. Similarly in stock markets, price is the only data that comes out of the market. Price chart is the only chart that you have to make sense off, however it is almost impossible to make sense of almost all the time. At such times when we cannot make anything out of it, we have to use different lenses to understand its different aspects that form the chart. To enable such analysis we use...

Human beings are all about stories and what makes stories interesting are the characters and their virtues in this passing frames called life  Every often there come people who are larger than life i.e. they live even beyond the long passages of time. People remember them for lots of reasons and most important of all their character and virtues, and their actions. These wonderful people leave behind a legacy to cherish, idol-ate and emulate. They become in their course of this passage a veritable milestone for other come behind to guide and emulate. This distinction of being idols of humanity din't come on a platter. They had to prove it. It could be somebody from the accounted history or somebody from the pre-historic oral history. Be it Rama having to prove himself, or Krishna, or Sita herself. Take Bible - Abhraham, Job, all the apostles, why even Jesus - had to prove their worth and character before...

The popular belief is that FDI will help remove the layers of "Traders", those anathema of free-markets and social revolution (/sarc) from the food value chain. Unfortunately, the value of Traders is very different from the popular perception. Yes, there are numerous incidents of high handedness and arrogance which almost always seem to converge in farmer suicides and hence it is bad. However, the truth is, in the country where farmers are under-banked and the scheduled bans balk at giving farm loans, traders perform an important financial function. Most of the problems that we frequently come across are mainly in the rain-fed irrigation where the possibility of crop failures are very high (and seasonal). You will not find much crop failures in irrigated lands and as such the role of the "traders" in these parts of the countries is very beneficial. The present status quo relying on Traders to provide financing to the farm activity is not sustainable an...

What a wonderful speech by Ronald Reagan. I always loved Reagan because he reminds me of my grandfather, though I have studied his policies a bit, never really took time to listen to his speeches. This was a pleasant surprise!

I was very surprised to see a documentary popularizing Golden Ratios, Fibonacci and Symmetry on Indian TV. In many years of studying these I have never come across an Indian program which popularizes these concepts, though most of these concepts have advanced usage in Indian upanishads.  Its sad that India has lost its lead in the area of mathematics. I was pleasantly surprised to see this. And I hope the glorious old days of Indian mathematics will return in future too. Happy Thanksgiving. Language: Malayalam

Why is it so difficult for people to understand this simple logic? And why is it that everything in the end becomes a manifestation of Vasudeva kutumbakam .

Technical analysis is filled with concepts – some simple, some esoteric. Every one of these concepts have their own die-hard believers. The results clear in some cases and in some cases are very vague. There are several esoteric methods, if that is the right word to use. Some of the prominent ones are Elliot Waves, Gann Method and Hurst cycles. There are many many more. The reason these are esoteric methods is that these are essentially abstract methods with underlying theory which can be very vague for an average person. The underlying themes though might be very relevant the applications of these concepts are fraught with dangers. They are dangerous, not bad or wrong or something similarly mild, because these methods if applied wrong can put us totally in a different trajectory of market movements. If incorrectly applied they can be seriously disastrous to the capital. Some of the points to note, before you venture in to esoteric : Abstraction First of all, these concepts are not for...

The biggest innovation pitfall is falling into the myth of the mad scientist.  People often assume it comes from the work of a lone genius – a Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison – who works behind closed doors and then one day comes out and shouts “Eureka!” In actuality, innovation is combination.  It most often arises through active collaboration among people with diverse skills and perspectives.  That’s why so few enterprises can do it effectively.  Large organizations breed conformity, strong leaders encourage a singular vision and don’t like to incorporate ideas that are off-script. http://www.digitaltonto.com/2012/how-to-disrupt-yourself/

Have you stopped to consider why is the corrupt political parties are so successful?  Contrary to what many may argue, the real cause of their success is the so called aam-admi. The reason is not the vote-buying, influencing or booth-capturing of old days, it is much more poignant. The real reasons for the millions for poor and middle class, subtly but surely backing the corrupt parties is because these corrupt parties are the biggest source of immediate gratification. A truly well-intentioned party (I can only think of CPI) can never succeed in India because they can never in their right conscience give the gratification that these (aam janta) require. On the contrary, every one of their schemes and proposals are like bitter pills which these population are scared of and hence, will never vote them into power. These dumb population will forever vote the parties into power because of the immediate and subsequent - VISIBLE - gratification that these cor...

As we become a severely fragmented society - in terms of how we live, our attention spans, multiple projects and multi-tasking, fragmented families and communities, fragmented networks, fragmented roles - the role of luck in our lives change - hugely. In a fragmented world it is almost critical to get in touch with other fragment who can help us professionally or in business. But such a connection may well be impossible to come by in most instance. The social networking brings together lot of people but at the same time fragments it further. This is actually the problem of networking. Being able to convert the social media relationships into real-world relations would be critical in future. Blueprint of which is simple: reach out to an interesting fragment and convert that fragment into real world relationships for mutual benefit. What we cannot rule out is the role of luck here. First of all, we have to reach out to the right fragm...

I am a very avid user of Twitter, as most of you know. But there was a time when I quit Twitter for an extended period of time. One of the reasons why I quit twitter was that Twitter was not archive-able. There are many times when we will want to go back and look at what we were thinking and doing. Unfortunately, with Twitter's limited archival it is next to impossible to understand what we were doing, thinking or pursuing.  Every platform has its advantages and disadvantages. Twitter has its advantages and blogs have their advantages. I was reminded of this fact in recent days when I decided to hand over admin rights of all my blogs to my brother and  I looked into some of my own writings from years ago. [I have blogs running from 2004.] What strikes me is that so much of what I was thinking has come remarkably correct and I have totally missed on some crucial issues. There are some beautiful vignettes of my own writing that I have enjoyed re-rea...

This is a beautiful take on the role of luck and the skills it requires to take to succeed. AND how even with very high skill level you need to have to luck to succeed. Check here

Sibal says Sensationalism of media killed the telecom auctions . That's half-true. There are many reasons why telecom auctions failed. Lowering the reserve price will not benefit anybody much. Telecom sectors growth rates have been stagnating over past quarters.  Several companies are rationalizing their existing subscriber numbers - looking for higher ARPU, efficiency and because high subscriber base is not necessary in new scheme of things.  What matters is efficiency and higher ROIs. For this companies like Reliance and BSNL all have much higher bandwidth than necessary. They wouldn't even bother to bid for new spectrum. Telecom sector as we know is in perhaps the last few years, may be a decade.  The incremental profits and marginal revenues are hard to come by due to high competition and high roll-out costs of traditional infrastructure. [This basically means, telecom providers will not care if they ful...

I often wonder why Malayalam films are so incomparably good. If movies of other languages including bollywood or hollywood are good, the Malayalam movies are simply superb. They are just too good. The real cause of this is of course, the demographics of the audience. And surely, the biggest and the most crucial difference in the quality comes because of literacy. Political activism that underlines the social structures definitely comes the close second in defining the maturity and quality of these movies. Just goes on to show that having a solid literacy rate has impact on all sections and activities of society.

I have been thinking as to why are finance professionals so not entrepreneurs  Prima facie this flies against the known wisdom of finance professional being risk-takers and this is very true. However, is risk-taking all and the only thing about entrepreneurship  I am sure not. Being able to take risks is good part of the entire entrepreneurial skills. I am, at this juncture, forced to rant about this because of few distinct behaviors I have noticed over years. First, its hard to convince a finance professional to quit their jobs and strike out. And it is almost impossible to get them to collaborate with others. No, it is not about the competition (as I will show you now) and reluctance of collaboration could be because of the huge financial responsibilities on each individual. But when you compare this groups of people with other groups, we can't but marvel the need for more collaboration than is happening right now. ...

The reason for repeated pattern failures we see in the market is because of the Common Knowledge. Common Knowledge in simple words is that opponent knows that you know that a particular thing is relevant, and you know that opponent knows that you know that opponent knows .. going into a long loop. Since, the market players are aware majority traders are looking at a price chart with an expectation of pattern, they also know where the stop losses of the patterns are, and hence it makes enough sense to go against the Common knowledge and take out the stops. Over a period of time if creates repeated pattern failures making the most common pattern - highly recognized patterns - less and less effective. In other words, you may say crowds cannot trade patterns, though they are actively involved in creating patterns on charts. When a pattern becomes a crowd knowledge the ability of that information to give you an 'edge' in trading is nulli...

We are all frustrated of how this country is run. We all accept that this country has lived well below its expectations and strengths. Its very frustrating to see how the growth prospects are hijacked by egomanical few. There are many such valid and even justified indignation we Indians have had to suffer for so long and with no hope. India is everything but its not broken. Its a miserable country in its present state but it has glorious days ahead. The system is not broken. Actually, we should blister whenever somebody says system is broken. It is not so. Saying the entire system has broken is a gross insult to millions of hard working people who keep these systems running whether they be post-office, a train, a port, a plant, a bus service, riotous traffic or garbage collection. The sacrifices these people make on face of almost no growth, motivation or better life to look forward to in this miserably entwined country, is something we must all respec...

Barclays on possibility of Interest rate reduction and possible easing in the economy.

PATTERNS are subjective in nature. No matter how clear the rules of discernment are, the actual implementation in the real life scenarios are prone of guess work. Because of its subjective nature, patterns can rarely be used solely for entering the trade. Though, at first blush, it would seem the patterns are working perfectly, it is pretty dangerous to trade based on patterns alone. If you were to ask 10 people to decipher a pattern in any particular chart, they would come up with five different variety. This is because a person sees what he wants to see on the chart. If the person is predisposed to see a bullish chart, the visual interpretation of the pattern is going to be bullish, even though there would equally qualified bearish patterns on the same chart. Having given sufficiently good disclaimer on the failures of pattern for any trading purposes, the patterns - a very few / handful, of them carry substantial value in trading. All most all of these are hindsight pattern...

There is something wonderfully ethereal about beautifully written prose. A alchemy of words and thoughts that transports a man into deep realms only accessible to imagination, realms where all the trueness comes forth in one gushing stream of song and dance. And rhythm  There is something beautiful in creating landscapes and all its attendant flowering joyous creatures; their joys, their sorrows and the troubling troubles that so looks and feels like our own. Nothing but words can wonderfully weave the heartbeats of characters and readers together. Nothing but words can bring alive all those hustle and silence  those smoothness of her hair and the warmth of her breath, there is nothing which brings alive someone in so embarrassingly truthful way. Prose is really wonderful way of expressing. A gift given to only those gentle few who have had it chosen. Its a gift not for those who wield the pen but all of us who are gi...

It is simply incredible how little BJP talks about corruption. Why are they not out of the streets and tv studios talking it everyday? What is the platform they want to contest the next elections, if at all they want to contest it seriously. (I am totally baffled by their lack of seriousness in taking up corruption as issue because that is their biggest opportunity lying around and well, they are just not interested!) The baton has been picked by likes of Kejriwal and even Mamta Banerjee! You got to be kidding, when the principal opposition party in the house has no interest on the burning issue. Or do they have hidden benefits not to puruse the matter beyond the point of break? Meanwhile, Congress' strategy for bigger elections seems to be on dry runs at Himachal. It basically involves deflecting blame for being corrupt and blaming the system to have enabled the corruption. If I am correct and that's really a pointer, that's a pathetic! All the more reasons for BJP ...