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Entries from July 2007

Investing ain’t easy

July 25th, 2007 · No Comments

Lately, many people have been asking me about investing in India and it got me thinking about investing in general.
I’ve realized that it’s very tough to beat the index year over year, this image (although dated) shows what i mean. I’ve read that many managers under perform the indexes, but I recently saw the concrete [...]

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Tags: Investing

Cold Coffee anyone?

July 21st, 2007 · 1 Comment

If you were hoping to get hot Starbucks coffee in India you better bring it on your flight to India. The wrath of Kamal Nath hits again, he’s the head honcho at the Commerce and Industry Ministry. According to the local papers, there was some confusion within the government over what exactly passes as [...]

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Tags: Business

Biyani’s Bazaar

July 20th, 2007 · 1 Comment

If you’ve ever been to a Big Bazaar, Pantaloons or Central then you have Kishore Biyani to thank for it. He’s the guy behind India’s first wave of retailing. I bought the book for Rs. 99 at Big Bazaar (go figure) and thought I might gain some insight into his empire. Unfortunately that [...]

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Tags: Books · Business · Marwari

3rd anniversary of celestri.org

July 17th, 2007 · No Comments

Yup, it’s been 3 years since I first started blogging at celestri.org. This will be post number 181, which works out to 1.15 posts per week. It’s been pretty interesting to be able to write down my thoughts and then get questions and comments from all over the world.  In the process it’s also [...]

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Tags: General

Global running of the bulls?

July 15th, 2007 · No Comments

If you thought that the Indian Sensex was the only stock index that hit a historic high this past week you’d be wrong. The Running of the Bulls festival has just ended in Pamplona, Spain. However, the bull markets continue to run up in every other country, some of them include: US Dow [...]

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Tags: Investing

The forgetful trader

July 13th, 2007 · No Comments

Sometimes the best way to trade is not via technicals or fundamentals but instead the buy and forget strategy. During the dot com bubble one of my buddies (Will P.) was always talking about Oracle and how great a company it was and blah, blah, blah…So I decided to buy the stock. On [...]

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Tags: Investing

World Wealth Report

July 10th, 2007 · No Comments

It’s that time of year where Capgemini and Merrill publish their annual World Wealth Report. It’s mostly a fluff report, but I like to look through it for several reasons.
1. See the geographic distribution of the declared wealth
2. Their definition of a High Networth Individual (HNI) and Ultra High Networth Individual (UHNI). An HNI [...]

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Tags: Investing

Hong Kong trip

July 8th, 2007 · No Comments

I went to Hong Kong last week for the first time and I was blown away by the city. It happened to be the 10 year anniversary of the handover back to China, so as you can imagine a lot of festivities around that. It also happened to be the 10 year anniversary of [...]

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Tags: Business · Cars