celestri.org

Experts on emerging markets are far and few between. One of the big boys is Mark Mobius of Templeton.  Mobius has spent over 40 years working in emerging markets and picking stocks while most others were still picking their noses in school. I had a chance to hear him speak back in Oct 2007 in [...]

[Read more →]

The current financial meltdown may not be the best time to talk about asset allocation since most people don’t want to open their monthly statements to see how bad the carnage is.  But, at some point you have to open them up and figure out where the damage is and potentially re-allocate. So how should [...]

[Read more →]

Someone emailed me yesterday and asked “why does your blog have such a negative angle on India?”  Part of me wanted to just tell the person to read the headlines and tell me what they see.  Americans always get blamed for not knowing anything about anything outside of the United States. Many Indian’s suffer the [...]

[Read more →]

Ridham Desai, MD of Morgan Stanley India, has been appearing on the financial networks lately talking about the Sensex correcting by 50% form their peak levels of 21000.  If that is true we still have another 30% to go…ouch.  Over the past 4 months he is one of the few guys setting realistic expectations for the [...]

[Read more →]

Reliance Mutual Fund (part of Anil Ambani’s empire) had recently converted a couple index funds (Sensex and Nifty trackers) into a single “quant fund.”  Since I’m a hugh believer in Index funds, it’s a disappoint to see Reliance shutdown that investment strategy…but its business.
The new strategy has been running since mid April and to make [...]

[Read more →]

Back in December 2007, Lotus India Mutual Funds launched India’s first “quant fund” called the Agile Fund.  I use the term “quant fund” lightly when talking about Agile because it’s really an equity mutual fund dressed up.  Most people would agree that a typical “quant fund” selects securities based on quantitative analysis, in agile they do [...]

[Read more →]

Watching the Indian financial networks lately is better then watching the latest comedy flick.  The talking heads are just trying to say something positive but the reality is there is nothing to say. My favorite was on Friday when an HSBC analyst said “inflation could hit 15% but growth should not be impacted much.”
Are you kidding [...]

[Read more →]

The Sensex was down over 515 points today to hit a low for the year - 14571.29.  The reason for the bearish performance was inflation, the gov’t announced inflation was 11.05% a 13 year high mainly on the back of increased gas prices.
But the fun doesn’t stop there, several people I’ve spoken to are putting their [...]

[Read more →]

I just raced through the latest book from Satyajit Das titled “Traders, Guns and Money” and you would think it was a year in review on the global financial markets…WRONG.  The book was penned in 2006 and describes his last 25 years in the derivatives market which happens to be what is ailing most investment [...]

[Read more →]

At last the Securities & Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has agreed to allow Direct Market Access (DMA) which will facilitate wire speed Straight Through Processing (STP) on the exchanges. If the previous sentence is as difficult to understand as Kevin Federline’s role in life then you may want to pass on this blog [...]

[Read more →]