50th blog

This is my 50th published blog and well it is about blogging :)  I would like to thank you all my dear friends for all the support, encouragement, appreciation and share some of the most heart warming experiences about what I learned through them in this golden jubilee 50th blog of mine. (I created the image below to express my emotions :) )

The idea of blogging came to me because of something really funny. After a painful wash out during the 2008 crisis and several years of experiments, I finally found the right approach to investment and wealth creation. I figured that there is way too much to learn & remember here and it is going to be a really long journey. I was learning, discovering things at a hectic pace and in huge volumes and wanted some way to keep track of all this. For me ever since my schooling days, I never had confidence on my memory, add to that as I grew up I developed this phobia that some day I am going to lose my memory maybe to alzheimer's or something like memnto .. just a phobia ...

So I wanted to persist all I am learning somewhere that is safe and I can easily refer to. At the same time I didn't want it to be just a theoretical dump of "10 Principles of Investing" because investing is so personal, subjective and contextual. It is a form of art instead of accounts.  So I wanted to save my learning with some context and personal experience embedded into it along with a crystal clear message that the experience highlights.

My goal
At the same time while interacting with my friends, relatives, colleagues I realized that there are so many people who are interested in growing their wealth and worried about shortage of money for essentials like family support, education, marriage and healthcare or what happens after retirement. One thing I saw common atleast at that time was that everyone had one common idea about retirement and that is "once I save one crore rupees, I can happily retire" According to me that was so wrong. Even more worrying was that people with "1 crore retirement planning" would realize that they are wrong only after retirement when it is already too late to fix things. The time to correct was now, not after 60.

 Another common thing I realized was that everyone correlated more wealth with more hard work. We especially in India have been brought up to believe that we need to struggle and work hard to become rich and successful and once again that is so wrong. We just need to understand the game. Money is the most abundant resource on this planet.

Through my blogs, I have also tried to encourage everyone to pursue their passion and take calculated risks in life instead of trying to always play it too safe and structured according to social expectations. Yes, accidents will happen but the victories will also be sweet. Life should not be about reaching your goals but blasting through them and setting new ones!

Some life lessons
The phase of my life post 2008, to put it very simply was very heavy for a few years in a row. For me if I could use my experience and help atleast one other person avoid  learning these life lessons in the hardest possible way, it would make everything much more meaningful. And so I published my first blog on retirement planning last year on June 17th. Way beyond my expectations, I got such a terrific response from all of you for my first blog. Close friends from childhood, college, early work days with whom I had lost touch pinged me and wished me for writing this blog.

Some friends messaged me on how reading the blog changed their perspective about money which they had developed due to scarcity & difficulty in their childhood days. That was such a satisfying outcome for me, considering I myself came from a background of unnecessary scarcity and that had impacted me so deeply for such a long time. Even after earning and saving enough with a stable and well paying job, spending even a small amount for something as basic as food used to pinch me because of my early experience.

I literally had to train myself, unlearn my fear of spending money and learn to enjoy it. It was difficult. More than that, it was unnecessary. It is now my goal to influence as many people as possible to switch from savings mindset to earnings mindset. Spend freely but focus on earning more than you need to spend. Too much focus on saving can lead to unnecessary stress on families, especially for kids who can grow up thinking that they are a burden on the family because their parents have to spend money on them. Such issues creep in slowly without we realizing it and have far reaching impact in later years for everyone. Very unnecessary & undesirable.

Even as individuals and as a country, our focus on savings, limits us whereas focus on earnings can offer unlimited growth and help us realize our dreams way beyond food, shelter & clothing. We have to make that cultural shift.

A long thank you note
Anyways, seeing that my writing has atleast some connect with friends, I decided to pursue it sincerely and today I am writing my 50th blog in less than 15 months from my first blog. Without naming anyone I would like to thank all of you for all the wonderful wishes and messages for my blogs. A friend's sister whom I never met commented on one of my blogs and appreciated it. It was so great to know that my blogs were reaching out of my circle of immediate friends. A few friends (also my investment buddies) with whom I regularly chat, expressed how my blogs helped them fix their misconceptions about stock market and gave them the right approach to start their investment journey. They also let me know about how they were doing pretty good and above all enjoying it. This is exactly what I wanted to achieve through these writings. It would be my greatest pleasure if one, some or all of my friends who got inspired into stock market investing because of me become millionaires and billionaires and live an abundant, worry free life.  Many people in office including my boss and managers appreciated my writing and also let me know how others far off in different geographies who didn't know me also appreciated my blogs and inquired about me. They also encouraged me to write more. Your boss encouraging you to do something other than daily office work, that's good right? Through many people, my blogs became a part of my introduction when meeting new people. Some appreciated for the humor quotient and some for the wisdom. That is all very generous of you. Thank you ! Few friends went through it in detail and helped me correct few mistakes here and there to make my blogs more readable. Cannot thank you all enough considering my language skills are very challenged. If it was not for auto-correct and spell check most of my blogs would hardly be readable :) thanks to technology ! Few friends are very expressive, few just hit like silently in the shortest possible time after I publish my blog (not sure if they read it at all) and few just let me know casually at the tea vending machine that they enjoyed reading my last blog. Thank you all, means a lot to me. Maybe there are few who don't like it .. in that case thank you for not making it very explicit or public and probably just ignoring it .. never got a nasty message about my blogs :). When you publish something in public, you always risk exposing your stupidity to everyone, but I think all my friends have been extremely kind to me. In a strange way my blogs have helped me improve my friendship & relationship with so many of you which is really great !

Hopefully I will be able to continue writing, hopefully it will be meaningful. Hopefully it will be positive for all of us. And if at all I lose my memory some day due to alzheimer's  or some memento kind of thing, I have a small request to all of you my friends. Please .. please direct me to this blog ! :)

good not good enough

Dipa Karmakar, Sakshi Malik, P.V. Sindhu who knew them before today? So what changed in the last few days? These players have been playing for several years and have been good at their respective sports for several years.

What changed in the last few days is that they graduated from being good to being "the best" by winning at the Rio Olympics. This has a very important lesson for all of us. India probably has lot of sports people who are good in different fields and yet when Rio Olympics began the country's pride was hanging in thin air for 11 days. The grim realization that although we have lot of good players, we probably have none who is the best. We cannot use the power of our billion plus population advantage everywhere. Hundred good athletes cannot join forces and come together to win one medal at olympics. It has to be only one alone, that one who is the best and not just good.

Here is how some of the global headlines looked like
"It took 11 days and more than 100 athletes, but India finally won a medal at Rio Olympics"

"By winning a bronze medal in wrestling, 23-year-old Sakshi Malik helped India avoid a potentially embarrassing Olympic blackout."

While we owe a big thanks to Dipa Karmakar (will win the medal in 2020 :) ), Sakshi Malik and P.V. Sindhu for saving a nation of 1.2 billion from a mega embarrassment on the world stage, we must learn from it.  We are all good and doing good in life, but that is not such a good thing because it makes us complacent. Being good keeps us satisfied and happy and probably stops us from trying to be the best. How many of us can claim to be the best and not just good in anything?

We will probably lead a happy life being good but will we be able to shine in that one critical moment in life that can be a make or break situation. Can we pass if put to such a test that demands us to be the best or perish? Suddenly being good doesn't look good enough. We are doing good in life just because we have not been put to a test that only the best can survive. We are probably not even good, maybe just lucky. So should we be happy being one of those millions who are good or should we try to be the best? Remember it's not just about our sports people, sports infrastructure or sports budget & policy. It's about us, all of us in every field.

freedom and happiness

freedom .. "free"dom .. the quality or state of being free .. infinitely valuable when it does not exist but hardly appreciated when it is there, because it's free .. like air .. like water .. you realize it's value only when it's not there. This is what makes it extremely difficult. We have legs and it gives us the freedom to walk, run & play but it's not like we worship our legs everyday and thank god for giving them to us.

Freedom & happiness
Now imagine how many such things you have in life that are absolutely essential, completely free but taken totally for granted. It could be something as simple as your favorite pillow .. We constantly take it all for granted and instead what is it that we focus on? .. some trendy cafe, first day first show movies, shopping at 50% sale, neighbor's car, colleagues bonus cheque, celebrity affairs, exotic vacations, government corruption, all the fake and masala news and tv series fantasies, ... the list goes on. So the question is are we making good use of our freedom? In the world of advertisement & marketing led zombiefication of humans we have been made to believe that we need to do, experience, have, consume everything in the world to be happy whereas actually to be happy you just need to be free and to be free you need nothing at all because it's free .. If you have to do, pay, or work to get something then it's not free .. if it's not free then I doubt it will make you happy because you will have to go through lot of unhappy things to get there which in itself is like making yourself unhappy to be happy. Does that make any sense at all?

But we work all the time so hard to be happy, we constantly plan things, do things, push the limits, hoping that it will make us happy. Because we are so invested into it, for a short time we think that we are happy and then it's over and then we need to find something else that will make us happy and then we again work hard, plan and do things to be happy. All it gives us is momentary happiness which is also neither true nor real. It is just the trick of our brain to think that way so that we have some satisfaction that all our investment yielded something. It is a way to cope with the loss of not having achieved actual happiness after working so hard for it. It is just like we try to convince ourselves that atleast we had fun when we lose a bet.

So how to be happy?
simple do nothing at all. Everything you need to be happy, you have it for free.

Good for Stock Traders - GST

The topic of GST has already been beaten to death by news and analysts. Every expert has a view on it. Some say it's good some say bad, some say short term, some long term, some say already priced in some say yet to be priced in, some say it will cause inflation, some say it will not impact that much, some say it will impact this industry some say that industry. I thought let me also have a say in it although I will not cover the points that have been covered like a thousand times i.e which stocks will benefit and which will loose. I will focus on the macros and a long cycle of optimism that GST brings to Indian markets.

GST - the multi-decade macro story
Let's get the first and the most important point out of the way. GST IS GOOD FOR THE COUNTRY and Good for Stock Traders and no, it is not priced in. GST is going to keep having a positive impact on the stock markets for several years to come. This is Aadhaar scale reform and 100 times bigger than that. At the macro level, GST is going make India climb way higher in world ranking on ease of doing business due to simpler and uniform tax structure which will attract lot of new foreign players to set up shop here. It will trigger huge consolidation in several disorganized sectors that have fragmented smaller players and create huge industrial behemoths in the country with market caps that have never been heard of. It will make the "Make in India" campaign successful and make India as one of the top manufacturing hubs of the world. This will create huge employment opportunities in the country and give a boost to the domestic consumption. In short it is not a one day event, not a one year event, not a multi-year story, it is a multi-decade story. Can all this be priced-in in just few days of stock market run up? NOPES ...

How will it play out?
Markets are driven by news flow and passage of GST sets the stage for a continuous supply of highly optimistic and mega announcements for the Indian market. IT contracts will be awarded for the implementation of GST, FII investments will come flowing in, more and more joint ventures will be announced, mergers & acquisitions will happen at a hectic pace, ratings will be revised, several achievements will be made and highlighted by Indian companies that will set new benchmarks. India story was like a blocked pipe with huge potential that was not able to flow due to congestion at various points. Friends the blockage has been removed and now the potential will flow with full unstoppable force. Get ready !

How should I play it?

Without going into individual names and ideas which you can anyways get from several news & media reports, I will give you one hint. This is not the time to think small. It is the time to think big, because big will keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. This is no place for small. Think big, do big, and grow big, there are no limits ahead. Don't get left behind and as you charge ahead into this new era, do remember the people who made it happen. Once again deep respects for PM Modi and FM Jaitley

Don't forget the monsoon

While GST is great and hogging all the limelight, don't forget the monsoon also. India has been blessed with good monsoon this year. The water tables are rising and it is always a great feeling to see the green shoots coming out of our villages and happy farmer faces with broad smiles. This is also not a small event. Ample water and electricity in the villages is going to trigger a revolution outside the mega concrete cities of our country. This is really a great combination for all round growth and optimism covering everyone in the country. We cannot live in these beautiful villages due to work and time commitments but can surely participate in this great revolution through various channels. (I will do so through stock markets .. off-course :) ) Don't get left behind .. a great journey ahead !