Moved from Canada to Romania for work. Hoping to skip the romance of expatriation and focus on the nitty gritty, no matter how nitty and gritty. 12.7.12 10 Reasons Why Romania is Better Than America Really? Yes, really. Let me count the ways. In America you can get everything you’ve ever dreamed of: GameBoy, Sega Genesis, […]
Elinor Ostrom died recently. Her work on the tragedy of the commons earned her the Nobel Prize. The tragedy of the commons is a term coined by scientist Garrett Hardin in 1968, describing what can happen in groups when individuals act in their own best self-interests and ignore what’s best for the whole group. A […]
It took me a long time to learn that instruments and forecasts don’t make money, risk management does. If you are in the capital markets, forecasting is paid work, a job, a vocation. Predictions are all over the place. What’s a prediction? Euro will die or Nifty will reach 8,000 or Gold will rise are all predictions. “That new Tom Cruise […]
From the start of the year, a business TV program editor wrote me numerous mails to have me as a market commentator during my next visit to London, Delhi or New York. After I finally made it to the hot seat, it turned out to be a brief affair. TV host: Mukul, what is your […]
Tracking market froth. They say that a rising tide lifts all boats. That expression fails to incorporate an often hard denouement – Planetary gravitational forces ensure that high tides are followed by low ones and some of those boats crash if they weren’t judicious enough to avoid the change in current. That’s probably a fair analogy to […]
We are in divergent times. A part of Europe is on the football field watching the Euro cup, while another part is protesting on the streets. I don’t know if Thomas Friedman would have seen it coming. Despite his vision of virtues linked with flatness, the world has somewhere descended into a vicious un-flatness. Not […]
In the age of information, quotes become books and books religion, almost. Robert Shiller’s Irrational Exuberance was a voice of caution that appeared in March 2000, before the start of a decade-long sequence of negative fluctuations. The book itself was written about economic bubbles and investor psychology. Shiller based his work on his 1981 […]
I was invited to deliver an inspirational speech at the Start-up Weekend for the global Jade network. KJ, a friend of mine, an international expert on e-gaming and netpreneur could not avoid a smirk: “Mukul and inspirational talk?”. He knew me well and was much updated about the contrarian me and our idea of glorifying […]
Timing is everything. Investing a quarter too early can influence the annual return on your portfolio. Now that Hindalco reached near 111 lows it reminds us of the great buy opportunity of 2009 when the stock was sub 40. Before we make our case for Hindalco whether to invest now or later, let us […]
Call it good omen or bad, human beings have associated natural occurrences with events. Though ‘objectivists’ say human beings suffer from illusions and see what they want to, reconsideration shows there is more to illusions than just a black crow or swan. Watching a crow perched outside your window or watching a black swan in […]