A really little book that could help you beat the Market

I was visiting a friend a couple of weeks ago and we were having our usual discussions about investing and stock picking and he mentioned about a blog that rates the stocks in the Sensex and Nifty based on a ‘Magic formula’. Of course the words ‘Magic formula’ got me curious and who wouldn’t be? So I came back home and looked up this blog and found that this formula is actually from a book that the blogger had read in the past.

The title was “The Little Book That Beats the Market” and I almost screamed aloud “what the ****!!”

Rest of the blog post can be found here

Warren Buffet’s funny and sensible quote

Warren Buffet is supposed to have quoted the following during an interview on US economic recovery

“You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.”

http://thedumbinvestor.blogspot.com

Stock Picks: Top 20 Indian Stocks to own by Forbes India

The following is the list of 20 stocks that were recommended by Forbes India in their recent release

Page Industries: A small company that makes a small product with big margins

Pidilite Industries: Pidilite has brands like Fevicol, M-Seal, car polish Motomax and other assorted consumer art materials and specialised home paints

Dabur: This company has focus. Five years ago, Dabur got out of the pharmaceutical business and put all its effort, like the best brand companies, behind five of its brands

Procter and Gamble Hygiene: Over the last three years, the money that P&G invested did not translate into market cap gains

Marico: Till 2008-09 came by, the company’s sales and profits had grown for 30 consecutive quarters, indicating a stable track record

Blue Star: Two decades to reach Rs. 1,000 crore in sales; two years to reach Rs. 2,000 crore in 2008

For the rest check out this post

Microsoft to offer free anti-virus software

This is a news report that I came across where Microsoft have said that they are going to offer something for free!!! From when have they become so generous?

Microsoft said on Thursday that it will soon release free anti-virus software so people on tight budgets won’t skimp on protecting
their computers from hackers.

A beta, or test, version of Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) will be publicly available for download beginning June 23 in Brazil, Israel and the United States. It is to be rolled out in other countries later in the year.

“Cost and performance barriers prevent many consumers from using up-to-date security software to protect their PCs,” Microsoft said in a statement.

The US software giant described MSE as “a no-cost anti-malware solution that provides consumers with quality protection from threats including viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans.”

The technology firm said that effective anti-virus protection is a “must-have” for computer users given increases in the number and severity of attacks by cyber criminals using malicious software to infect machines.

Paying to buy and routinely update computer security software “does not meet the needs of many consumers,” including those in emerging markets where money and resources are scarce, according to Microsoft.

The Redmond, Washington-based company said it will automatically update MSE for users.

Whats new in EJB 3.1

Few interesting new features are being added in EJB 3.1, the main ones are listed below. Asynchronous invocation is definitely a BIG plus.

1. no-interface session beans
2. Singleton session beans
3. Asynchronous invocation of Session beans
4. Global jndi names
5. TimerService enhancements
6. EJB Lite
7. Packaging enterprise beans within a WAR
8. Embeddable EJB containers

More details at

http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=EJB3-1Maturity

Did you know? New things I learned about Servlets

I learnt few new things about Servlets recently

1. SingleThreadModel has been deprecated since 2.4 specification

2. Servlet’s init method should throw UnavailableException if it cannot complete its initialization

Smart and funny ways to save money during recession

Loading Files using Java in a location independent way

Location independent access to Java Resources is a nice tutorial if you would like to know how to load files in java without specifying absolute paths. In a nutshell its done by using methods getResource and getResourceAsStream method in class Class. There is another set of methods in ClassLoader for loading system resources.

Smart and funny ways to save money during recession

Import test and static data using Hibernate’s hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto

Hibernate comes with a nifty feature that makes it unnecessary to use DBUnit or any tool for initializing your test database with data before the unit and integration tests are run. Ofcourse you need to be using Hibernate Core or its JPA module to take advantage of this. Steps to achieve this are very straightforward

1. Configure Hibernate’s hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto property in the persistence.xml to one of the allowed values. e.g. The following configuration tells Hibernate to create the tables as per the given JPA/Hibernate mapping

<property name=”hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto” value=”create”/>

2. Place additional tables/sequences/trigger creation scripts and the test data insert statements in a file with name import.sql and place it in the runtime class path. In case of eclipse, put it directly under build/classes.

3. Make sure the insert statement has no newline character

That’s it!!

YM

Investing in Index funds – So boring but I will still do it

I came across the book “The bogleheads guide to investing” in the public library recently. I took it since the name Bogle sounded familiar and I had only 15 mins to choose a book before the library closes down for the day. I assumed it was written by John Bogle but it was not be so. It had three authors – all leaders of an online forum called bogleheads who are basically diehard fans of John C Bogle’s investment philosophy. I was sceptical but the book was quite ok. The opinions and advice of the authors had lots of common sense and some of them had really caught my attention and I really want to put them in practice even though my ego is still actually reluctant to follow them.

One of the points was to invest a bulk or all of your money in index funds – equity and/or bond. I am also a DIY investor who started a year ago, right at the peak of the Indian Bull Run. And I don’t have to say that I am not doing too well with my portfolio. It’s obvious isn’t it? But I don’t know if that’s attributable to the financial crisis that swamped the global markets since I started or it’s my poor stock selection. Anyhow!! Coming back to the topic of Index funds I know for sure that investing in these funds are the easiest and the most efficient, and perhaps most assured, way to long term wealth. It does not need much of your time – you don’t have to spend hours going through company’s financials, prospects for the sector, profiling the quality of the management etc. Basically you don’t have to do anything except for choosing an index fund with good track record and low expense. That’s it!! It’s as simple as that.

But the problem lies in this simplicity. Is it not too boring? Where is the challenge, where is the uncertainty, where is the thrill? Don’t we want to beat the market and those highly paid and fancied fund managers? Yes, we certainly want to do that and we can do that – that’s what our ego tells us. But if you really let your commonsense rule then you know for sure this is the way to go forward. So, reluctantly, I am going to look for an index fund that gave decent returns over 5 year period and has a low expense ratio and put in 50% or more of my money. Rest I will manage actively to feed my ego. I may do well or may not, I don’t know yet but what I know for sure is that the 50 odd % of my money in the index funds will do its job of compounding my wealth at decent percentage every year.

So, now let me focus on choosing an index fund!!

Posted originally at http://theindiastockmarket.blogspot.com/

An update on the Tata Nano!

This is a follow up to my last post where I was wondering about the status of Nano and the lack of media attention on it esp since there are no problems attached to it anymore.

I just came across this article on rediff where they mention that Nano will now roll out in the first quarter of 2009 and the exact date has not yet been decided. Nano seems to be undergoing road tests. You can read the news report here