Traits of being an investor

Being a good investor is like being a good sportsperson in sports, it takes consistent improvement every day. And the good investor will always have the routine, just like a sportsperson has their workout plan.  

Human has evolved emotions towards money nowadays. which gives rise to a lot of emotional roller coaster rides when we have invested our money in a volatile market. And we experience many different emotional feelings depending on how markets are reacting.

Being a good investor is like being sherlock homes in the detective world. So,

what it takes to be a good investor?

  1. Observant, being mindful about what is happening around us is important, and processing those information and using that information to adapt our portfolio is key
  2. Good investors understand crowd psychology and use this information to their advantage. A good investor will not try to be bear in the group of bulls and wise versa
  3. Having a good emotional coefficient is key to an investor. As we know, we are very much attached to our money, but when we don’t take out our money from bad investment then we will be like a frog inside a boiling pot.We have to take our money and jump out if the investment/trade becomes too hostile. Like a lizard shedding its tail to protect itself from danger.You should always know when to exit.Our emotions should not be entangled like the pointer on the volatile graph, we should detach our emotions from the outcome of the process and stick to our plan.
  4. Having knowledge of what we have invested in is important. often many investors take advice from social media or TV and invest their money,  something which they don’t understand. At all costs, we have to take time to understand what we are investing in. in simple words, we should have vertical knowledge of what we are investing in.
  5. Negotiation is a key skill any investor should have. Good investors know profits are made when buying at the right price and not when we are selling at market price. I had written a blog about how to negotiate? So will not try to explain much about this point here.

Note this is not an exhaustive list, being a good investor means having the right mindset towards money, emotions, and information on which we are acting upon.

Have a good investment. I will see you on my next blog.

One minute idea for stock market investment

For most of the new investors, picking their first stock comes with a lot of confusion. Here is one simple idea that you can apply without knowing much about technical or fundamental analysis. This idea requires you to observe your surroundings.

Everything in our surroundings one way or another way belongs to some brand or company. For example here are some of the sectors, which you can think of

  • Mobiles to automobiles
  • Food to footwears
  • Hotel to hospitals
  • Petrol to pharma   

List down all the most used products by you, your family, and your friends. And see if those companies have given any dividend from past 5 years, eliminate which are not, and pick the one’s which are most used by everyone.

You will be surprised to know why some companies are not listed in the stock market and some companies with good brands have not paid any dividends. This will get you started with your investment journey.

How to protect your investment?

Having the right information is like having the key to a volt full of gold in it. Sometimes this information may be psychologically positive or negative in nature, it depends. In this blog, we are focused more on psychologically negative news and how we can protect our investment from it?  Sometimes we call negative news black swans as well.

This is the powerful theory proposed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. You can  download the audiobook for free by using this link if it is your first time signing up for audible

Here are 5 tips to protect your investment during back swan news

  1. Have stop loss on your portfolio
  2. Use 20% of your portfolio in hedging
  3. Once your money is liquidated from the stop loss trigger, you can use this money to short equities or buy put derivatives
  4. At the end of the crisis don’t forget to reinvest your money to build your portfolio.
  5. Diversify your portfolio with fundamentally good stocks

The bottom line is, you need to have a plan. And what do you need to do with your investment during the world crisis?

Having vertical knowledge on the subject will help in anticipate and negotiate the investment prices. You can read about vertical knowledge in my previous blog T-shaped learning model.

what is T shaped learning model?

This is one of the favorite topics in my learning process. Well, for every subject we take, there will be a related subject or cross-subject, which is associated with the main subject that can be learned. For example,

 This website is all about investment. Investment is a very broad subject by itself, like investing our time or money and getting some return from it.

But there are so many ways to invest our money and time. When you think about investment deeply everything we do in our lives is one or another way it’s an investment like our education, relationship, having kids, building the home, or even parking some time for learning is an investment.

Investment is all about returns, like

  • We invest In education so that you get a good job or you earn money from our specialization.
  • We fall in love with a person so that you have a better life and live happily
  • We buy peice of land so that value of land get appreciated
  • we write a blog so that it gets recognized by others

well, if we put effort and time and in turn if we are not expecting any outcome it is called as holy work. I think only a few great people could do it. This is a topic for another day.

Coming back to our main subject of this blog T-shaped learning.  There are two parts to it

  1. Horizontal knowledge  or skills
  2. Vertical knowledge or skills

Here horizontal knowledge or skills meaning, knowing about the related subject.

Vertical knowledge or skill meaning, going deep into the subject, it’s like doing master in the subject.

Coming back to our example of investment

what is horizontal knowledge or skills?

So on the horizontal scale

This gives a broad perspective of the subject. And knowing each related subject will help to prepare for change or when the situation raises our transition will be smooth. Say, if there is crash in the stock market due to some global crisis. You can always take your invested money and put it in real estate. It is only possible because, we had some understanding of alternative investment vehicles.  T shape learning always keeps us ready for the next challenges which life would throw at us.

What is vertical knowledge or skills?

Now let us see the vertical knowledge or skill, in this we focus on depth of the subject and deepening our understanding on the subject.  Knowing the latest and greatest on the subject and keeping ourselves up to date. Say for example

we do stock market investment and trading, as you know there are so many types of trading like F and O trading, commodity trading, intraday equity trading, and swing trading.  So based on our knowledge we might develop an interest in one type of trading and we could master that particular type of trading for example swing trading.

So what do we need for swing trading ?

We need Technical analysis of the chart and fundamental analysis. Based on these knowledge we build our strategies related to swing trading.

So simple idea of having T shaped understanding of the subject would help us in opening new opportunities and it would help us traverse during challenging times.

This will also help us in building our portfolio on the subject and keep us insulated from external volatility.

We might be good in vertical knowledge or horizontal knowledge of any subject. However, approaching to expand our knowledge with T shape learning would help in expanding our knowledge wide and deep.

Simple rules around T shaped learning is

When to focus on vertical knowledge or skills?

When we want to earn more, then we have to go deep into the subject and become experts. This yields more income. It’s like having a nish website with high authority.

When to focus on horizontal skill or knowledge?

When you want to have resiliency in our career or life, horizontal knowledge is most important because it helps in adopting the changes. It’s like having multinish websites which might have less authority.  Horizontal knowledge helps interact two or more knowledge areas and creates unique subjects like combinations of elements and mechanics which give raise to electromechanics.

 I hope you found this blog useful. please like and share this blog if you find it useful.

How to negotiate?

close up of human hand

How to negotiate?

Mastering negotiation is an important factor that will define one’s success or failure. Negotiating is a key skill is required by everyone to effectively work in their office, business, or personal life. Good negotiators always manage to keep their smiles on their faces in all sorts of situations that life throws at them.  Every day in our lives we negotiate in almost all the matters like when you buy or sell equities or NFT’s, or while purchasing products of any kind for their quality or price. Well, we even negotiate for our personal space and time with our relationships or we negotiate for their time. Some of the negotiation decisions are taken subconsciously and others consciously. Thanks to our brain, some of our decisions making abilities are automated for us, we call it instincts. well, that’s the topic for another day. In this article, we are more focused on taking the Conscious way of negotiating with people.
There are 3 steps to effectively negotiate
1.      Analyze
2.      Ask
3.      Anticipate

  1. Analyze

    Analyzing the situation or trends is key. Having the right information at right time is a very important factor between a good negotiation and a bad one. So, this first step is time-consuming and costly, and there are no shortcuts. also, this step will prepare you for facing challenges. Let’s take a hypothetical situation of person x getting married to person Y, well it’s not so easy for X has to convince the parents of Y before they get married. I took this example because my last blog was about what is love? If you haven’t read then you can read about it after this blog, that’s out of the way. Let’s see how x will negotiate with Y’s parents? Using 3 A’s approach which is mentioned above. X has to analyze the expectation of Y’s parents and, X has to ensure that X is better than the expectation. Also, X has collected additional information that he is better than the law of averages in many aspects of life.  Hope X has enough data and confidence to move next step

  2. Ask

    Often we will have enough ideas or data to achieve our goals but we tend to not execute those ideas or use those data for our well-being, in this case, we will fail silently. Taking action is one of the easy steps which you could take in this process of negotiating. You have to just Ask.  In our hypothetical example, X asked Y’s parents. So, what’s next

  3. Anticipate

    Well, during the first step we would have spent enough time analyzing the stats and related data. It’s time we anticipate the outcome of the ask. The answer might be in binary yes or No. if yes you have negotiated successfully else you would know the actual expectation or fact of the situation either way you will be in a better position to move forward.  As far as our hypothetical example X would have got the answer as yes or no, if the answer was Yes the X did good negotiation. If the answer was NO then at least X did the right thing and made Y’s parents start thinking about it. During this negotiation  X may even have gotten an actual understanding of the expectations and could plan for the next move.

When there is a choice to pick, then you choose what you need to pick. And choices are only present themselves when you do the right negotiation.

If you find this article useful please like and share it with your friends and family.

What is Love?

heart hand on shallow focus lens

What is love?

I asked this question myself some years back and finally found a satisfying answer in one of the Psychology courses and thought of sharing my understanding with you.

So let’s Die sick what is love?

There are 3 parts to love

  1.  Empathy
  2.  Passion
  3.  Commitment

Empathy is a deep care for one another.

Passion is a common interest or something that could be done together.

Commitment is how long one stays in the relationship?

Now let us dissect the relationship of this 3 part:

What if there is only empathy in a relationship?

This kind of relationship is called Friend, where we care about each other but don’t have any common interest.We welcome their presence but we don’t miss them either during the celebrations.When we are emotionally down we seek comfort around them.

What if we have only passion in a relationship?

 We just call this kind of relationship as time pass friends.Well, might meet them in a sports club or the library.You would share common interests but would not share emotional feelings towards each other.  Also, you don’t miss them when you don’t see them for a long time.

What if there is only commitment in the relationship?

Well, we call this kind of relation as empty love. In this kind of relationship people would not share any emotional feelings towards one another nor do they share any common interest.They stay together because of social status or social pressure or because of their parents. 

Now let’s use a relationship with combinations of these three components:

What if there is empathy and passion in a relationship?

We call this kind of relationship a romantic relationship. Here they share a deep emotional feeling for each other and also they share a common interest but when they asked about marriage? Either they will say no or they not thought about it.Well, this kind of relationship will turn into a toxic relationship after a long time because of a lack of commitment in the relationship.

Ok, let’s move on to the next one

What if a relationship has empathy and commitment?

Well, we all know what we call this kind of relation? We say they are best friends. In this relationship, people would care for each other and also meet each other very often and they share the deepest secrets with each other. But don’t share common interests so, when one person asks let’s start a business and the other person says, just I am not interested in it and I will support you.

What if there is passion and commitment in the relationship?

Well, I don’t know what to say about this kind of relationship. I would name it as working partners or maybe managers. Here people don’t care for each other nor wish for the wellbeing of another. They come together to get things done and they just walk away without even saying goodbye. This kind of relationship is transactional in nature.We should avoid this kind of relationship at all costs in the home.

So finally

What if relationships have empathy, passion, and commitment?

We call this kind of relationship true love. Where people care for each other well-being and share some common interests and give their relationship a meaningful name, they support each other in bad times and celebrate together for each other success. They will not know when they started their relationship but make it till the end.

The true relationship brings true happiness in life, the relationship is the biggest investment that we make ourselves and it gives returns in form of happiness, wealth, and prosperity.

I hope and wish you to find your true love. If you find this article informative please feel free to share it with your friend and family. Also if you have any suggestions or feedback please share them in the comment section.

What is a digital rupee?

indian rupee

Digital Rupee

In budget 2022-23 Indian finance ministry has proposed a digital rupee using blockchain technology. This is a very big positive move in preventing corruption and a step towards making the rupee a global currency. Since the digital rupee is based on blockchain technology I would refer to it as crypto rupee for simplicity. Here term crypto means mathematical hash or a block of record in the digital ledger on the internet, these blocks of hash-chained together form an encrypted ledger called the blockchain.

So let us understand how the crypto rupee is different from conventional currency stored in a digital wallet or bank account today. The number/balance that we see in our digital wallet is just recorded in the bank database. That means when we send and receive money in the conventional bank it just update records in the database and replicates them into the various systems. The disadvantage of conventional currency is, it is possible to update these records if someone gains access to these databases. Also, conventional bank records don’t have any intrinsic value. Records are valid only when underlaying physical money is transferred. Therefore conventional banking is time-consuming, needs more maintenance, and security infrastructure is very expensive due to obvious reasons.

When we want to travel abroad we have to exchange our home currency with foreign currency as a home currency doesn’t have any intrinsic value in a foreign land. And when we want to transfer money from one country to another, an actual physical money transfer would take days to get transferred. Where physical money is bound to physical damages. All these issues can be addressed with the introduction of the crypto rupee.

Advantages of the crypto rupee:

  1. Crypto rupee can be tracked, which means every transaction will create a new block of hash that can not be modified. Each hash in the blockchain contains information about the sender, receiver, and value of the transaction. This feature would reduce corruption if all government offices start accepting digital rupees for all transactions.
  2. The digital rupee makes international travel easy as we can easily swap the rupee with foreign currency.
  3. Less infrastructure is needed to mine the digital rupee.
  4. The digital rupee can not be faked or damaged.
  5. Finally, international trades can be done in rupee and not in any foreign currency.

Some more keynotes, in the crypto world digital rupee would be considered as a stable coin which means the digital rupee replicates the value of the actual physical rupee. When a digital rupee is issued, the actual physical rupee will be removed from the circulation, otherwise, this will lead to corruption. 

The introduction of the digital rupee is making India future-proof and also helps India tackle corruption. I hope every government office and official should only transact with a digital rupee for obvious reasons.  I am excited about the digital rupee and the positive changes it brings to society.

Please let us know your thought on the digital rupee in the comments section and please share this blog with your friends and family if you find this article informative.

Top 5 habits in 2022

Top 5 habits in 2022

We all like to be a better version of ourselves when we start our new year. Many would take new resolutions, goals, and missions.Well even I thought of doing something like that, but this year I decided to pick a few new habits which make our lifestyle better than last year and which can be sustained during our lifetime.So did a bit of research in my library and finally shortlisted these 5 habits.

1. Mindful meditation

Practicing mindfulness has many benefits which include improving immunity, reducing anxiety, and also it helps taking control of our health. In the past few years, we have come to realize how important is to take care of our health. Mindful practice is a whole set of suits that gives us tools to keep ourselves in good shape. I had practiced mindful meditation for the past 1 year which had helped me recover from COVID faster and much more.I would like to quote mindfulness is the gateway to a better life.

2. High five

Well, this habit is much more than giving high five to your friends.Giving high five to others makes you feel charismatic personality but, it’s all about giving yourself a high five first thing in the morning by seeing yourself in the mirror. This habit helps you improve your confidence and motivates you to achieve your goals.If a small change in habit could do much more, then it’s better to cultivate them and nurture them. To know more about high five habits and the science behind them I recommend you to read Robin’s book called high five habits.

3. Bookkeeping expenses

Now that we have taken care of our health, it’s time to take care of our financial health. The simple habit of bookkeeping our expenses would give us insights into expenditure patterns and also it helps us identify the places where we can do financial automation or reduce the unnecessary expense which occurs.  Effective financial bookkeeping is made by being brutally honest with ourselves and logging every small expense. And retrospect your expense every bi-weekly to optimize it

4. Invest regularly

It’s time to expand our sources of income.It is always better to have multiple sources of income. If you are an employee then your primary source of income is salary or if you are a business owner then your primary income is the profit of your business. So, to build an alternative source of income it comes in all sizes and shapes.Alternative sources of income can come from stock market investment, mutual funds, renting out a property, building a new business stream or even taking classes on your favorite subject after your work hours. Whatever works out for you.Just by thinking that we should have a second source of income new opportunities would present themselves.

5. Learning new skills every month

Yes expanding our knowledge is key for survival and betterment of life. And also knowledge helps to make better decisions when the situation arises. It keeps us always “Be prepared”.Committing ourselves to learning a new thing every month would open a lot of new opportunities and keep us ahead of the competition in our career or in our business.

I hope you enjoyed this blog and if you find it useful please share it with your friends and family.

Thanks, I will see you in my next blog. I will be posting links on some of the resources in the comment section. So, please check out and feel  free to reach

Twitter

Habits are the basic foundation of a happy life

Hi guys, I hope you are doing good. We could have kept the title “Habits are the basic foundation of success” but decided to go with happiness because we all seek success for living life happily. That being said. This blog is a follow-up on learning as investment 101.  Molding our habits are a powerful tool in our learning journey. Well, learning new things regularly by itself can be a habit.  Let us see what is forming our habits?  Our habits are closely related to how we feel in any given situation.  Say for example

  • Working out makes us feel good, so it help  motivate go to the gym
  • Getting good grades so, it would encourage me to study every day.
  • Thinking of early retirement, so it motivates us to save or invest money
  • For good health so,  it motivates us to wash our hands, doing yoga

well. Often our habits are formed by doing regular practice. For everyday training, we need strong motivation.  And motivations come from achievable goals. So goals are one of the critical factors of building habits.

The grass is not always green on the other side.   Along the way, knowing or unknowing, we tend to pick some bad habits. We don’t want to judge which is a good habit and which is a bad habit. But the good news is we can replace our bad habits with good ones.

There are several technics. The one which I used and found effective was habit sequencing. Which is a simple trick. which can be done with the following steps

  • Write down all the activities you to perform in a day that would help achieve your goals.
  • Then sequence the activities, for example
    1. Wake up at 5:30 AM and get fresh up in 15 minutes
    2. After fresh up will go for walking in pavilion ground for 15 minutes
    3. After walking, on the way home will buy vegies in Reliance fresh

Well, you got the idea, the template is

After some Tasks, I will perform the next Task and in some place.

This kind of sequence helps feed our subconscious mind, and we get habituated to do it every day.

  • The final step is retrospective. It is time to identify the activities which are not contributing towards your goal and replace them with the new one

Habit sequencing also helps create our routines like morning routines, work routines, and before sleep routines.  So the set of activities creates a pattern. Having good habits helps in improving everyday productivity and making us self-disciplined.

Also, another trick that I found helpful in forming habits is self-identity. Self-identity is a powerful tool that helps set our goal setting. If you don’t know what I mean, see your Facebook profile how you are describing yourself?  Well, don’t care much about social media, then that’s even good. Ask yourself some of the hard questions like

  • How should I be seen as a child, as a spouse, and as a grandparent?
  • For professional life, ask yourself how my colleague should see me as?
  • Or just write down how others need to pursue you?

Having a third-person view of ourselves helps in building a strong personality which is one adores. Also helps better earthlings. Do you know? That we can learn to be charismatic.

Here are a few words by Aristotlewhich would surely motivate you to work on habits

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

If you found this blog helpful, please share and like this blog. Also, feel free to leave the comment down below if you need any help on this topic.

Go green is a buzzword no one even cares for

World leadership is talking about reducing the use of fossil fuels because of climate change and the potential damage to the world and can impact each individual directly or indirectly.

We have talked about going green for a decade and not seeing reduction in crude oil production or reducing crude oil consumption. Even though oil helped the economy grow and humanity thrive faster, we are seeing the threat of overusing crude oil which is impacting global warming and rising sea levels. Even though this is a higher threat for island nations, but this issue is global and we should be concerned about it.

In the past few decades, we humans have fallen in love with speed do everything faster to get paid faster. Be it an employee, enterprise, or economy. We would like to grow more quickly even though we have achieved that speed towards growth, but we have not prospered in our journey. We have left behind so much dirt and pollution that hampers the entire ecosystem.  It is time we slow down and look behind what is essential to thrive and prosper.

My friends in India tweeted that beer is finally cheaper than petrol (laugh), so let us stop traveling and start partying.

No wonder the world economy would get impacted by crude oil price fluctuations. And the politics around it. We are here to talk about how we can go green as individuals to make a difference in climate change and rising sea levels.  Even if there is a slight chance it makes a difference, then it is worth trying

  1. We can use walking or cycling for local commutes. We often take out our cars and two wheels just to buy groceries. We can be easily avoided by walking to the nearest grocery shop.
  2. Upgrading our vehicle to electric
  3. Try using public transport for commuting long-distance travel.
  4. Installing solar panels on our rooftops would reduce the dependency on thermal energy.
  5. By growing trees in our neighborhood  or our back yards  would help reduce the carbon footprint

Simple habit change could yield big results and build a better future for ourselves and generations to come.

Why go green?

We can show our care and kindness to save our world and save millions of homes in island nations by going green. Let us use our power wisely and it is time we care for each other before things go out of our hands.

murudeswara beach