Up or Down

We continue to stay invested. There have been few sell side trades though generally we have been investing.  As a strategy, we have invested in high quality large cap stocks. Investments in last 4 weeks were well timed. Currently the portfolio is showing a decent gain though the top 7 scripts are accounting for all of the gain:)

There are many mid-caps looking attractive at the current levels though I would stick only to large caps at the moment. Hard to say the 2012 outlook for Equity Markets though I stay bullish for a 3 year horizon. We have also started regular investments in Gold EFT from last few months. Recent norms introduced by SEBI for listing day IPO trading should help in the long turn.

www.rohitshahsworld.com is registered now though site is under development. I would like this site to focus on Financial Planning resources. I now have a good collection of all books related to Financial Planning. I would like a list of such books to be published on the site. It will take a while to get the site fully up & running though.

Long hours continue at work place. Not much chance to blog or read books. Hoping that I will get regular on reading front, sometime soon now.

Regards, Rohit

Furniture Making Experience

I would like to narrate my experience on making of furniture for my house. We stay at Rustomjee OZone in Goregaon West, Mumbai. You can visit our house at Builder's website here.

Nothing much about the Finance of Furniture. We pretty must paid decent money, at market rates. What helped is the approach we followed. We made a minute design for both the Ward Robes and the Kitchen. While it took really long time, the rule of 'if you spend 90% Time in Planning, it takes only 10% Time to execute', worked well for us.

Furniture was designed & made by Sajid Patel (098212 16900) from Kitchen Palace, Goregaon, Mumbai . We worked along with him and gave inputs, including this excel sheet, in most possible details.

Let me first post few photos of the view from our Bed Room.

Here is the design we followed for this Wardrobe in our Bed Room. Pictures of the Wardrobe are also added below.

And here is the kitchen ! Sorry, the soft copy of the Kitchen Design is not available with us. Sajid designed this in his software.





Regards, Rohit

Financial Quotes

One of our Kind reader from Ahmedabad, Nikhil Shah, has shared a nice presentation of quotes from Financial Wizards.  Its available here. 

Regards, Rohit

Giveindia

It's been a long time that I have been wanting to donate some part of my income for charity purpose, in the education field. The big problem is how do I ensure that my hard earned money is actually used towards the intended cause? Given my work profile, I have limited flexibility of doing any field research myself. Finally, I came across Giveindia website. Started by Venkat Krishnan who is IIM Ahmedabad Graduate. I learned about Venkat and this website in the book 'Stay Hungry Stay Foolish' by Rashmi Bansal.

They basically provide a donation platform & you can choose from around 200 NGOs that Giveindia has scrutinized for transparency & credibility. They ensure that at least 90% of the contribution reaches to the organization, against 60% average for NGO Sector.

I found this to be extremely helpful.

Regards,
RS

Minority Shareholders

Ajay Shah has an excellent article here on Minority Shareholders. Some examples and very good suggestions on what can be done to improve things.

Regards, Rohit

Interesting Utilities for your Computer

Found these interesting utilities available complimentary on web.

Courtesy: Recent Money Today articles.

PowerToys are some additional features and functionality in Windows.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/Downloads/powertoys/Xppowertoys.mspx

Glary Utilities can help to optimize, clean & speed up your computer.
http://www.glaryutilities.com/gu.html

Regards, Rohit