Yesterday and Today [ 6th and 7th feb ], I dumped everything in the Indian Market and moved into cash since the global markets are not looking good. Greed is what killed my wealth during dot com boom and I decided to get out and dumped all positions including the futures except [ With considerable gains ] long term holdings in IT sector.
I am expecting the market to test the 5050 mark again on the nifty tomorrow [ 8th Feb ] and if that happens, I will move into trades in Nifty futures and also accumulate on the long term holdings.
On the IPO front, Wockhardt, Emaar etc., have fell flat on their face. Realestate companies valuations have come down sharply but I am not interested in taking them up since I dont believe they are fairly valued. I am not buying Emaaar or a DLF yet since these land banks do not generate any cash flow for these companies.
In Hyderabad, Commercial Realestate space is buzzing in prime areas at Rs 60-100 / sq ft per month. Its bound to cool down as new SEZ’s are quoting Rs 30 - 50 / SQ ft per month for 2009/2010 delivery.
Indian IT companies are finally cooling down on the hiring front.. its become pretty tough for resources to job hop with large raises except for the top 10% of the population. Gone are the days of asking for 30% raises, 25-50% bonuses and 100% increase for a job hop. TCS recently announced a cut in variable pay due to underperformance and newspapers are filled with stories of how IBM and TCS are trimming their workforce citing non performance. One trend I noticed is that companies are no longer worried about attrition in high paid techies.. Market is maturing and they are able to find more and more mid level talent who can do the job as well or better than the high cost senior talent.
Received a ton of email from regular readers of this blog and decided to cover most of the questions related to investments etc., through this blog post. So here I share a few moves we made. Let me know if you have any recommendations ..
On how I fared overall….. Luckily I was shielded from the drop to a large extent due to a few moves I made knowingly or unknowingly before and during my return to India
I still have upto 50% of my investments in US and the decision we made in 2006 to leave them in metals and energy before moving to India helped us get good returns in VGPMX ( Vanguard Precious Metals ) and VGENX ( Vanguard Energy fund ). Recently, Oil at $100 was too much for me, so I dumped my position in Energy and decided to sit on cash. I had enough to tap into Home Builders ETF ( ITB ) and VGSIX ( Vanguard Real Estate Fund ) and a chunk of C ( Citigroup ) at their 52 week lows during the recent pullbacks in the US market. I continue to have a high exposure to precious metals and GLD and am actively working on a plan to reduce that. What do you think? .. Should I move out of Metals now ?
I never seriously got into the Indian stock market until recently. Black tuesday was a great opportunity for me… Infosys at ~1300, Neyveli at ~100, Prithvi at ~210 and a lot more. For the first time we also picked up a few Nifty futures and made some cool cash in the short term at 5100. Right now, I am long in all my positions and have started nibling at Long Nifty Futures. We made a few long term investments in 2 Real Estate funds.. ILFS Milestone [ yield driven fund ] and Peninsula [ development focussed ]…. Also opened SIP’s for kids in BNP Paribas and UTF, and plunked a good chunk of money in Reliance Power Fund on black tuesday at a pretty decent NAV. I continue to be bullish on Energy, Infrastructure sectors of India and am expecting real earnings and returns to roll in another 2 years. At this time, I feel that IT and Banking have been oversold and I am accumulating at every available opportunity in large caps like INFY, TCS, ICICI and others like Canara Bank etc.
Did I apply for Reliance Power .. Most popular question in the last 2 weeks.. LOL!!! .. Yes, I did with the partial payment option and got an allocation of 16 shares.
Lots of questions about Hyderabad Real Estate.. Will gather the latest details and post it in the next 1 or 2 weeks. You all already know whats happening with Telangana..
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