In Hyderabad

 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..