21 Nov
I think that the equity markets have topped out and have cashed out all my equity and equity mutual fund holdings, and am thus sitting on a pile of cash, which I’m looking to invest in debt. Happened to check out the websites of a few banks where I hold accounts and what caught my [...]
Posted in banking, finance by: skimpy
4 Comments
31 Oct
The basic idea of this post is that interpersonal relationships (not necessarily romantic) need to be treated as balance sheets and not as P&L statements, i.e. one should always judge based on the overall all-time aggregate rather than the last incremental change in situation.
Just to give you a quick overview of accounting, the annual statement [...]
Posted in arbit, business, economics, finance, fundaes, randomness, relationships by: skimpy
2 Comments
26 Oct
When my mother died last Friday, the doctors at the hospital where she had been for three weeks didn’t have a diagnosis. When my father died two and a half years back, the hospital where he’d spent three months didn’t have a diagnosis. In both cases, there were several hypotheses, but none of them were [...]
Posted in business, finance, fundaes, investment banking, personal by: skimpy
20 Comments
10 Oct
Any of you remember this movie called “My Best Friend’s Wedding”? If you don’t, here is a brief description of the plot. Julia Roberts and Dermot Mulroney (had to look up imdb to remember his name) have this agreement that if they are both single as of her 28th birthday, they will get married to [...]
Posted in arbit, finance, fundaes, investment banking, relationships by: skimpy
3 Comments
16 Jun
Today’s Business Standard reports that ESPNStar and their advertisers stand to lose significantly following India’s early exit from the T20 World Cup. However, the situation now is significantly better off than in the 2007 World Cup where India didn’t even enter the super8. Back then, India had played a grand total of 3 matches out [...]
Posted in business, cricket, finance, sport by: skimpy
2 Comments
03 Jun
I first got this idea during some assignment submission at IIT. One guy in our class, known to be a perfectionist is supposed to have put in 250 hours of effort into a certain course project. He is known to have got 20 out of 20 in this project. I put in about 25 hours [...]
Posted in IIT, arbit, education, finance, fundaes, work by: skimpy
2 Comments
14 Apr
I don’t have sources here but enough people have cribbed that nowadays too many MBAs are going into finance, and banking, and not too many of them get into “real management” jobs, which is what the country/the world desires them to get into. I clearly remmeber a Mint column on this topic by Govind Sankaranarayanan. [...]
Posted in IIM, arbit, education, finance, fundaes by: skimpy
18 Comments
09 Apr
No, unlike the previous post, this has nothing to do about food. It is about Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s recent op-ed in the Financial Times where he gives his “recipe” for saving the global financial system. Two of my favourite bloggers Arnold Kling and Felix Salmon have responded to it, but I didn’t like either so [...]
Posted in banking, business, economics, finance, fundaes, investment banking, randomness by: skimpy
6 Comments
25 Mar
A blog post earlier this month on Econlog finished off with a very strong quote by Friedrich Hayek:
One of the forms of private property that people cherish most is their ideas. If you convince them that their ideas are wrong, you have caused them to suffer a capital loss.
I ended up liking it so much [...]
Posted in arbit, economics, finance, fundaes, work by: skimpy
7 Comments
22 Mar
If you look at my IIMB grade card, one subject stands out. It is one of the two Cs that I have on the card, and the other was in a “dead rubber” (5th/6th term where grades didn’t matter for placements). This C was in introductory marketing management. Where the major compoenent was a group [...]
Posted in IIM, business, finance, fundaes, personal, relationships by: skimpy
12 Comments