NIFTY50 beats DOWJONES in last decade : NIFTY comparison to DJIA 2004 to 2014

Nowadays the buzz word in equity investing seems to be diversification and globalization.  Every news channel that you see will be awash with pundits describing the benefits of diversification, and exposure to international equity as one such avenue.  But this is something I wanted to check out and figure for myself.  The best way would be to simply compare the performance of the Indian stock markets vs a major international stock index, and the obvious one that comes to mind is the US stock market.  So I set out to compare the performance of the NIFTY 50 as a proxy for the Indian stock markets, vs the DOW JONES Index, which is a proxy for the US stock markets.  This analysis is useful in 2 scenarios.  There are several NRI investors who struggle to decide whether to keep their investments in the US, or deploy them back home in India.  There are also India based investors wanting to get a piece of the US market action in the name of diversification.  Both these investors are looking for the same thing, which is the best returns on their investment Dollars or Rupees.  In this article I have attempted a simple comparison of the US and Indian stock markets, by contrasting the NIFTY vs the DOW.  The results certainly surprised me!  Why don't you take a look for yourself here.

Am I Earning Enough

Being a salaried employee, the bulk of my dreams of an early retirement are funded by what my corporate employer chooses to pay me every year.  My fortunes are inextricably linked to my salary.  I have tried over the years to build a secondary stream of passive income, but progress has been slow on this front.  So I figured I should take a minute to get a handle on my salary progressing over my working career. It took me a while to dig up the data, since this is something I have never really separately tracked. I have always focused on my networth, and my savings rate, but never really looked at how much my income is, and more importantly, how it has been increasing/decreasing over the years.

NSDL CAS : One stop window into all your investments

One of the most common challenges of the early retirement or personal finance enthusiast, is the ability to meaningfully track all their investments from a common platform.  The investment avenues are so diverse in India, that typically your investment universe is spread across everything from your friendly neighborhood banks, online brokerage portals, MF AMCs, online portfolio management tools, your own local excel spreadsheets, insurance agents, relationship managers, post-offices, and the list can go on and on.  How does one really manage all of these different avenues, and more importantly is there a single platform from which you can access and view all your different investments?  If this sounds familiar, read on.

Quotes : Do It NOW!

A good plan violently executed NOW is better than a perfect plan executed next week

-George S Patton

Quotes : Millionaire Next Door

Whatever your income, always live below your means

-  Thomas J. Stanley, The Millionaire Next Door

How to Retire Early : Equities, Equities and More Equities

If you have been reading early retirement blogs regularly, and researching the web and books for strategies to achieve your early retirement goals, you must be very clear in your mind that saving a large enough corpus for early retirement is a very daunting task.  

In India, and I am sure pretty much everywhere else in the world, saving enough just for a regular retirement wherein you retire by 60 years, is tough enough.  Amassing wealth at a faster pace, so you can accumulate a sufficient corpus at a younger age, and leave the daily grind of the corporate work force, is a mind boggling challenge.  

I have written before on this blog about the need to save as much as possible, as a percentage of your take home income.  However, I am also looking for ways to increase my return on investments, to accelerate the rate at which my total corpus grows.  

Networth Calculator

Earlier I had posted a web article, describing how much net worth you should have accumulated by a certain age, with a table showing how you can calculate your expected networth, based on a few assumptions that you can make.  Here is a online calculator that you can use to estimate your expected networth with any starting assumptions you want to make, suitable to your personal situation.

Here are some recommendations on how to use this online calculator