naveegator.in

Author: Naveen

  • Why it costs India so little to reach the Moon and Mars

    Pallava Bagla describing how ISRO manages to keep the costs low.

    At the moment, he says, India uses small rocket launchers because they don’t have anything stronger. But that means India’s spacecraft take much longer to reach their destination.

    So, when Chandrayaan-3 was launched, it orbited the Earth several times before it was sling-shot into the lunar orbit, where it went around the Moon a few times before landing. On the other hand, Russia’s Luna-25 escaped the Earth’s gravity quickly riding a powerful Soyuz rocket.

    “We used Mother Earth’s gravity to nudge us to the Moon. It took us weeks and a lot of resourceful planning. Isro has mastered this and done it successfully so many times.”

    — Why it costs India so little to reach the Moon and Mars

  • The good enough trap

    Let’s say you’re a student and you use ChatGPT to write your essays for you. Give it the right prompts and it will produce pieces that are good enough to get the grade you need. That seems like a win: it saves you time and effort, presuming your tutors don’t notice or don’t care. Maybe you get through the whole of university this way. But be wary of this equilibrium. Over the longer term, you will be stunting the growth of your own mind. The struggle of turning inchoate thought into readable sentences and paragraphs is a powerful exercise for the brain. It’s how you get better at thinking. It is thinking.

    — The Good Enough Trap

  • iPhone shortcut to alert on percentage increase/decrease in stock prices

    There are several tools available that can send alerts for stock price or percentage movements, but most high-quality ones come with a cost. To address this, I created an iPhone shortcut that polls the Yahoo Finance API to monitor price changes compared to the previous day’s closing price. This shortcut alerts users when the price changes by more than 3%, 5%, or 10% in either direction.

    You can copy this shortcut and use automation to run it multiple times during the weekday to keep an eye on your favourite stocks.

    Steps

    1. Go to https://finance.yahoo.com and search for your favourite stock, mutual fund or index.
    2. Copy the symbol. For e.g. DABUR.NS is symbol for Dabur, ^NSEI is symbol for Nifty 50.
    3. Open the shortcut and add your symbol and name in the format <SYMBOL>|Name.
    4. Save the shortcut.

    There are downsides to this approach. Because you are polling Yahoo Finance API at intervals, the alerts are not instantaneous and you will require an internet connection.

    Download the shortcut from this link https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/d6ddf634ab6f46f4a28a92c7dace2312.

  • Four years as shareholder of SRF

    Four years as shareholder of SRF

    I started invest in SRF four years back, but it is only in the 2023-24 fiscal year that I have significantly increased my investment in SRF. My investment is still very young.

    During the initial days my investment in SRF was comfortably beating Nifty Next 50 Index. But as I decided to increase my investment and SRF’s share price going sideways, I am now getting handsomely beaten by Nefty Next 50 index. But I am in this for the long haul. Let’s see how long I can go!

    Investment through the years

    Returns

    Profit

    XIRR

    Related reading:

  • Seven years as shareholder of ITC

    Seven years as shareholder of ITC

    When I first invested in ITC, I was just testing the waters of equity investing. Over time, I realized that ITC is a rather polarizing stock. On one side, there are the die-hard fans who swear by it, and on the other, there are the critics who never miss a chance to poke fun at it. And, to be honest, some of those jokes are pretty clever. Don’t believe me? Just Google ‘ITC meme’ and get ready for a good laugh.

    In the early years, my investments in ITC were quite small. It wasn’t until the stock began performing well that I significantly increased my investment. Looking back, I realize I should have done the opposite!

    The dividends remain strong, though they’ve dipped slightly compared to the initial years. Currently, I’m outperforming the Nifty 50’s XIRR by just 1%.

    ITC’s announcement of demerging its hotels business hasn’t had any noticeable impact yet, either positive or negative. We’ll have to wait and see what happens when the demerger actually takes place.

    Investment through the years

    Returns

    Profit

    XIRR

    Related reading:

  • Limiting factor in India’s equity investing

    So if I want higher returns, now this is where it flips away from being me and it’s no longer my characteristic, but I do want higher returns for higher risk, then you choose which instrument has actually given you those higher risk. And I think by and large, this has become a function of size and manager affluence. So the size question would be that as you grow bigger and bigger in size, the number of companies that you can buy into in India becomes smaller and smaller.

    So now the biggest Indian mutual fund is nearly 80,000 crores.

    Oh, they hit 80,000 crores?

    70 plus thousand crores. So at that rate, at the 80,000 crore rate, even if I have 100 companies, I don’t think he has 100 companies, he has 50 or 60 companies. But you’re still buying more, nearly a thousand crores per company.

    Now the number of companies that you can afford to buy a thousand crores for is now countable in the total number of companies you actually have. The 100th company in India today has a 1 lakh crore market cap. That means if you bought 100 companies with a thousand crores each then the 100th company you would own 1% off.

    So effectively, you’re owning more and more percentage of… So what this happens is you just have to spread yourself too thin. You can’t meaningfully take large bets.

    And until Indian market cap of Indian companies reaches a much higher degree, you’re limited by the growth of… The size of the mutual fund is greater than the growth of market cap of all the companies. So in the sense that that becomes your limiting factor.

    — Capitalmind Podcast: Mutual Funds, PMS, or AIF: Choosing the Right Investment Vehicle for Your Needs

  • Six years as shareholder of Havells

    Investment through the years

    Returns

    Profit

    XIRR

    Related reading:

  • Historical stock composition of Nifty 50 and Nifty Next 50

    I was trying to understand the historical stock composition of indices like Nifty50. I tried searching the data on the internet but couldn’t find anything. After posting my query on multiple forums, I got a direction from my query on Money StackExchange.

    NSE provides the historical stock composition on Nifty 50 and Nifty Next 50 indices on Nifty Indices by selecting “Archive of Daily/Monthly Reports → Market Capitalisation, Weightage, Beta for Nifty 50 and Nifty Next 50”. However, the data is shared month-wise and not consolidated. I wrote some quick and dirty utilities to scrape off data and consolidated it in a Google Sheet.

    In the ‘Nifty 50’ and ‘Nifty Next 50’ worksheets, you can see when a stock entered and exited the index (e.g., Axis Bank joined the Nifty 50 in March 2009). The ‘Nifty 50 Data’ and ‘Nifty Next 50 Data’ worksheets contain the raw data downloaded from the website.

    NSE Index Data Google Sheet

  • Seven years as shareholder of VIP Industries

    Seven years as shareholder of VIP Industries

    Seven years ago, when I first invested in VIP Industries, I had no idea what kind of journey I was embarking on. Although VIP Industries represents less than 2% of my direct equity portfolio— even less when considering mutual funds—it has taught me valuable lessons about investing.

    First, volatility. We’ve all heard countless times that stocks are volatile, but nothing prepared me for how true that would be with VIP Industries during the Covid pandemic. In just one month, my investment went from a 170% profit to a 20% loss.

    Second, beginner’s luck versus long-term reality. When you start investing, you often experience beginner’s luck, where your investments outperform your expectations. VIP Industries was no exception, delivering impressive returns for the first two and a half years. Even the post-Covid recovery was remarkable, with an XIRR of 40%. But then, reality sets in—a reality where the former Managing Director leaves for a primary competitor, causing a shift in the industry.

    Investment through the years

    Returns

    Profit percent

    XIRR

    Related reading:

  • Forecasting

    Wow!

    Every forecast takes a number from today and multiplies it by a story about tomorrow.

    — A Number From Today and A Story About Tomorrow