Last year I blogged about three years with Motilal Oswal Long Term Equity Fund. I continue to hold this fund and continue to be in dilemma that should I completely exit it. Now that all my units in this fund have completed 3 years, I can exit this fund. The world has changed in last one year—Covid is (nearly) gone, war has started and much more. I did not make any further investments in this fund.
I use Apple Mail to manage emails from multiple accounts because of it no-frills UI which follows the macOS design language to the letter. But then the app is so bare bones that it does not even have a simple reminder option for email to follow up—at least not in a very intuitive way.
To add a reminder on your email you need to use the Reminders app from Apple. See how Apple tries to hook you up in their ecosystem. Follow the below steps.
1. In your Apple Mail app select the subject of your email and right click. This is a key step so that the reminder opens up the email that you want to follow up on. Click on Share > Reminders. On iOS you follow the same steps—select the Subject, tap on Share and select the Reminders app.
2. You will get a dialog similar the one below where you can set the date and time for reminder. Note the Mail icon being shown in the dialog. Click on the Add button.
3. The reminder should be added in the Reminders app with the Mail icon. Tapping on it will redirect you to the email.
Four years ago after my thorough research—which I can’t remember now—I decided to invest in Hatsun Agro. I knew very little of the company when I started investing in it, apart from that it was in the dairy industry. Overtime I learned that it has been in existence for 50 years and 20 mutual funds had invested in it.
I think the first time I bought Hatsun Agro, it was at its peak. Because I did not see any profits for a good two and a half years. It was only after the announcement of company giving bonus on Dec 2020 the share price started to move upward. I decided I will accumulate more and made the same mistake of buying the share at its peak the second and third time. The share price has been been in a correction mode for last six months and eroded a good chunk of my profits. For a fleeting moment—Oct 2021—I was kicking index funds behind before crashing and burning.
Hatsun Agro has been relatively consistent with its dividends—no complaints there—and my dividend yield at cost has improved to 1.1% after bonus issue.
After trying my hands with Low Risk – Smart Beta, I decided to get serious with smallcase. I chose Weekend Investing’s Mi_NNF10 Momentum smallcase. There were three primary reasons for selecting it.
I have considered below components in my Amount Invested.
For the first six months I did not see any profit. After that the profits have improved and even during the current market correction the smallcase seems to be holding on.
I have renewed my yearly subscription to this smallcase. Let’s see how it performs in its second year for me.
Last year I blogged about completing four years as shareholder of IDFC First Bank. I continue to stay invested in this company and have poured in more of my hard earned money. And as with previous analysis, IDFC First Bank continues to underperform for me after half a decade. But hey, I am in this for long term. I just hope I don’t say the same thing after a decade.
Last year I had hoped that IDFC First Bank will turn into HDFC Bank. This year—with the number of spam calls from IDFC First Bank rivalling that of Bajaj Finance—I am hoping that it becomes Bajaj Finance!
Below are my key observations.
A couple of years ago I listened to Anupam Gupta’s Paisa Vaisa podcast explaining something called as smallcase. Intrigued, I continued to learn more on it. And around 3 years back I decided to dip my toes in the water by subscribing to Low Risk – Smart Beta. Here is what I learned.
I should not have dipped my toe in this water. I should have dipped my entire foot. Let me explain. A smallcase needs regular rebalancing i.e. every now and then you are going to sell some of your stocks and buy new ones. As I was just dipping my toe in water, I had invested minimum amount required. And rebalancing of smallcase every 3 months meant that most of the time I was selling 1 stock and buying 1 stock. Yes, just 1 stock. That also meant paying brokerage and taxes on every transaction. That in turn meant I was negating whatever minuscule gains I had made before rebalancing.
After 3 rebalances, I decided to ignore the rebalance notification. As the stocks in the smallcase were reputed companies, I was okay to hold them for long term. Here’s how it has performed for me.
Psst! If you want to subscribe to a smallcase, go for discount brokers (like Zerodha). You will save big while rebalancing.
For the first year, I diligently rebalanced my smallcase (by selling 1 stock and buying 1 stock). It was towards the end of 2019 I realised my stupidity and stopped rebalancing. Since then, post COVID-19 market crash the worth on my investment has steadily risen.
If you notice Amount Invested (red line), every now and then it goes down ever so slightly. That is the dividend amount that I am reducing from my Amount Invested.
As you can see, profit has been made only after COVID-19 pandemic market crash. As far XIRR goes, the smallcase has given 16%. And I am happy with that—considering I was dipping my toe in water.
Four years ago while brushing my teeth with Colgate, I decided to invest in it. I am using Colgate for more than three decades now, so the company should survive at least few more years. And here we are four years later, Colgate is still there and so is the money that I invested in it. Are the returns great? No. Are the returns good? Still No. Are the return average? Sadly, yes. But hey, it could be worse considering the research that I did here.
Over these four years I invested 8 times in Colgate. The returns across these four years have largely been positive except during the COVID-19 pandemic market crash. But since last couple of months the share price has tumbled erasing a good chunk of my (unrealised) profits.
On the other hand, 1%+ dividend yield at cost is much better than the dividends that is given by other companies.
XIRR across these four years has been around 15% and I was happy with that. It was during the last 3 months that the share price price has tumbled putting my XIRR at 5%.
NOTE: XIRR for initial months varies wildly and is not useful for any analysis. But once the investments complete minimum of 1 year, XIRR gives me a much better picture. So I calculate ‘XIRR (>1 year)’ which calculates XIRR only for the investments which have completed minimum of one year while ‘XIRR’ continues to calculate for all the investments irrespective of how much time has been completed. There are some periods where ‘XIRR’ and ‘XIRR (>1 year)’ calculate to the same amount as for that time all my investments had completed minimum of 1 year.
Four years ago I subscribed to the HDFC Life Insurance IPO. And I got lucky! I got the minimum quantity of 50 shares with HDFC Life Insurance opening up with a nice 17% gain on first day. After that I bought the share 3 more times. This is how it has performed over these four years.
Over these four years the worth of my investment has never fallen below my invested amount. The dividend yield at cost for me has been around 0.5% with the company declaring dividends thrice over four years. They skipped the COVID-19 year like other companies.
The V-shape that you see between the period Jan-2020 to Jul-2020 is the COVID-19 market crash and its subsequent recovery. I do regret not being able to buy more during the crash. But the recovery was so quick that I had little to no funds to invest.
NOTE: XIRR for initial months varies wildly and is not useful for any analysis. But once the investments complete minimum of 1 year, XIRR gives me a much better picture. So I calculate ‘XIRR (>1 year)’ which calculates XIRR only for the investments which have completed minimum of one year while ‘XIRR’ continues to calculate for all the investments irrespective of how much time has been completed. There are some periods where ‘XIRR’ and ‘XIRR (>1 year)’ calculate to the same amount as for that time all my investments had completed minimum of 1 year.
Makes me wonder, if some day electric cars rule over the Indian car market what will happen to all the tax revenue from petrol and diesel?
When it comes to sales of electric cars, Norway is in a league of its own. In September, battery-powered electric vehicles accounted for 77.5 percent of all new cars sold. That figure makes Norway a world leader by a long way—leapfrogging over the UK, where 15 percent of new car sales were electric as of October, and the US, where that number is just 2.6 percent.
Norway’s electric dream has been credited to a series of tax breaks and other financial carrots that mean brands like Tesla can compete on price with combustion engines. But these incentives—and their success—have created a unique predicament: Norway is running out of dirty cars to tax.
Norway Is Running Out of Gas-Guzzling Cars to Tax
A wonderful article by Walter Murch on how the birds came to have super-efficient lungs.
The answer seems to be that bar-headed geese, like all birds—hummingbirds, ostriches, pigeons—have super-efficient lungs. It makes our lungs—and the lungs of all mammals—look primitive. I’m sure when birds get together they gossip about how pathetic our lungs are!
All mammals, including us, breathe in through the same opening that we breathe out. Can you imagine if our digestive system worked the same way? What if the food we put in our mouths, after digestion, came out the same way? It doesn’t bear thinking about! Luckily, for digestion, we have a separate in and out. And that’s what the birds have with their lungs: an in point and an out point. They also have air sacs and hollow spaces in their bones. When they breathe in, half of the good air (with oxygen) goes into these hollow spaces, and the other half goes into their lungs through the rear entrance. When they breathe out, the good air that has been stored in the hollow places now also goes into their lungs through that rear entrance, and the bad air (carbon dioxide and water vapor) is pushed out the front exit. So it doesn’t matter whether birds are breathing in or out: Good air is always going in one direction through their lungs, pushing all the bad air out ahead of it.
How did birds get such great lungs? They inherited them from dinosaurs. Birds are dinosaurs! When I was growing up in the 1940s, there was a category in biology called Aves, which meant birds. But scientists have now folded Aves into a category called Dinosauria, and those dinosauria, like pigeons and seagulls and geese, are flying all around us today. If you want to know what a dinosaur probably tasted like, eat some chicken!
Why Birds Can Fly Over Mount Everest