Being Poor Helps You… Sometimes!!!

Being poor is good for your health. Yes, anyways being poor means there is no chance for you to consume extra calories. Right? That way, you consume less which in turn makes you slim if your genes won't ditch you. Therefore, for you, there is no need to go to that hi-fi gym and pay fees for using the ultra-chic equipment there. But, rich have to do this. Because their spending power buys them all sorts of unnecessary calorie rich stuff and they eat that anyways, which leads to increase in the girth of their pot size belly. Again to reduce this, they prefer to go to gym/ health care/ fitness centers, which charge them heavily to reduce their own hidden fat. How ridiculous! And, being poor, before you spend every penny, you think twice. This kind of thinking increases your alertness which in turn increases your consciousness. Rich people pay hefty fees to attend meditation classes just to incre ase their consciousness and alertness. Since most of the times, they rarely get a scenario which taxes their mind power; just to keep their mind in healthy state they are forced to attend meditation classes. Being poor, your situation itself creates such kind of environment without you paying a single penny! Howzatt!!

Society scrutinizes every action of yours, if you are poor. To avoid this, you need to consider Society and how it reacts and responds for actions of yours, for every activity you do. Most of the poor people think that life is a hell; this kind of looking at life happens only when you compare yourself with the filthy rich guys. But, just look at the way on what rich guys are spending money for. They spend most of their money on feeling good and looking good. Feeling good factor is a costly one. People, only when they can buy what they want to buy and do how they want to do, can feel good. But it is not possible for everyone, though being rich, at all times. Sometimes, being poor helps you to do what you want to do without attracting unnecessary eyeballs. And about the looking good factor, you don't need to think about that. Your situation and your purchasing power parity take cares of y our slim look. Any doubt!

In summary, sometimes, being poor helps you in more than one way. A few things, which you feel that can be possible only for rich guys, are unnecessary to lead one's life. If you are good at preventing them happening to you, then there is no need for you to be rich. Just like what we discussed above, if you control what you eat, there is no need to go to gym. Similarly, if your mind is alert and your consciousness level is high, there is no need for you to attend meditation classes, etc. After saying all the above stuff, this blog also agrees that there a few things only money can buy to further your advantage in current life, for example, just like your international MBA degree, your flying power to anywhere in this world within a few hours, etc.

The Trend of Luck

Luck has much for many, but enough for no one. It's true that everybody needs luck badly. But it is not only scarce and nobody knows when it will brace you or leave you. That is LUCK! Some people believe in luck and they feel that the things happening in their life are because of luck they have. Irrespective of the believing or not believing in luck, everyone in this world needs a bit of luck. Even Thomas Edison, who believed in science and invented so many new things for the convenience of mankind believed in luck. He himself said that genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration, which is nothing but luck.

There are so many examples in our real life regarding this luck. People, whom we know for years and who were declared dud in their professional life, have suddenly started flying in their careers. Everyone wonders how it happens. But it happens and is happening. Nobody knows for sure how luck play games with us. There is no mathematical formula to predict the lucky trends in our life. All the algorithms so far invented by mathematicians hoping that they can capture the future trend of luck, sadly explains only the past performance of luck. There are so many theories to predict the patterns of luck.

From the religion point of view, those who do good karma possess good luck. If a person does the bad karma, the percentage of luck factor goes down. Nowadays, we can see the fortune graphs of people rising and lowering just like stock market Sensex within a few seconds. As per religion, the underlying factor that causes these random and unpredictable Up and Down fortune aberrations in our life with rapid frequency is because of the LUCK percentage factor in our lives.

In summary, we can only conclude by saying that luck never gives, it only lends. And no one can make luck. It has to be given by some unknown force or factor. How and on what basis the percentage of luck will be allocated to us, nobody knows.

Best of luck!

Turnover as a Performance Indicator

While buying mutual funds, most of the investors consider turnover as one of the performance measuring indicator along with other indicators such as P/E ratio, load/no-load, investment strategy, etc. As per this blog, considering mutual fund turnover as a performance indicator is ridiculous. At most, you can consider the turnover factor as the complimentary performance indicator along with other regular performance indicators.

In a financial year, if a mutual fund shows 100% turnover means that it has replaced all of its holdings at least once in the last 12-month period. If the turnover is more than 100% means, the rate of replacement of holdings increased by more than 1 factor. There are so many things to be taken into consideration before judging why a particular fund is showing that much percentage turnover. And one more factor is that whenever a fund goes for buying/selling of holdings, it has to pay tax on every transaction. Whatever profit it is expecting to earn by buying/selling the holdings that should be more than what it pays as tax and other expenses.

A few funds do not go for huge turnovers. But that does not mean that they are so prudent and are following a profitable path. As per funds history, there are so many low turnover funds that have made huge losses by not doing trades at the right time in the market. The high turnover funds are no exceptions. If the manager of a particular fund wants to dump the holdings at the wrong time, it means that the fund lost so much money in the form of taxes. Buying/selling holdings without following right market timings will bring loss to high turnover funds.

In summary, it is always better to give less importance to the turnover as a performance indicator. Always give priority to other performance indicators and if you want consider turnover as a complimentary performance indicator rather than the main indicator.

Focused Funds

If you are sure about particular sector funds, have enough knowledge in the basics of investing in those sectors and sector fundamentals, you can go for sector fund investing and reap huge benefits. Now the stock market is UP. And it seems that this trend is going to continue irrespective of the current recession. The FIIs are pushing the market up again. And it is time for the small time investor to again start doing the investments through funds.

Sector funds may add value and double your returns at this moment. But as you all know, every coin has two faces. It is better to branch your investments in sector funds while maintaining the proportional investments in other options like Open-ended mutual funds for diversification. If the boom continuous, the sector funds may add value and returns to your portfolio; but it bursts, your diversified investment portfolio will save you from the market crash.

Sector funds have high maintenance part. They come with huge overheads. It is always better to check out how much the fund is charging under the Fund Maintenance part before jumping into the ring.

Best of Luck!

The Advantages of Internal Newsletter – A Handout

An internal newsletter targets company employees as its main audience. The periodically published newsletter is expected to talk about the employees and their achievements mainly. Birth/marriage/work/etc anniversaries relating to employees should be brought to notice through internal newsletter with colorful visuals accompanied by flowery text. Every newsletter carries the messages of company CEO/MD/etc targeting employees, company growth, and market conditions, which educate employees and give them a broader outlook about where their company stands in the present competitive market. No matter what, an internal newsletter surely serves the company in integrating employees of all roles and ranks like a united family.

All the events, small or big, that happen in the company can be highlighted through newsletters. The underlying idea of "United, we can achieve anything and everything" can be propagated using newsletter as a medium. You can conduct instant polls to know the pulse of the employees about any critical issue and publish the same in the newsletter so that all the employees could come to know the opinion of their colleagues. If you are a knowledge-based company, you can use Newsletter to drive a reading campaign among the employees.

These kinds of campaigns help employees to educate themselves about new concepts, issues, policies, etc, relating to their domain and allow them to use their newly found knowledge to design and implement new processes that can help the company to save redundant costs in the long run.

So many things happen in the daily professional life of an employee.

While solving the unexpected issues under tremendous deadline pressures, the employee uses his/her little grey cells at lightening speed and uses the hidden knowledge base acquired through in-depth practical experience gained so far. Problem solving is important but sharing others how s/he solved the problem is "more important" from the company point of view. This kind of sharing helps the company to reduce the redundant efforts in solving the similar kind of problems in future. Moreover, the company's internal newsletter is the only tool through which employees can share their unique personal work life experiences.

In summary, an internal newsletter acts as glue that binds the company with its employees by sharing their unique experiences, knowledge base, and talent. Just imagine if you can make this medium little bit interactive that forces the employee to contribute something for the newsletter, whenever it is published. By publishing the contributions of an employee along with his/her visual, the company is doing nothing but respecting the employee and at the same time letting him/her know that s/he is the valuable source for the company. This kind of appreciation and publicity makes an employee proud and increases his/her sense of belongingness to the company. This kind of belongingness in turn helps the company in retaining the crucial talent, which it requires in this heavily competitive world.

Writing Release Notes Proving to be an Enigma

Products are updated by their manufacturers following the market demands of the customers. After every updation, the manufacturer releases the new version of the product along with a Release Notes. This Release Notes talks about so many things about the product in terms of defects/bugs, enhancements, changes made to the existing features, etc. And every manufacturer tries to give precise and correct information in the Release Notes. Since there is no universal format about how to write the Release Notes, every company follows its own standards in presenting the content and layout design.

All over the world, there is a convention among the Release Notes documenters that the Release Notes should be written in Present Tense. But at the same time, all companies don't follow this rule religiously. Again, there is no consensus about how much content should be provided to the reader of the Release Notes relating to a particular topic. In companies, this decision is always taken by the Documentation Head in a subjective way. That means, whatever goes as part of the content to the reader, depends on the wish of the Documentation Head. Nobody is quite sure about the content aspect. Some companies try to write the Release Notes as a mini-guide but a few others go for providing conceptual outline for the changes done along with respective guide links, where the new content in detail has been updated. Reader can click the guide links and read the content in detail, if s/he wants. < /P>

A few documenters debate about which tense should be used in Release Notes. As per them, if you are writing the Release Notes about a defect, then the problem part should be written in Past tense and the Solution should be written in the Present Tense. But, all over the world, documenters insist on writing all the Release Notes in Present Tense. A few others write in whatever tense they feel convenient; these guys argument is that they are mainly targeting the reader understanding aspect. Therefore, the stress is not upon the tense and sentence structure part but on the readability part.

In summary, how to write a proper Release Notes is proving to be a mystery for the new writer. Since the writer's content is always at the mercy of the Content Reviewer, there is much not scope on the part of the writer regarding how much content should be provided to the reader. Unfortunately, there is not much content available in the Net relating to the Release Notes.

Rule Creation

Sticking to said rules is one thing and creating new rules is altogether a different job. It is not possible for a person, who is a strict follower of existing rules, to think creatively and design new rules. His /her mind is already disciplined to follow those existing rules and creating something new is treated as a crime. Nevertheless, rule-benders exist everywhere. These guys /gals always are in a lookout for excuses so that they do not follow the said rules. If they are successful, then they feel that they have achieved victory.

Rule creation is an interesting job compared to following the existing rules in a disciplined manner. During rules creation, one has to think about all the target audiences and their psychologies. Everything has to be taken into consideration; otherwise it will be difficult to make people to follow the created rules. On the whole, the created rule should provide leverage to the follower and should not take way the mostly guarded personal space of the follower. Any rule which does not follow these rules will be broken by the followers no matter what how much good it does for them, if followed.

In summary, rules should be there and have to be followed. Creating rules is for bringing orderliness in the place wherever they are implemented. Nevertheless, rule-breakers/ benders are there everywhere and it is quite a fun to watch them doing that. However, neatly designed rules, keeping everyone in consideration, do not face resistance among the followers.