A few quotes from my article ‘The two-headed Goliath — Mutual Funds and their distributors’ in The Ken in 2019. Quotes by Sanjiv Shah (Co-founder of Benchmark Mutual Fund), Monika Halan (a member of Sebi’s Advisory Committee on MFs and Consulting Editor at Mint), Sandeep Parekh (a member of Sebi’s Advisory Committee on MFs and Managing Partner at Finsec Law Advisors), Professor Renuka Sane (National Institute of Public Finance and Policy in Delhi) and Kaustubh Belapurkar (director of fund research at Morningstar) etc
Posted on LinkedIn in March 2024
Conflict of interest drives some RIAs to say that being frugal is not essential to 'have enough for retirement'
Posted on LinkedIn in January 2024
The 8 most surprising stories in the Financial Planning profession in India
Posted on LinkedIn in December 2023
Lessons from Charlie Munger -- Inverting provides the solutions to the hardest problems
Posted on LinkedIn in November 2023
5 years back, I became the first SEBI RIA in India to recommend only Passive Index funds. Today, S&P’s SPIVA report showed that, since then, the typical investor in Active Largecap Mutual Funds is 6% poorer than the investor in the equivalent Nifty 50 Index Fund
Posted on LinkedIn in October 2023
William Sharpe (one of my two personal finance heroes) vs People who do not study / understand finance
Posted on LinkedIn in July 2023
The composition of the 918 SEBI Registered Investment Advisers (RIAs) in India
Posted on LinkedIn in July 2023
Subjectively, the domestic best equity product is a Nifty 50 Index Fund (Direct Plan – Growth option), else then, the most actively traded Nifty 50 ETF
Posted on LinkedIn on 20th April 2023
Customers have lost $ 1 trillion due to high fees of US Active Mutual Funds, over the last 30 years. This is one of the reasons why HourlyFee.org refuses to list RIAs in the US, India, Australia etc that prefer to recommend Active MFs
Posted on LinkedIn in April 2023
Results of the false claim that 'Financial Planning & Investing is just Common Sense'
Posted on LinkedIn in December 2022
India Active MF fees are > 10,000% of the Alpha
Posted on LinkedIn in December 2022
Salaries of top Active MF managers: Further proof for my earlier article in Mint: Emotional arguments against Index Funds -- The social proof argument
Posted on LinkedIn in December 2022
My article in Business Standard in December 2021: "Bitcoin mania: ...Independent of the value of Bitcoin, crypto exchanges in many countries have disappeared, taking with them the Bitcoins of retail investors"
Posted on LinkedIn in November 2022
The importance of this LinkedIn poll question and the results is that it explains that most people who engage with an RIA pay fees of 1% per annum of their Net Worth to an RIA because they do not realize that they are giving away 26% of their Net Worth over 30 years
Posted on LinkedIn in November 2022
The article about Allan Roth that drove me to quit my 12-year career as a Private Equity investor and become the 3rd Hourly-Fee Financial Planner in the world and the 1st Hourly-Fee Financial Planner in India in 2018
Posted on LinkedIn in October 2022
Various RIA fee models from the point of view of the Client and the RIA: Hence clients should engage with Hourly-Fee RIAs or the minority of Fixed-Fee RIAs who put in 10+ hours of effort per new client in a year
Posted on LinkedIn in September 2022
Benjamin Graham recommending the concept of a Passive Index Fund, 13 years before it became available to the public in the US in 1976
Posted on LinkedIn in August 2022
Clients should use the Direct Plan of MFs and avoid commissions by investing via mfcentral which is a free government-mandated website
Posted on LinkedIn in August 2022
The secret sauce of Active Mutual Funds in India... Extracting hidden fees of 1% per annum from the 99.999% of the population that is financially semi-literate
Posted on LinkedIn in August 2022
An illustration of how Hourly-Fee / Fixed-Fee works for 60-year-old clients with a net worth of Rs 1-100 cr
Posted on LinkedIn in July 2022
Top questions that clients ask competent Hourly-Fee (else then, Fixed-Fee) SEBI Registered Investment Advisers (RIAs)
Posted on LinkedIn in July 2022
5 ways in which SEBI RIA regulations protect clients of Individual RIAs
Posted on LinkedIn in July 2022
An RIA / Financial Planner with a very high revenue, almost definitely lacks integrity
Posted on LinkedIn in July 2022
We can become better investors by putting in more effort into studying Finance & Investing
Posted on LinkedIn in July 2022
Input the number of hours of phone discussions with any Fixed-Fee RIA (in India) into this table below and deduce whether the approach is suitable for you
Posted on LinkedIn in July 2022
Active MFs are also harmful because they increase your Financial Planning & Investment Advice fees 50 times over RIAs that recommend Passive Index Funds
Posted on LinkedIn in June 2022
Two of the ‘Manias of 2021’, that I pointed out 6 months back [in Business Standard], seem to be unravelling
Posted on LinkedIn in June 2022
If an entrepreneur decides that he would not like to con his clients, then he will earn much less
Posted on the IIM Bangalore Alumni magazine in April 2022
5 ways in which Active Mutual Funds lead to Irrational Financial Planning
Posted on LinkedIn in April 2022
Why there is not even one good book about Financial Planning in India
Posted on LinkedIn in April 2022
How much should a 60 year old couple ideally spend on SEBI RIA fees in a year, based on their net worth?
Posted on LinkedIn in February 2022
Best and Worst practices of Financial Planners + SEBI Registered Investment Advisers in India
Posted on LinkedIn in February 2022
US NRIs can find an Hourly-Fee Financial Planner on HourlyFee.org
Posted on FreeFinCal in January 2022; Link to the site HourlyFee.org
Ten secrets that Dalal Street does not want you to know
Posted on LinkedIn in November 2021; Also cached on Facebook
I am not aware of even one PMS manager in India with a fair fee structure. They all charge fees even if they do not really beat the index... By definition, there are precisely zero Active Mutual Fund managers in India with a fair fee structure..
Posted on LinkedIn in October 2021
There are only 25 Financial Planning Professionals in India. The rest are all businessmen. These are 10 simple steps to select a Financial Planning Professional to engage with
Posted on LinkedIn in October 2021
Active MF Managers tell themselves that they are at least not as bad as Registered Investment Advisers (RIAs) that charge 0.75 – 1.5% p.a. of Assets Under Management (AUM). At least the Active MF Managers don’t have to look their clients in the eye while conning them. 0.75 – 1.5% p.a. of AUM RIAs tell themselves that they are at least not as bad as...
Posted on LinkedIn in October 2021
Warren Buffett calls Charlie Munger the wisest investor in the world. And Charlie Munger says that “[Bitcoin / crypto] is disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization… I don't welcome a currency that's so useful to kidnappers and extortionists”. Unfortunately, 15 million (1.5 crore) Indians have decided not to listen to the wisest investors in the world. And they have instead decided to believe Influencers who do not disclose that they are getting paid by crypto exchanges to push crypto.
This is naturally not a forecast about the price of any cryptocurrency because (a) no one can predict how long it takes for an insane crowd to regain its sanity and (b) the crowd could always become even more insane before it regains its sanity.
Posted on LinkedIn on 8th September 2021
There are only two Financial Planners & SEBI Registered Investment Advisers (RIAs) in India who explicitly disclose their hourly fees...One reason why there are only two such RIAs in India is that the hourly fee that the client sees appears high. While the hourly fee that the RIA gets is very low. Based on the model of the specific RIA, the hourly fee that the RIA gets is between one-sixth and one-tenth of the hourly fee that the client sees...India is stuck in a bad and persistent equilibrium where any RIA who is transparent about his / her hourly fees will suffer a penalty for the transparency...clients only thinking about total fees and not hourly fees drives many RIAs to focus primarily on minimizing the typically invisible number of hours of effort per client i.e. a race to the bottom...As a very tiny step towards solving this chicken-and-egg problem in India, I hope to update this post as and when I become aware of new information
Posted on LinkedIn in July 2021
SEBI bats for individual investors -- But ‘buyer beware’ will always be true
Posted on FreeFinCal in July 2020
The Boglehead approach to investment advice depends on Fixed-Fee-Only [Advice-Only] Financial Planning. And Fixed-Fee-Only [Advice-Only] Financial Planning will depend on the Boglehead approach to investing. Since Fixed-Fee-Only [Advice-Only] Financial Planning is still nascent in India, this link is not apparent. But it is very apparent in the US and it will become more apparent in India also...I was the first RIA and currently the only RIA to recommend only index funds in the Boglehead approach to index funds both for Equity MFs and Debt MFs (there may be others who claim that they can generate alpha using index funds but that is just active investing while disguising it as passive investing)...36% (4 out of 11) of these [established Fee-Only (Advice-Only)] RIAs recommend index funds to varying degrees. I expect that in a few years, more than half of these RIAs will primarily recommend index funds.
Posted on FreeFinCal in January 2020
My (and a few other people's) tribute to Jack Bogle (and CB Bhave)
Posted on IndexHeads in January 2020
Should I invest in index funds in India? Yes, because Indian active mutual funds (as a whole) do not beat the index
Posted on Quora in March 2019
Why it is important to rely only on the professional analysis that is put together by S&P in its S&P Indices Versus Active Funds (SPIVA) reports for India. The SPIVA report adjusts for poor performing mutual funds that shut down etc. The SPIVA report shows that there is no proof that Indian active mutual funds (as a whole) beat the index
Posted on LinkedIn in February 2019