As of 14/05/2020, 10.2 Crore Indians are reported to be using Aarogya Setu app, which is basically a contact tracing app to help with Covid-19 or novel Coronavirus related pandemic. When the app was launched, I had doubts about its effectiveness since it was not clear why people who test positive for Covid-19 will be motivated to mark themselves as infected on the app (see section later which describes: “How is a person marked COVID-19 positive?”). This was so because of reports of even doctors who were working with Covid-19 patients being harassed or facing discrimination by certain ignorant people,Read More…

In my last post on Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), I had given lot of support to them believing they deserve a chance to govern Delhi and prove their credentials, inspite of the flak coming their way both from rival political parties and some of the public.  My stance then was that a lot of the criticism was political in nature and due to holding AAP to much higher standards than other parties are held accountable to.  The main reason for these higher expectations from AAP was primarily because of lofty promises and utterances by AAP leaders themselves, but nevertheless IRead More…

After swearing-in of AAP (Aam Aadmi Party) into Delhi government, both the MSM (main stream media) and social media has been abuzz everyday with some or other news of the following kinds:

Satyam sold to Tech Mahindra.  One could not have avoided the news on TV yesterday.  I also saw Anand Mahindra speaking on the occassion.  He said it in so many words that this is a good sign that free market capitalism works.

Once upon a time Indira Gandhi gave the slogan called ‘Garibi hatao’.  It is hard to argue against that.  Recent Samajwadi party’s (SP) election manifesto has come in for criticism since it seems to be against computers.  I tried to read the manifesto myself to see what it contained.  I searched on the web and SP’s website here.  But it is not available on website either.

From news story at link here:

His comments come a day after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, during an interaction with women journalists in New Delhi, said he did not wish to have a television debate with Advani as he did not want to accord Advani the privilege of being “an alternative prime minister”.

 I am not a trained economist so I will make my arguments based on my knowledge and some healthy dose of common sense. I will assume the recent trend growth rate to be 8-9%, because 9% was around the number at which economy grew in last 3 years. For 2 years before that it was healthy above 8% rates. So a significant slowdown would be one where the growth rate becomes half of the recent trend growth rate. A 4-4.5% growth rate for FY10 would mean that we slowed down.

Index investing and allocation of capital based on PE — these were two ideas I was mulling about for few months now. Today I happened to see a website which is dedicated to research and data on both these. Here is a good food for thought on valuation based index investing:

http://www.passionsaving.com/stock-market-investing-advice.html

Specifically, read up the eighth tenet:

The eighth tenet of Valuation-Informed Indexing is that valuations matter.

It is different from normal investing advice because:

The news of GDP growing by 9.2% in Jul-Sep 06 qtr was a pleasant surprise. However, on same day there were news of rioting etc in several places in Maharastra and even other states, over Dalit issues.

MPs recently were seen trying to teach a thing or two in motivation to Indian cricket team coach Greg Chappel. Nothing stirs the masses more than proclamation about love of cricket and country, or so they thought.