Category Archives: Due Diligence

Deductions – Aren’t They Making You Sick?

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The human being likes it easy.

Well, most do.

That’s why, many of us like to give out our hard-earned savings to be managed by a third party.

We like to believe that our full energies are required for our mainstream profession. We don’t want to get into the nitty-gritty of managing our savings.

In fact, we want to know as little as possible about the way our savings are being managed by the third party.

The third party starts from where we left off, and takes it to the Goldman level. Believe me, today, a Goldman attitude is the norm. Wealth manangers are looking to make the maximum out of you. They talk more about ways to squeeze fees out of you than about ways to make your corpus grow.

Chew this, digest it, and when you’re ready, please say the magic words.

All right, all right, I’ll spell it out for you. The magic words are “Enough! Enough! I’ve had enough of fee deductions! I’m ready to manage my savings on my own!”

See, that was simple. Say it, and then do it.

Deductions are a pain. Many strike behind your back. You feel you didn’t know about them. Well, it was all in the fine-print. Did you bother to read the fine-print?

Who reads fine-prints? Wealth managers know the answer to this question. That’s why, all the nasty stuff is put in fine-print. The sugary stuff is saved for the pitch. When an investment is pitched to you, it sounds so sweet, that you feel like jumping into it. Careful. The people, who have prepared the pitch campaign, have spent many days deliberating over it. The person pitching the investment to you has spent long hours practising the pitch. No jumping please. Tell the pitcher to buzz off, and that you’ll call him or her back if and when you’re ready for the investment. Meanwhile, read the fine-print.

This is when the pitcher takes out his last and most deadly weapon. “But Sir, deadline is till tomorrow noon,” is the sound of this time-weapon. Earlier failings have prepared you for this. You have learnt to ignore the time-bomb. You are going to take your own sweet time to decide. It’s your hard-earned money, and the least it deserves is thorough due diligence on your part.

Meanwhile, you’re reading the fine-print. You’re realizing that the game is stacked against you. There’s a monthly mortality / cover deduction in the insurance policy being pitched to you. Then there are administration charges to cover day to day expenses. Don’t forget fund management charges. Now, there’s probably even some adjustment for short-term capital gains tax. Also, there are upfront deductions on the first few premiums, pretty sizable ones. There’s a 3 to 5 year lock-in. Switching charges. Hey, where was all this in the pitch? And remember when they spoke about how you could take a loan against your policy. Did you hear anything about the huge loan disbursement fee, or whether or not service-tax and education cess charges would be passed on to you? And may heaven help you find solace if you surrender your policy prematurely. Premature surrender charges were conceived by the descendants of Shylock himself. Such surrender charges carve out chunks of flesh from your investment’s corpus.

For the company pitching the investment to you, accountability has been made very easy. All they have to do is to deduct all background charges from the daily NAV, and then publish the NAV after these deductions. You will be sent an yearly statement (if you don’t ask for a statement sooner), where stuff like mortality and cover charges will be shown in small-print. Take all this into account while calculating your returns on the investment, before wondering where a chunk of your profits went.

That’s a common scenario in unit-linked insurance policies. The market goes up so much, but your ULIP only yields you this much. Where did the rest go? To answer this question partly, look at the deductions.

The classic counter-argument (made by fund-managers) to above discrepancy is this. The market went up so much, fine, but the scrips in the mutual funds, to which the policy was linked, didn’t move up so much.

Maybe, maybe not. To find out, you’ll have to dig even deeper. Most of us don’t want so much hassle, and we resign ourselves to the dictates of the investment’s deduction policies.

Meanwhile, here’s an alternative. Learn. Study. One hour a day. Your savings deserve this from you. Every learning resource is available online, and most of what is available is free of cost. Make use of this unique opportunity. In a few years you’ll be savvy enough to manage your own funds. Thus, you’ll save yourself from the scourge of deductions.

Connect to market forces by playing with your own money, yourself. Learning solidifies in your system when you put your own money on the line. Play small for many years. Make all your mistakes in these years. Get mistakes out of the way. Learn from them. Don’t repeat them.

Soon, you’ll realize that you are ready to scale it up. Your system will sense that you have now gone beyond making big blunders, and will send you the appropriate signals telling you to scale up.

Welcome to the world of applied finance. May yours be a long and lucrative tenure.

This is Getting Murky

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Have you actually seen China’s account books?

Has anyone, for that matter?

How does the US pay for its imports from China?

With treasury-note IOUs?

Are Chinese GDP numbers doctored?

If yes, for how many years have the Chinese cooked their books?

How many more bailouts is Greece going to require?

Isn’t the amount of financial maneuvering increasing from bailout to bailout?

It feels as if real debt is being made to “go away” synthetically.

Things are getting murky in the financial world.

When that happens, the stage is set for tricky synthetic products to be offered.

It’s time to go on high alert.

You see, for the longest time, banks in the “developed” world have not been clocking actual business growth. However, their balance sheets are growing on the basis of trading profits. In almost all cases, the “float” is not increasing significantly from clients’ savings, or from new business. Instead it is increasing from good trading.

However, trading can go wrong for a bank. All that is required is one rogue trader. Blow-ups keep happening. For banks, good trading is at best a bonus. It is not something solid and everlasting to fall back on for eternity.

Well, that’s what most or all “developed” international banks are doing. They are relying on their international trading operations to see them through these times. (((Compare this to an emerging market like India, where an HDFC Bank generates 30%+ QoQ growth, for the last 8 quarters and counting, on the basis of actual business profits from new accounts, savings and fresh real money that increases the float))).

While the scenario lasts, what kind of synthetic products can one expect from the plastic composers of financial products?

And we are going to get something plasticky soon, since “developed” international banks have gotten into the groove of trading, and since trading is their ultimate bread and butter now.

So what’s it gonna be?

The conceivers of plastic in the ’80s still had a conscience. For example, Michael Milken’s “Junk Bonds” still had actual underlying companies to the investment. That the companies were ailing, and could probably go bust, was a different issue. In lieu of that, junk bonds were giving returns that beat the cr#p out of inflation twice over, and then some. Though investors knew that these underlying companies were ailing, greed closed their eyes, as crowds lapped up the product. We know how the story ended.

In the ’90s, anything with the flavour of IT ran like an Usain Bolt. The conceivers of plastic products here were tech enterpreneurs, coupled with bankers that pushed through their IPOs. One had a lot of shady dotcoms with zero or minus balance-sheets clocking huge IPOs, apart from being driven up to dizzy heights by greedy public, from where their fall began.

By the ’00s, whatever 2 pennies of conscience that remained were now out the window. Products like CDOs did the rounds. These had no actual underlying entity, like a bond or a debenture. They were totally synthetic, mathematical products, assembled by bundling together toxic debt. The investment bankers that conceived these products knew that the debt was toxic, and were cleverly holding the other end of the line, i.e. they sold these products to their clients as AAA, and then shorted these very products, knowing that they were bound to go down in value because of their toxic contents.

We are well into the ’10s.

What’s it gonna be?

I think it’s probably going to be a “Structure”.

There is going to be an underlying. The world is wary about “no underlyings”.

The catch is going to come from the quality of the underlying, as in when it’s ailing badly and the world thinks otherwise (in the ’80s, the junk value of the underlying was no secret. Here, it probably will be).

Where is the product going to be unleashed?

Emerging markets. That’s where money has moved to. Also, investors there are not as savvy, since they’ve not been properly hit.

Why is the time ripe?

Interest rates are kinda peaking. Investors have gotten used to sitting back and raking in 10%+ returns, doing nothing. When interest rates start to move down, that would be the stage for the unleashing of the product in question.

Lazy, spoilt investors would probably lap up such products offering something like 13%+ returns, with “certified” AAA underlying entities to the investment.

So watch out. Don’t be lazy or greedy. As and when interest rates start to move down, move your money into appropriate products that are not shady and that have safe underlyings. From knowledge, not from hearsay.

Be very selective about who you let in to give investment advice. Even someone you trust could be pushed by his or her employer institution to aggressively sell you something synthetic with a shady underlying.

Be very, very careful. Do your due diligence.

Don’t get into the wrong product, specifically one with a lock-in.

Making the Grade

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It’s your convocation. From now on, you’ll be a degree-holder.

Yippeeee!

Just pause for a second.

All your life, you’ll be introducing yourself as a master’s in this or a bachelor’s in that, or perhaps even as a Ph.D. in xyz.

Have you even once considered, that your respective field will continue to evolve, long after you stop studying it?

For example, one fine day, in a Chemistry lecture to class XII, I noticed that the stuff I’d learnt for my master’s degree exams was the very stuff I was now teaching these 17-18 year-olds. That was a big realization for me. It then dawned upon me, that I had to either keep moving with the developments in the subject, or I needed to change my profession. I moved on from Chemistry in 2004.

So, for heaven’s sake, a paper degree is not your ticket to your subject for life. Things, people, seasons, subject-matter, issues at hand – everything changes. Every decade or so, there’s a complete overhaul. To stay on top, and still feel like a degree-holder of your subject, you need to be with things as they move, through the whole decade.

Does your marriage give you a licence to stay married to that same person for life without working on the relationship day in, day out? No, right?

Your degree doesn’t make you a king-pin in your subject for life either, without the appropriate ground-work everyday. Let’s please digest this truth.

The worst-case scenario of whatever I’ve said above happens in the markets. It is a worst-case scenario, because you enter the markets with some finance degree, thinking that the degree has taught you to play the markets successfully. Nothing is further from the truth. Here, you have a piece of paper that gives you false confidence, and you see your balloon bursting after your first few live shots at Mrs. Market.

Financial education in colleges and universities lacks two basic factors. The thing is, these two factors are game-changers. Get them wrong, or don’t know much about them, and your game becomes a losing one.

What are these two factors?

Everything and everyone around us teaches us not to be losers. We are taught to shove our losses under the carpet.

Cut to reality: winning market-play is about losing. Losing, losing, losing, but losing small. To be successful in the markets, we need to learn how to lose small, day in day out. It’s not easy, because our entire system is geared up to win, every time.

Then, everything and everyone around us teaches us to seal that win and post it instantly on our resume, on facebook, on twitter. Modern society is about showing off as many wins as possible. Losers don’t get too many breaks.

Cut to reality: winning market-play is about winning big, very big, every now and then, amidst lots of small losses. That can’t happen if we immediately book a winner. We need to learn to nurture a winner, and to allow it to win big. Again, that’s not easy, because as soon as a winner appears, our natural instinct tells us to book it and post it. So bury your “win it-cut it-post it” attitude. Instead, win, let the winner win more, and more, and when you feel it’s enough, without getting greedy, cut it, and then keep quiet, bring your emotions back to ground zero, and move on to the next winning play.

The reason, that most teachers of finance in colleges and universities don’t know about these two factors, is that their own money is almost never on the line. They have almost never felt the forces of live markets through this “line”, day in, day out. The line one puts on is one’s connection to market forces. Only a regular connection to these forces teaches one about realistic, winning market-play.

One could argue that the case-studies examined in finance school are very real. Well, they are very real for those protagonists who actually went through the ups and downs of the case-study in real-life. They got the actual learning by being exposed to live market forces. You are merely studying the statistics and drawing (dead) inferences, devoid of first-hand emotions and market forces. Whatever learning you are being imparted, is, well, theoretical.

Theory doesn’t cut it in the markets. Theory doesn’t make the grade.

So, what makes the grade?

I consider a seven year stint at managing your own folio a basic entry requirement into bigger market-play. What happens during this time?

Each body cell gets attuned to real market forces, live. You get to know yourself. You build up an idea about your basic risk-profile. Your market-strategy takes shape. It is fine-tuned to YOU.

During this stint, money needs to be on the line, again and again, but the amounts in play need to be small, because you are going to make many, many mistakes.

And please, make whatever mistakes you need to make in this very period. Get them all out of your system. Make each mistake once, and never repeat it, for life. Point is, that after this stint, money levels in play are going to shoot up. Mistakes from this point onwards are going to prove costly, even devastating. The kinds, where one can’t stand up again. You don’t want to be in that situation.

Once you are comfortable managing your funds, and don’t get rattled by Mrs. Market’s constant action, her turnarounds, crashes etc. etc., your market decisions are such, that you start applying your knowledge of money-management successfully. You have now become a practitioner of applied finance.

Applied finance is advanced level market-play. To win at applied finance, your money-management basics need to be fully in place and rock-solid. You can define applied finance as Money Management 2.0.

Winning at applied finance is self-taught. You don’t need a degree for it. In my eyes, a degree here is in fact detrimental, because you then spend a long time unlearning a lot of university stuff during real market-play. You actually see for yourself, that most of what you learnt applies only in theory. The stuff that makes winners, where is that? Why wasn’t it taught? Well, you’ve got to go out there and learn it for yourself.

Let theory be where it belongs. Respect it, but leave it in its appropriate world. The world needs its theoreticians to make it go round, but you need to go beyond theory, to win big.

Put on your practical shoes when you put your good and real money on the line, and be ready for anything.

Let your mistakes teach you.

Keep making the grade, day in day out.

Long after society tells you that you’ve made it.

Learning to Draw

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Life’s about reaching out.

There’s not a single bridge that’s been built without someone having to reach out first.

A child connects the dots of life to find that it’s looking at a roadmap. Walking on a known parameter is then easy. One knows where to tread.

Mrs. Market is a conceited lady.

She needs you to reach out to her.

Till you don’t, she doesn’t care about your existence either.

When you do, she starts concerning herself with you, but only after you make the first move towards her.

You have to take the first step. You have to build the bridge.

In the world of trading, you do that by putting on a trade.

Given that you don’t want to lose your pants to a tough cookie like Mrs. M, you need to first look at the stuff that’s working in your favour. Before reaching out, that is.

You are able to connect to her with hardware. As long as the hardware functions, there are no further issues there.

The approach with which you connect is your strategy. It has been developed upon observing the behaviour of Mrs. M, and as her behaviour has changed from time to time, so has your strategy reinvented itself in tandem. The software with which you programme your strategy has highly maneuverable algorithms that are able to alert you instantly upon any of Mrs. M’s behavioural changes. Once you’ve identified her pace and style of movement, you know what kind of a bridge you need, to connect with. You know what kind of a trade you need to put on.

Putting on the proper trade at the proper time is the name of the game. When Mrs. M is trending, your trade time-frame, trade-size and stop are all different from when she is moving in a range. When she is falling, the pace of your trade needs to be fast, real fast. Your instrument needs to be options, not pure equity, since the latter is tougher to move through. When she is flat, take a break, don’t build any more bridges for a while.

Each bridge, that you are capable of building, should give you an edge over Mrs. M. If that’s not the case, then the bridge is faulty, for even a coin-flip is giving you an even-steven 50:50 shot at Mrs. M. Therefore, your bridges need to be in the 60:40 plus category. Bridges take time and effort to build. Thus, they must yield you ample profit once they have been built.

After a while, she gets bored with your approach, and changes her pattern. Your bridge is not able to connect well. You notice this when your trades start going awry. Your systems need to adapt, and new bridges need to be built to account for her new avatar.

And what is this whole exercise?

Just like the child who connects the dots, you are learning to draw at Mrs. M.

And you’re doing it well.

You’re drawing at her with systems that give you a good edge as long as they work. When they falter, you tweak them to adapt to her, so that they continue to allow you to draw at her with an edge.

You don’t draw at Mrs. M without an edge. Period.

If you can learn this one basic fact, you’ve learnt a lot.

A Hedge is a Hedge is a Hedge

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U guessed it, this is again about Gold.

Why do I keep harping on Gold?

Situations crop up, questions arise, people ask stuff…whatever.

I’ve always treated Gold as a hedge. Luckily, I don’t suffer from any Midas affliction.

There’ll be a time in one’s investing timeline, when there’s no need to hedge. As of now, there is a need to hedge, seeing the uncertainty around us. This does not mean, under any circumstances, that you go around picking up your Gold for hedging at these rates. A hedge is best picked up cheap. Curretly, Gold is 2 or maybe 3 multiplied by cheap.

So, if Gold is your hedge of choice, this is not the time to pick it up. There is absolutely no margin of safety at these levels.

Once you’ve picked up your hedge cheaply, you can turn it into a double whammy and sell it really expensively. That option will always be with you.

You also have the option of not buying your hedge, whatever hedge it might be, if you don’t get a cheap enough price.

Exercise your options. Mrs. Market gives you lots of freedom till you act. Once you do act, you have to bear the consequences, whatever they are.

Don’ be in a hurry to act, especially if you are an investor. For the investor, the entry is of prime importance. Entry is the investor’s singular weapon.

And please, for heaven’s sake, treat Gold as a hedge. In good economic times, it’s going right back where it came from. The 100 year return on Gold has been 1% per annum compounded.

Whenever one gets into any underlying, one needs to be clear about what one is getting into.

Do you buy your car without doing the appropriate due diligence? No, right?

By the same right, investing demands proper due diligence too.

Anatomy of a Ponzi Scheme

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Charles Ponzi came up with the brilliant idea of paying early investors dividends from the investment money put in by later investors.

It’s as simple as that, and it’s called a Ponzi scheme.

After the first few dividends, promoter disappears, having lured many investors into a fake scheme with no underlying business.

Latest famous example of a Ponzi schemer – Bernie Maddoff.

Or, if you’ve not seen Damages – Season III, that’s about a Ponzi scheme too.

So what lures the common investor into a Ponzi scheme?

Simple. It’s called greed.

What triggers the greed?

The Ponzi schemer concocts a scheme that promises a rather too lucrative return. This return does not look unrealistic, so the average investor’s alarm signals don’t go off. Nevertheless, it’s more than high enough to make the average investor’s mouth water.

And what’s normally promised is a quick return, mind you. The average investor buys smoothly into the idea of doubling his or her money fast.

Then there’s lots of advertisment. Billboards everywhere. The Ponzi schemer wants to hit the public with ads about the tremendous returns.

The sales-people who sell the scheme are glib-talkers. They are smart, wear expensive stuff, basically exuding sophistication. They want to rub it in that they’ve made it big in life.

A Ponzi scheme’s documentation generally cracks under close scrutiny. I mean, when something is being sold to you without any underlying business, all you have to do is your dose of due diligence. Just pick up the phone and start asking questions.

What works for the Ponzi schemer is human nature. The first investors (who get paid dividends from newbie investor money) start talking. Actually, they start bragging. The human being likes to show off. And, the human being hates missing the boat, even if the boatman is a disciple of Charles Ponzi.

The Dark Side of Private Equity

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Greed is the investor’s nemesis.

I’ve been guilty of greed at times.

Luck has been on my side, and I’ve been saved from losing money. I’d like to tell you about it.

In my experiences with private equity over the last four years, the one thing that stood out was the pitch of each scheme proposed. The average pitch just sucked one in by describing a world that would appear utopic to somebody in a balanced frame of mind. When greed sets in, balance and common sense go out the window. One gets taken in by the pitch, and without doing any due diligence, one is willing to bet the farm.

The private equity teams of today have a tool up their sleeve that creates pressure on the investor, and leaves little time for due diligence. It’s called the time-window. Most schemes are proposed to the investor with a very short time-window. Either the investor is in within the window, or he or she can sit out. Lesson learnt: if one’s due diligence is taking longer than the time-window, then the scheme can go out the window rather than putting one’s hard-earned money on the line.

One of the worst starts a newbie investor can make is a good one. This happened to me as a newbie private equity investor. I got involved with the Milestone group in the middle of the financial crisis, and I invested in their REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts). These people were honest, and the investments have yielded steady quarterly dividends since, apart from the property appreciation. I started thinking private equity was the holy grail, and that all forthcoming institutions and schemes would be like Milestone.

Big mistake. When Edelweiss knocked on my door with an 8 year lock-in real-estate scheme, I was lapping it up. One thing kept going around in my mind – the 8 year cycle they were trying to make me believe in. Wasn’t convincing, but I wanted the profits they were promising. Before signing on, it occured to me to do at least some due diligence. I insisted on a conference call with the management. During the concall, I became aware of one wrongful disclosure. The pitch had spoken of a large sum of money from overseas, already invested in the scheme. In the concall, it became apparent that these funds were tentative and had not arrived yet.

A wrongful disclosure is a big alarm bell for me. I have programmed myself in such a way that when I come across wrongful disclosure during due diligence, I axe the investment. Luckily, the mind was not totally taken in, and I stuck to this rule.

Then came Unitech. Second generation real-estate magnate. Big money. Big leverage. In a joint venture with CIG, Unitech was redeveloping the slums of Mumbai, we were told in the pitch. Each slum-dweller would be relocated with ample compensation, we were told. The scheme had a multi-page disclaimer protecting the promoters against anything and everything. Alone that should have been an alarm bell. Of course I wasn’t thinking straight when I signed the documents.

In the next few months this scheme got a few investors interested, but its corpus wasn’t enough for the first leg of investments planned. Then, Adarsh exploded. I’m talking about the Adarsh real-estate scam. CIG / Unitech could not find a single new investor for their scheme. Everyone was scared of real-estate. Then there was another explosion: the 2G scam. Sanjay Chandra, CEO of Unitech, was one of the prime accused. What would happen to my money? Was it gone?

I got together with my bankers, and for more than a month, we steam-rolled the CIG / Unitech office in Delhi with emails and phone-calls, asking for the money to be returned with interest, since the scheme had not gotten off the ground. Luck was on our side, and after a thorough documentation process from their end, I received my entire amount with interest, one day before Sanjay Chandra was sent to jail.

Moral of the story: double your due diligence when you feel greed setting in. Don’t get taken in by fancy pitches. Don’t get pressurized into time-windows. Tackle the dark-side of private equity with a clear mind and full focus.