ETF portfolio

WSJ posted a portfolio that closely resembles mine. In a previous post, I blogged about having direct investment in a business (and not its stock) as a means of diversifying just because earnings( esp of small businesses) tend to be more stable than stocks. In a crude way, this can be achieved through private equity. You guessed it, there are ETFs for private equity too. Here is a snapshot of the portfolio -

Also, I made a mindmap of all the top level ETF categories that you need to consider to make it diversified. You can make it weighted more towards one level or the other depending on various factors (which is for another blog).

Subprime crisis in India is going to happen !

http://www.rediff.com/money/2007/oct/08spec.htm

The logic is simple. Low dollar value with not-so-increasing prices - less revenue for indian companies - less salaries for employees - not being able to pay mortgages (which are probably 50% of the salaries) - investors not being able to charge as much rent - defaults

Classic subprime cycle that happened in US is going to happen in India.

Retail in India did'nt think about land !

http://ia.rediff.com/money/2007/oct/08guest.htm

I blogged about the importance of selecting a land and calculating the project's ROI with land prices. As this blog is about mind boggling things that appear trivial to grasp for you but others would not get it. Retail sector in India apparently made a blunder of underestimating the difficulty of grabbing land proximity to the city !

Good decisions have nothing to do with the result

Each minute in our life is made of decisions. All we can do is analyze the situation, take into account all the data and all the decision choices, assess the risks and rewards of each decision and take one. If you do all that, it is a GOOD decision, IRRESPECTIVE of what the result is. Now comes my book recommendation.

Book Recommendation - Hard Call: Great Decisions and Extraordinary
People Who Made Them by John McCain and Mark Slater. Not all the
stories are good, but some of the stories are great enough to make the
book a good read, especially the story that the book starts with.

Life and Happiness

I have two recommendations for ya'all people - Goes back to a few us who are on constant search for meaning of life and such. Each of the videos tell a lot of gripping lessons about "leading life:

Movie Recommendation - The Pursuit of Happiness:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0454921/. I somehow missed the movie when it
was released but it is a very good movie and it has some very good
subtle messages about happiness told in an interesting way.

Video Recommendation - The last lecture of Randy Pausch, a CMU professor
and pioneer of vision and virtual reality who is going to die in a few
months :http://youtube.com/watch?v=4HqdnjgkExY