What a year 2009 was? At the beginning of the year, the stock market was trying to find how deep the abyss was. Every other participant in the equity market was trying to run away like there was no tomorrow. Fast forward to second half of the year. The story changed and now the stock market is trying to find its peak. It was in true sense a roller coaster ride.
When the equity market goes up like it did in later part of the year, it gives a false sense of confidence in our abilities to pick stocks. Irrespective of what one thinks, any company stock you had touched in second of 2009, it has zoomed. It really did not matter which company stock it was! Lately, I have seen quite a bit of emails trying to point me towards how the stocks that I negated (or did not pick?) have zoomed up and made them money. I do feel happy for everybody who made good money in 2009. I wish you had shared those winners with readers of this blog. We all want to make money here. Right? Continue reading rest of this article…
Once in a while, I discuss about topics other than investing such as THE HINDU’s website design at foreign source and my thoughts about it. That particular post resulted in passionate discussion on both side of the aisle. There was one theme that seemed to be echoed by quite a few commentators, and that was; there are companies and entrepreneurs that are focusing on developing products. Many entrepreneurs are in fact attempting to develop solutions for Indian consumers.
Social Media is a new buzz in business circles and marketing machinery. If you have an email address and read popular news articles on internet, then it is hard for you to avoid the talk of social media. It is the new in-thing in today’s World Wide Web. There are many different connotations of social media such as social is influence marketing, social is conversation, social is inbound marketing, social is permission marketing, social is community, and many more. At a fundamental level, it is nothing but organization of social groups. I think of it as similar to group of people in our building, our society, our group of colleagues in work place, etc albeit much larger now. One aspect about such web based social groups is that we may not know folks in our society (physically close), but many of us will probably know much more about somebody we have never met.
Graphite India Limited (GRAPHITE) is the largest manufacturer of graphite electrodes (90% of the revenue). It also provides impervious graphite equipments and GRP/ERP pipes and tanks (10% of revenue). It end customers, and applications are in metallurgical (ferrous & nonferrous), chemical and process, and aerospace industry.
We as human beings are always objective or goal oriented. We may not know it, but sub-consciously, we are always attempting to do a given task or an activity towards certain goal. Many folks will not agree with me, because there is a perception that ROI is always related to money. To me, it is not. If I spend time with my family, its because the pleasure I get (that’s an ROI). If I did not get that pleasure, overtime it will automatically create a rift. Similarly, if I play any team sports, or go out with friends, it builds our relationship, it builds camaraderie, a sense of togetherness. It is not necessarily for getting any money in return, but to be part of social community. You cannot live alone in this world, right? Keeping with this, the question I am trying to answer today is what is my ROI from this blog? I need to know what I am getting out of this blog. Here also, I will use the framework provided by Avinash. There are multiple parameters to determine ROI from the blog. 
Future Order Book: What Does it Mean?
In my view, there is no effective way to measure the impact of future order book on future EPS. Theoretically, it is possible to translate this into future EPS. But I believe it can only be done by company executives. It is company insiders who know the operating cost, raw material cost, possibility of order completion, taxation, and when the revenue is likely to be realized (i.e. received by the company). I cannot understand how brokerage houses or independent analyst can make that estimate. I would like to know if anybody can share the methodology? To me, it only has a marketing value, nothing beyond that. Let me use an example. Continue reading rest of this article…