meek-investor

Painting with a broad brush is not always the right thing to do. In the United States, virtually anybody who's in the finance sector has been branded a villain. They of the billion dollar bailouts and the million dollar bonuses. Near the top of the pecking order of rogues, in the public mind, is AIG - the insurance company that had to be bailed out at the peak of the crisis. But consider what's happened to AIG in the last one year and you may change your mind. AIG's stock has risen 97% in 2010 - the fourth best performer in the S&P index. AIG was a solid company brought down by the antics of one department. But that didn't detract from the soundness of the rest of its business. When confronted with the crisis, it had a number of valuable assets it could sell. Top of the pile was AIA, its Asian subsidiary, which was a jewel. It has disposed of other businesses as well. It brought in a new CEO - Bob Benmosche, a rather colourful personality, out of retirement. Lots

Its that time of the year, when there is a nip in the air (or a vigorous bite if you happen to live in cold lands). The world is seeming an altogether nice place. Half the world's humanity is on holiday. Warm greetings and best wishes are flying around. Most of us are prepared to put the ills of the world behind us and, for a few days at least, look forward with hope and happiness to celebrate all that's good in this world. As indeed, it should be. For those in the northern hemisphere, its deep winter. Both in Europe and in the United States, they are facing an especially cold start to winter. Many will have a white Christmas, even in places where snow is unusual. Its cold and blustery outside. Perhaps frigid. But inside, the family has got together. The fireplace is exuding warmth. There's food on the table. There's a drink to warm the insides. There's a feeling of joy and togetherness. The spirit of Christmas. And there's the coming New Year. Millions more,

The Federal Communications Commission has moved to keep Internet service providers from limiting or unreasonably discriminating against content provided by competing services The regulations are designed to keep telephone and cable companies that provide phone services from using their Internet services to limit use of Skype and other online telephone services. It is also intended to halt them from making content provided by audio and video service providers they do not own less desirable by limiting downloads from firms such as Netflix or Hulu or providing faster service only for their own content. The rules are designed to maintain a level competitive position on the Internet and to restrict the abilities of companies that dominate access to the Internet from using oligopolistic control of the service points to harm content competitors. The regulations require that services allow their customers equal access to all online content and services, but allow the services some flexibility

How do you say farewell to a man like Phil, on his retirement ? You just can't. Period. How do you even begin to say farewell to somebody who has spent 42 years in the company. No that's not a typo. The number is right. FORTY TWO years of sterling service to the company. He has seen it all - he's seen the company's many victories and some setbacks. He has seen people come and go. He's seen history being made ; well, he made much of the history. Phil's an Australian and typifies everything that's great about that country. Sporty, fun loving, thoroughly professional, amazingly warm in a non sentimental way and above all, a wonderful human being. I bumped into him on a lovely barmy day in Sydney in 1994 ; an instant friendship grew that carries on to this day and will undoubtedly carry on for a long time more. I could go on and on about his professionalism. He's the only person I have ever known who drove an initiative that was right for the company, even

If you are from the generation that grew up with The Sound of Music, you may recall this song - Climb every mountain . In that classic musical, it wasn't the most melodious of pieces, but it made up with some depth of meaning. Each one of us climb our personal mountains and this post is a rambling muse into how all achievements, big or small, are remarkable, amazing and, in many ways, the purpose of life. Any one of us who has watched a baby take her first step can easily marvel at that achievement. For the baby, that step is like climbing Mt Everest. The act, by itself, is simple and one that the baby won't give a second thought to in the years to come. But at that moment, its a priceless achievement. Big achievers reach stardom. They get much fame, but alas not always, some happiness. But, each and every one of us, achieve many victories during the course of the years. Small it may seem to the outside world, but giant it is in our own hearts. Every personal milestone, we cro

They say all that glitters is not gold. But today, that might be a slightly misplaced sentiment. Gold is glittering so much that everything seems to pale into significance. I mean the price of gold. If you haven't noticed, it has skyrocketed. And the cause of it is coming from an unlikely direction. Gold hit an all time high price of $1424 a troy ounce in Nov. It seems to be zooming northward. I haven't done the math, (after all this is a Sunday post !), but gold might have performed as well as equities as an investment vehicle in the recent past. That's a little funny given the significant difference in risk profiles. Cut, to a completely different angle. One of the fundamental cultural differences between Indians and Chinese comes in the area of addiction to the yellow metal. Indians simply love gold and can't resist hoarding it. Gold jewelery, that is. It is passed from generation to generation; safely stored in bank lockers. They are taken out only for weddings, whe

A growing number of firms are aggressively pursuing the market for information by providing material that answers online searches and employing strategies so their material appears high in search results. These enterprises are providing high quantity, low quality material on topics designed to produce many search hits and driven by the desire to make money from advertising received as high traffic sites. Some are proving quite successful. Demand Media, for example, uses about 13,000 freelance writers to produce about 4000 articles a day for which it gains about 95 million unique visitors with more than 620 million page views monthly. Its eHow.com site alone gets about 50 million users. Ask.com, Yahoo and AOL are also engaging in the market. When you make a search and are taken to answer.com, dictionary.com, wikianswers.com or hundreds of other sites providing such information to the public, you encounter this mass produced content. The business strategy is working and many of the sites

All bureaucrats are the same, but some are better than the others ! Each nation is blessed with a liberal sprinkling of "homo sapiens pointless bureaucracy-ensis". But the ancient land of India is surely the world leader in this matter. Meet Ramamritham - the quintessential member of this species. Readers of this blog will know of my partiality to caricaturing a typical member of a group by a name. The Indian female has featured here so often that her name is now acquiring legendary proportions (pun intended). Having been accused of gender bias, I shall now strive to correct it with describing the masculine equivalent. India abounds in Ramamrithams. Typically he comes from the state of Tamil Nadu or West Bengal - these two cultures seem to have a huge affinity for inhabiting the corridors of babudom. He takes great pleasure in designing the most elaborate and pointless of procedures. He squeals with orgasmic delight when he has the opportunity to add one more procedural step

Chicken Tikka Masala is reputed to have taken over as the national dish of Britain. Perhaps the best example of reverse colonisation, although it must be said that overthrowing "British food" is not as great an achievement; such being the epicurean significance of the cuisine in Her Majesty's land. Actually its a Bangladeshi takeover, given that 99% of the curry houses in Britain are run by Bangladeshis. But we shall lightly pass over Bangladesh propagating "Balti"cusine" and such other monstrosities. Stay with the chicken. British affinity to consuming this hapless avian is the only logic I can find (after much scratching of the head in vain) to explain the take over of Blackburn Rovers , a Premier League football team, by Venky's - an obscure chicken farming company from India. Firstly the facts. Blackburn Rovers is a struggling middling football side in England. Its been bought out by Sri Venkateswara Hatcheries for £ 53 m , an Indian famil

It took us 74 minutes two weeks ago to enter the airport. It is now time to experience the blissful experience of actually being in. Lets concretise the experience. Imagining you are taking an international flight out of Chennai airport, arguably the worst airport in the land. You may recall that the last step before being allowed entry into the hallowed portal is a painful check of your ticket and papers by an uniformed worthy. Immediately after you enter, within 10 yards, the same process repeats itself as you enter a fenced off area - another queue, another check. You then proceed to yet another queue - this time to screen your baggage through an Xray machine . Not even in Timbuktu airport in Mali, which is essentially a cowshed, does this process take place. Huge queue. People on overloaded trolleys banging you from the back. Since Indians have a general disdain for queues, seven sub queues form which ultimately merge into one chaotic rugby scrum . And unique Chennai practice dict

Beijing, everybody knows. Shanghai, is equally well known. But most people's knowledge of China stops right there. The more enterprising will know of Shenzhen. But then , that's about it. The rest of China remains a mystery to many who have not ventured in that direction. Well, its now Guangzhou's turn to be in the spotlight (pronounce the zh, like a j). The Asian Games start in Guangzhou on Friday, the 12th. It was my home city, until recently, and so, if I may, I will dress up the long suffering bridesmaid, as the bride that she will be for the next two weeks. You may know Guangzhou better as Canton. The province in which Guangzhou is situated is called Guangdong which the British , long ago, transliterated to Canton. Confusingly, they ascribed the name to the city, not the province. But, even in Guangdong, the bride is often, the brash noveau riche, Shenzhen. Even in her backyard, Guangzhou remains a bridesmaid. But for most of China's history, when the culture tur

If you have had the good fortune to be in an Indian airport even once, you would appreciate the unmatchable joy of such an experience. This blogger is uniquely qualified to ruminate on this topic, since he has spent a substantial proportion of his life in the confines of the aforementioned entity. Unfortunately he continues to indulge in this hobby , despite numerous new year resolves to escape from this magical experience. Readers who have specialized in weaning diehards away from their addictions may please email this writer. The enjoyable experience begins with approaching the airport. As you near your drop off point, you see a traffic jam a mile long. This is because everybody coming before you has parked his car right in the middle and has begun the process of unloading humans and baggage of gargantuan proportions. The famous Rajalakshmi (she of the gargantuan proportions herself) finds the act of getting off from the car a feat that might challenge Nadia Comaneci, and therefore

The Ascent of Man is an all time classic BBC documentary on the evolution of human society. Written and presented by J Bronowski, it was made in the 1970s and traced the evolution of humans into what they are today. That was before the age of computers. And email. And the Blackberry. With the onset of such a revolutionary step in human evolution, the series needs to be continued. Alas, J Bronowski is no more. So with much tribute to him, this blogger now presents the fourteenth chapter in the series. Humans will now evolve with amazing rapidity in the next 20 years or so , both physically and mentally. The right hand will now comprise of 5 thumbs so that they can all simultaneously punch away at the Blackberry. The left hand will evolve into no fingers and a velcro palm so that the sainted instrument can rest more snugly. The human neck shall elongate and tilt at 45 degrees so as to see the screen better. All teeth shall turn Blue, so that there is no need for wires at all. The mos

Imagine a company which was for decades a byword in inefficiency. It pollutes like hell. It has 400,000 workers, none of whom can be sacked, although it needs far fewer. Most of the places it operates in are rife with insurgency, where the government's writ doesn't run very deep. Corruption is endemic. Technology is antiquated. There's a mafia which operates almost exclusively thanks to its presence. It struggles to transport its production to its customers. Governments set prices, allocate stocks and fix wages - not the market. You get the drift ? Now this company wants to sell its stock to you. You would run a million miles. Right?? Wrong ! You actually fall over yourself in trying to invest in its stock. Welcome to the crazy world of stock markets. The company, is Coal India. It is a government owned monopoly that has been around for decades and for most of that period was of dubious financial capability. And yet, for the last few days, everybody around me seems to be

Consumer behaviour is so complex that nobody really understands it. That's why there's a massive and flourishing market research industry to try and fathom this mysterious creature called you and me. Perhaps this is not so mysterious - after all the consumer is usually referred to as "she" instead of "he". And who can claim to fathom the mystery of the female of the species ....... Take the case of consumer behaviour in relation to plastic bags. When I first went to Guangzhou, I did the usual thing - go to a supermarket, buy tons of stuff you don't really need and cart it away in about 27 plastic bags . Since there are a lot of people in China and a lot of supermarkets, this translated into zillions of plastic bags let loose on the environment. Bad. Campaigns to "save the planet" yielded zero results. Mrs Li continued to merrily buy every kind of meat imaginable and carry them away in plastic bags. The Guangzhou municipality hit upon a brainwav

Newspaper publishers need to explore new methods of pricing content as they expand their digital portfolios because merely transferring the methods used in print can never bring the success publishers desire. Print newspaper publishers have traditionally tended to set prices based on production and distribution costs and not on value created. Unfortunately, this has made it impossible to possible to obtain a price premium for factors such as prestige, service, experience, and convenience. New digital operations, however, provide significant other pricing options because they differ in terms of whether they maintain the existing content bundle, whether non-payers can be excluded from use, the types of experience they deliver and how they are used. Digital media require significant new thinking because they tend to be joint and complementary products with print. These lend themselves to selling strategies of bundling and versioning that permit uses of bundle pricing, option pricing, mult

Even in the stupefyingly boring world of business, there can be music that can make you catch your breath at times. So it shall be in this blog, which has, thus far, been scrupulously clean of anything tonal , thanks to the acute tone deafness that afflicts this blogger. No, I don't mean the ritualistic annual day in Indian IT companies where 10,000 coders all try and do weird contortions in the name of dancing to music that is broadcast at 10,000 decibels . This post opts for a little more classical touch, for after all one has to act one's age sometimes. Nothing to do with business at all. If you are not a connoisseur of classical music (the Western variety, that is), Andre Rieu is probably a very good place to start. He's a bit like T20 to the world of Test Match cricket. Still, I shall confess (no doubt to the disgust of one reader of this blog who will, I am sure, elaborate at length in the comments on my folly) that I like to watch and listen to him. He is a classica

Remember Jerome Kerviel - the trader who almost brought down Societe Generale ? The French banking giant ? He was convicted by a French court this week , sentenced to jail and ordered to pay back the € 4.9 bn loss the bank suffered as a fine - largely symbolic as he would just become bankrupt. No doubt at all that he was guilty. He had built an open position of some € 50 bn . He violated trading policies of the bank. His actions almost brought the bank to its knees. He was guilty; and he's been found so in court. But what is amazing about the judgment is that it completely exonerated Societe Generale . They have been found to be not guilty at all. That completely gobsmacks me. The bank admits lax controls, but said it did not know. You want to believe that the bank did not know that the guy was taking an open position of € 50 bn ? Really ?? Of course they must have known. They just turned a blind eye as long as he was raking in the money. When the retreating tide reveal

The somewhat improving condition of the newspaper industry is permitting companies to move from merely paying operating expenses to finding ways to improve their balance sheets and looking for new opportunities. In recent weeks: The Gannett Co. has placed senior notes totally $500 million that will be due in 2015 and 2018. The notes financed at 6.375% and 7.125% will give the company some financial breathing space by being used to pay a maturing loan and revolving credits. In addition it negotiated an extension on $2.7 billion in revolving credit with Bank of America from 2012 to 2014. The New York Times Co. has cut its debt by 40 percent in past 2 years and is beginning to look at small investments in digital media that may position it for future growth. It recently provided $4 million in financing for Ongo, a start-up news sharing site that will aggregate stories from a number of newspapers. The Washington Post Co. announced it would repurchase 750,000 of its outstanding shares. Such

Hooray, Hooray, It’s a holi holiday – if you were a gawking teenager in the 70s, you would have probably tapped your feet in rhythm to Boney M. If you are a toddler, teenager, 20,30,40,50 something or a laorenjia (old old man), in China, you would instead be singing Oh My God; it’s a holiday and run for cover ! This week is “National Holiday” in China. Oct 1 is the National Day in China – some 61 years ago Mao Zedong declared the People’s Republic as formed. Never mind that China was “founded” long long ago in the mists of time – Chinese history begins with whenever the current ruling dynasty started – that’s the way it has been for all those centuries. This is not a post on Chinese history. Instead it is a rant against the crazy Chinese concept of National Holidays. This whole week , a full seven days, is a holiday. All offices are shut. Banks are shut. You cannot transfer money from one bank to another. You can do nothing, especially if it involves the government. And since everythi

HSBC is a solid, and perhaps staid, bank. It rode the financial crisis reasonably well and generally stays out of the headlines. Surprising then to see it on top of the financial news for the last five days thanks to a messy succession saga. Here's what happened. Successions in HSBC are very orderly. The Chairman retires to tend to his garden somewhere in the English countryside. The CEO becomes the Chairman. The senior most executive being groomed for years, takes over as CEO. All very dignified and solemn. The Board congratulates itself over many glasses of the finest bubbly. The money continues to pour in and all is well in the world. This time the script went wrong. Stephen Green , the current Chairman, had indicated in May that he wanted to retire in a year's time. A search firm was duly appointed to recommend that there were no suitable outside candidates so that the pesky shareholders can be told to keep quiet. But suddenly Stephen Green was asked to join the UK cabinet

Jobs for life ?  A quaint and obsolete concept ? Not even dinosaurs would think of such an idea ; Right? Don't snigger. No less a company than Siemens has done just that in Germany . My first reaction was, of course, what on earth has Siemens done. Has it simply bowed to the pressure of the mighty German trade unions ? The power of trade unions in Germany is well known. The country has adopted a model for a cosy relationship between workers and managements. Confrontations, when they come, are often less intense than might be seen in other parts of the world. Wages are high. Its not easy to lay off workers.And yet Germany remains a massive industrial success; it remains the largest exporter in the world neck to neck with China.  The arguments for flexibility with work force are well known. But why has Siemens opted for giving jobs for life - and that too in high cost Germany ? There must some arguments on the other side of the debate as well. There surely are.   If we turn around th

Vaithy mama is a legendary figure if you were a schoolboy playing cricket in a certain district in the south of India in the 70s. No prizes for guessing that this blogger was one of them. Vaithy mama was the lone selector of the district cricket team and had the power of life and death over earnest schoolboys for whom being dropped from the team was the end of the world. Vaithy mama's selection criteria were very clear. If you were a batsman, did your bat stay close to the pad; was the bat straight, did the front foot point in the direction of the stroke, did the ball travel all along the ground, did the front shoulder point to mid off, etc etc. Readers unfamiliar with this funny game can translate this as the good old way of playing cricket. Not the current day slam bang variety. To Vaithy mama, it didn't matter if the runs did not come. Did you play correctly ? Many a boy had got slapped for attempting a cross batted shot. Such is cricket. It's more than a game. It repres

The Right to Information is a fundamental right in most countries. Freedom of the press is a cherished goal. All very good.  But I think its now time to have a Right to NOT have information. I write this even though I have witnessed at close quarters for three years, the perils of such an idea. Take the case of the story of the idiot in Florida who wanted to burn the Koran , which is the trigger for my post today. He is an irrelevant nobody  who perhaps has a dozen imbeciles who go to his "church".  Suddenly he has become a celebrity and has been interviewed and reported all over the world. And equal imbeciles in some corner of the world, who can't even point to Florida on the map demonstrate and threaten violence against America. That's reported on too. News has been "created" where none should have existed. With potentially dangerous consequences. The world would have been a better place if the worthy in Florida had been royally ignored. A week ago, there

I had never heard of ShoreBank until I read this article in The Economist. The Economist titled its article – Small enough to fail. I add an “alas” to my post header. ShoreBank , according to The Economist article, thrived for 35 years on a business model of a small community bank that targeted lending to poor people in poor neighbourhoods. It actually had higher repayment rates and lower delinquency,  as any careful micro lender will tell you.  But then the recession struck like a tsunami. In the neighbourhood in  which it operated, the recession has been brutal and most people lost their jobs. Despite very good payment records in the past, they couldn’t keep it up.  Unfortunately its location in Chicago and therefore the association with Obama made it a political lightning rod. No way it could be bailed out. Alas, it had to go. This article set me thinking on the risk quotient for small businesses. By definition, small businesses cannot be diversified in terms of risk. They will be

The blurring of lines between work life and personal life has been a profound change in the last 10 years. We may not have fully realized it as it’s a classic case of slow boiling of the frog. If anybody had presented to you what the demands of working life would be when you started your career, you would have recoiled with horror. But like the proverbial frog, we have all been slowly cooked to death. E mail, and later Blackberry, have been the two largest causes of virtually eliminating the line between business time and personal time. I know of a senior guy who sets an alarm three times in the night to check his email. He may be an extreme case, but most of us are not very far away from there. Just look around when a plane lands and you’ll know what I mean. The office comes to us all the time. We can’t go to bed without it – the damn thing is under the pillow. We can’t even go to the loo without it. The day is not far off when we’ll be buried with it. Imagine a business situation wh

You may have heard of the 100 km traffic jam in Beijing where traffic moved at 1 km a day - that's right a day; not an hour. This post is a learned treatise on handling exactly such a situation. There's no point cursing or wailing. It won't get you any further than 1 km a day. No point abandoning your automobile to come and get it another time - whenever you get it you still can only do 1km a day. You have to turn to India for advice; for Indians love to spend half their waking lives absolutely stationary on the road. The first thing you need to do is to climb your car over the divider (yes, that's possible) and drive at 100 kmph on the opposite side of the road. Since you can absolutely rely on 5000 other people doing the same, you will progress 1 km and then come to a screeching halt. You can also  confidently rely on the fact that people stuck in the opposite direction would have also done the same and therefore the street now has the proper order of two armies faci

Once upon a time, long long ago, before gils was born, there was a time when there was only a single TV channel in India. Of course , it was government controlled - Doordarshan was the only channel and those who want to experience that torture can tune in to CCTV today. The powers that be in Doordarshan decreed that prime time viewing must be Krishidarshan (a program on agriculture, for those unfamiliar with the concept). But even in that era there were some gems which evoke nostalgic memories. This post is about one of them. Apologies to the non Indian readers of this blog - second successive weekend post on a very Indian matter. But then when you search for something for long  and finally find it, you can't help but go a little over the top. I've been looking for this TV clip on the internet for a few years with no success. Finally found it. Yesterday  So the post naturally follows. Promise to desist from purely Indian matters for a while after this. There was an organisati

It has not been a good month for newspaper unions at bankrupt newspaper companies or the government corporation that insures pension funds. As part of their reorganizations, a number of bankrupt newspaper firms are not paying money owed union pensions or are quietly letting the guaranty pick up the tab for retiree costs. Unions of Philadelphia Newspapers LLC (The Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News) were forced to accept 12 cents on the dollar for the $12 million the bankrupt company owned to employee pension plans as part the reorganization plan. The Chicago Sun-Times off-loaded $49.1 million of its underfunded pension obligations for 2300 retirees and employees to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. The paper and it suburban subsidiaries were purchased out of bankruptcy without the new owners assuming the pension obligations. The Dayton News Journal dumped $15.4 million in underfunded pensions payments on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. , which will ensure 1,100 current and fo

Californians are the best example of the concept that it is a thin line separating genius from madness.  The genius of Californians is well known. If there is one single place that is deemed to be the most creative in the world, it has to be somewhere in California. Many of the world's greatest inventions originate from there. Maybe its in the water; maybe its in the air, but something makes creativity flourish in California. It is then a mystery as to why such creative people are adept at scoring own goals. California adopts a particularly virulent form of voter activism. All sorts of ideas are presented to voters in referendums and if passed, have to be observed. A series of such voter passed Propositions have made California virtually ungovernable, at least financially. Witness the annul ritual of theatre in passing of their budget. In keeping with that tradition, California voters  passed two years ago Proposition 2, designed to create humane standards for farm animals. Laudabl

India is 63 years old today. Well, India is several millennia old, but also only 63 years young. It is Independence Day for India the country, as it exists today. Bits and pieces have gone away – Pakistan, Bangladesh and so on. But a large part came together, as it never had had all through its history. People with different cultures, different languages, different religions, and even with wildly different looks, came together as one nation this day 63 years ago. At midnight on that momentous day, as the Union Flag came down and the Indian tricolor came up, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister made the famous Tryst with Destiny speech . You can even view a small portion of the speech here . India’s independence heroes came from all parts of the country – as diverse as the land itself. There wasn’t even a common language they could speak in. And yet, they came as Indians, first and foremost. Not as Punjabis or Bengalis or Maharashtrians or Tamilians. But as Indians. To my mind, t