Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Project Child: Make it a successful business venture

BARUN JHA
A brand new year is here and it’s time for parties and celebrations. This is also the time for making new resolutions and plans to ensure a successful year ahead, both in personal life and on the financial front.

The same holds true when a child is born. It’s also the time for celebrations and new resolutions and planning to ensure a comfortable and happy life ahead for the newborn. And again the financial matters hog the limelight in the overall planning for the life ahead of the newly born human being.

Most of us are well aware of the large expenses to be incurred in future on education and marriage-like events for a child. While making provisions for these future expenses, we buy some insurance policies, make some fixed deposits (FDs) or invest in similar instruments, which could be encashed when the time arrives for big-ticket expenses like college education and marriages.

However, the financial planning for a child does not merely mean making provisions for education (engineering/medical/MBA or other professional courses) and marriages etc. We tend to forget that there is a continuous cash outflow both before and after these big events.

We often forget to make advance provisions for that daily pocket money, that first bike for the son, the expensive Barbie doll-like dress for the daughter, those picnics and holiday school trips to hill stations among numerous small but pocket-pinching events.

We all have a big picture in mind, but we tend to miss out on the overall picture, when it comes to planning for a financially secure life for our lived one. Even when saving for marriages and college fees, we tend to consider the costs in today’s term and forget to account for the inflationary effect, which is bound to make it many times costlier when the actual time arrives about 15 or 20 years later.

The best idea would be to consider the whole exercise as a pure business venture, while accounting for everything on a balance sheet entailing all the details ranging from the cash inflow, initial costs, running or day-to-day expenses and investments required to the final returns, which would include an everlasting smile on the face of the child and happiness for the whole family.

Here we will try to understand the whole picture of the expenses to be incurred and a proper mechanism or planning and investments required to meet the goal of making the Project Child a successful venture.

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Project Child

Get your basics right before venturing into online world of stock trading

Want to make money in bull market? Get online

BARUN JHA
The advent of internet has changed the very structure of life and stock market trading is no exception. Just like latest news, music downloads, movies, railway ticket booking, banking services, instant messaging, mails and various business and personal services, even stock market trading is now barely a click away on the world wide web. After remaining a domain of brokers, floor traders, institutional investors and mutual fund managers, the stock market now can be reached directly by a retail investor on his Net-enabled PC.

Sensex scaling new record highs has become one of the most repeated headlines in the recent past. We have seen the stock market scaling new heights quite often in the past few months and the benchmark Sensex is expected to soon hit the massive 10,000-point mark.

While this record rally in stock markets has seen investors’ wealth multiplying by leaps and bounds, the upsurge has also led to an astounding growth in the interest of new investors trying their hands at making a killing out of this Bull Run. Online trading is one of the most convenient and cheapest modes of investing in the stock market for both new investors as well as the old investors trading in the traditional way of physical form of shares.

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Wanna be a day trader? Play safe to earn big bucks

BARUN JHA

'Extreme Caution' is the main mantra if you want to make some quick bucks in the stock market through day trading. As the name suggests, day traders buy and sell stocks at a rapid pace throughout the day and rarely hold any position overnight.

A typical day trader makes a career by making numerous trades in a single day, but squares off his/her position at the end of the day – meaning, the day trader does not hold any position in any stocks before and after the trading session.

The goal of the day trader is to capitalise on the share price movements within a single day and the gains primarily depend on the number and volume of trades made. Higher the number of trades and trading volume, higher is the profit made by a day trader.

But, at the same time, higher are the chances of making a big loss, as the day trading is mostly based on speculations and market timing, rather than investing with a proper planning.

However, day trading is still one of the few ways of earning some mega bucks in a short span of time in the stock market and this drives most of the naïve investors to fall prey to this high-yielding, but higher-risk mode of investing.

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