The Wait Is Over: How to Find Out If You Got Shares The IPO subscription window has closed. You have applied. Now comes the anxious wait for allotment status. If you have never navigated the registrar websites before, the process can feel confusing, there are multiple registrars, multiple ways to check, and the results often […]
SGBs and the Tax Angle Most Investors Partially Understand Sovereign Gold Bonds (SGBs) are one of the most tax-efficient ways to hold gold in India, but the tax treatment is not uniform across all scenarios. It differs based on whether you hold to maturity, redeem early through the government window, or sell in the secondary […]
The 80C Ceiling Problem Every year, millions of Indian taxpayers scramble in January and February to complete their 80C investments, dumping money into ELSS, PPF, or LIC policies to reach the Rs 1.5 lakh deduction limit. Once that box is ticked, most people stop thinking about tax saving entirely. That is a significant missed opportunity. […]
Turning Losses Into a Tax Silver Lining Every investor has positions that have not gone to plan. Some holdings sit at a loss, below the price you paid. Most investors look at these with frustration, waiting for recovery. But there is a systematic way to use these unrealised losses to reduce your tax bill right […]
What the Repo Rate Actually Is Every time the Reserve Bank of India’s Monetary Policy Committee meets, financial news channels go into overdrive. Anchors speak in hushed tones, tickers flash red or green, and Twitter fills with hot takes. Yet most retail investors I speak with cannot clearly articulate what the repo rate is or […]
The Numbers That Define a Historic Run I work in markets professionally, and even I find the pace of India’s IPO market over the past few years remarkable. FY2024 saw India raise over Rs 67,000 crore through mainboard IPOs, with more than 75 companies listing on the NSE and BSE mainboard. Add the SME platform […]
The Business Model You Are Not Thinking About Before you can read financial news well, you need to understand what financial news actually is. It is not a public service. It is a business, and its business model shapes every headline, every segment, and every analyst quote you encounter. Most financial media companies make money […]
The Summer, the Problem, and the Decision Not to Buy In the summer of 2022, the space I needed to cool was awkward, not quite a full room, not a small corner. The commercial air coolers that would work were either too big, too ugly, too expensive, or all three. And somewhere in the irritation […]
A Decision That Looked Eccentric to Everyone Around Me In 2019, I planted 1,200 banana trees on land my family owns. I live in a city, work in financial services, and spend most of my time thinking about markets and products. And yet, here I was, walking muddy rows of freshly turned earth, overseeing the […]
FOMO, the fear of missing out, is not new. Humans have always felt social pressure to participate in what others are doing. But investing FOMO has become significantly more potent in the last decade, and I think that matters enormously for how retail investors actually perform. The speed at which investment themes spread, the volume […]