My Stocks portfolio- Part III

I am not economists or equity analyst but temp to write more on my holding.

Its almost 6 months since my last post on my stocks portfolio. Well, nothings is changed much than my views on ETF and situation in India.

So, I keep on holding losers like  Maytas, RPower, Suzlon, Edlewisee and Brigade. I will hold them till the time I will have dmat account or when I feel, its enough to keep on holding such stocks. RIL is showing some sign of action as many things happening in their favour like Settlement of Gas Price issue with RNRL, Shale Gas deal, more gas discovery in Cambay Basin etc. L and T is doing surprisingly good and Infy is as usual generating Alfa. Rpower is around 18-22 % down to my purchase price from IPO of Jan 2008 which is good sign.

Gold is doing good and there are more gold ETFs in pipeline from AMCs like ICICI and HDFC MF, so there will be demand of around 500 to 600 crores as these two MFs are backed by very strong retail presence in terms of branch network of parent banks. Might go for some more buys. Its retailing around Rs 19000 in Indian market now.

Nifty BEeS is doing good and but then as compared to MFs holding, its trailing. So need to re-think strategy on this and might exit in favour of more large caps oriented MF which I am holding since last few years. Might need to compare data for last 10-15 years of data. Over the period of 1,3 and 5 years timeframe, MF’s like Reliance Growth or Sundaram Select Midcap or FT Blue-chip are performing much better than Nifty BEes.

So, what will I buy if I want to ? In last few months, I also drastically reduced my portfolio of MF holding from 20 to just 4-5 funds. So, I am thinking its better to hold investments in Equity in the form of mutual funds. But if I can do quality stock picking at reasonable level or price, I think, that will be a trick.

So here is list.

Banks – HDFC Bank and Axis bank. and if you want to – Kotak Mahindra Bank

Autos – Hero Honda, Maruti or Tata Motors or Mahindra and Mahindra

IT – TCS

IT Small Caps – Zensar Tech

Banks PSU- SBI and any other like BOB or Canara Bank.

Telecom – Bharati

FMCG – Nestle / ITC

Please not that I will not buy these stocks but they are kind of wish list. I tried to analyse some of them in private banking space but they are too expensive as per their current trailing P/E for last FY.

Investing in UK – best way to do that.

I am going to blog about my experience of investing in UK capital market in next few posts. It will mainly cover major indexes, major shares and cheap share brokers.

After that, I also want to cover some of the unique features of execution only discount brokers. You can always go to site called moneysavingexpert.com and find out what is cheaper or best way to do that. I will narrate my experience though.
Will also add more on cost of service and how competitors can think of reducing cost or including more number of citizens in stock market investment.

My Stocks portfolio- Part II

After spending more than 15 months since my last post on my portfolio and a lot of upside in Nifty and BSE Sensex, I am thinking of writing second post. I was thinking to do the same when exactly one year was completed in Oct 2009 but then I couldn’t do that as was busy for my India trip.

Anyway, most of the stocks in which I was able to profit, I sold them and latest one is GMR which I sold in this week.

I will list down which I sold since Oct 2008 in descending order.

1  GMR Infra – Sold in 3 trenches in Oct 2009, Dec 2009 and Jan 2010 (200, 125 and 75). Reason being, high PE, Stagnant share price around 70 Rs and nothing much happening in infra space for the moment and thought of buying more of Nifty ETF ( New entrant in my portfolio since last year) or leader in Cap Goods or Construction space i.e. L and T

2 Power Grid - Same reason as above though this was only stock which was never in loss even in downturn. But then there was not much upside.  Sold most holding in March 2009, Then in Oct 2009 and some more in Dec 2009.  Value of stock was following the range of 100 to 120 Rs.

3 Bajaj Auto – and other two such as Bajaj Finserve and Bajaj Holdings and Investments sold earlier and then Bajaj auto in Dec 2009. There was sudden rise of share price in last 3-5 months and whole auto space increasing sales and market share and hence share prices of auto sector. But since holding was just 5 shares and already in profit, thought of selling and executed idea at last.

4 BEML/EClex /Lanco Infratech / Burnpur Cement - All these shared were my IPO rally buy of 2007 and early 2008. There was no specific reason to hold them as long as they are not making any losses. Hence sold all of them in same order of appearance in label.  Eclex was really showing some good sign of recovery and was low PE bet and dividend yield around 3.15 % (Rs 10 for FY 2008-2009)  and now they also declared interim dividend of 7.5 Rs in Nov 2009, I think sell in Oct 2009 was mistake as today’s CMP is around 469.75 and eps around 31 rs (PE 15 now). But again it was really tiny holding and I was planning to exit since long time.

Now, worst of my portfolio- 5 major stocks out of which one

1. Maytas Infra I was planning to sell in Oct 2008 and waiting for 1 year to complete and then Satyam scam came into light and this script got hammered.  Still having around 50 % loss from IPO purchase price.
2. Brigade - Same is case as Real estate stocks got hammered and it having losses of 53%
3. Edlewisee – IPO buyout and still 40% down but its profitable company and gives dividend yearly though it might take at least 3 years to reach IPO price of Rs 825 or so.
4. Reliance Power – Same kahani (story )as other IPO and Power Sector stocks and its down around 26% even I try to make up losses in between by buying more stocks on lower price.
5. Suzlon – Only mistake apart from above 4 stocks which was bought not in IPO and not in profit till date. Its down nearly 30%  but got once chance to exit in break even price which I thought that share is in bull phase. Range bound around 90 rs currently and need push from better sales and result to cross Rs 100 barrier. But need to contain losses otherwise its nice story about green energy and a lot of emphasis on climate change and global warming might help this company to increase sales.

Now best of what I am holding

1. L and T - 64%  in profit since my last buy and having around 30 in total. Paid dividend too last year. But concern is , its risen too soon and too fast and hence might cool off.  High PE of 122 (I don’t know how is calculated at Google Finance but it shows this figure)  also needs to supported with better numbers. But will hold on this investments.
2. Infosys – 32% in profit since my last buy and added it make it around 29. No words to explain about this firm as all the numbers tells the story. Only concerns are that recent downgrades by Wells Fargo and Jeffreys in US and Rupee appreciation which took a toll of this stock in current week (around 5% down). But again, if someone want to hold best of Indian IT stock, I will go with this stock (than TCS or WIT) even though its not market leader in its segment.
3. RIL -29% in profit since my last buy and including bonus, now I am having around 60 shares. Best bluechip, highest wt on Sensex and Nifty 50, but concerns are infightings over Gas Price row between Ambani Siblings, trying to buy a controlling stake in bankrupt LyondellBasell Industries, hence pressure on stock as they are selling treasury stocks to raise cash.

New additions in last 15 months – apart from additional buying mentioned above 3 stocks and cost averaging in Suzlon and RPower,

1. NIFTYBEES - Nifty 50 ETF by benchmark mf after reading blog from Mr. Ajay Shah about low cost EFT’s and recommendation of once of close friend in banking industry. Why Benchmark ? well, lowest tracking error, lowest expenses in index fund cataory and highest AUM in ETF category for Nifty. (Other option was Qnifty by Quantum MF and Sunder from UTI and one more from ICICI Bank). Its also having 4 star rating from Valueresearchonline.com.
2. GOLDBEES - Gold ETF from Benchmark MF. Even I am surprised with choice of buying gold in my portfolio but whatever happened to Gold prices and to bring some stability to my portfolio, I thought of keeping more gold in future as well.

Well, this is what I am holding as of today. I will add more of NIFTY as and when I will get surplus money to invest.

Key Learnings?

Well, I am holding losers like RPOWR,SUZLON, EDELWEISS, BRIGADE and MAYTAS and selling winners like Eclers, GMR Infra and Lanco Infra or Bajaj Auto but then I need to improve this trait of successful investor in future.

Why I am writing all these?

May be past reference points for my future investments or what I was thinking in Jan 2010 about my equity holding or what I think was mistake and what I think was not mistake.

(And it took more than 1 hr for me to type all these)

My immediate impression about Google Chrome OS

Somehow when I visited Balaji Temple at Birmingham last week on boxing day, I noticed one hoarding at Dudley Road about Google Chrome and I was surprised to see that. Then I thought, since Google has got a lot of money to spend in UK, they might be spending some on brand building. So I though of doing some online search on this advt campaign. I got a article about this video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JyFbF7QFlY which is all about more details on Google chrome os. Some of the questions raised by IT Journalist were not answered properly like privacy of data etc. Sometimes, I feel they are reinventing the wheel (OS in this case) than focussing more on their core strengths like Search or Ad works etc. I spent 80 mins today to see the whole video about this presentation and read 284 comments and then thought of blogging about it.  Here is my take on this OS. Some part of it, I tried to post on Youtube but there is limit for 500 words. Hence this additional post on my blog.

Few things to note- This will be new OS same as current Chrome Browser which will fast. Hence, it will be popular. A bad thing about it is that it assumes net connectivity for its functioning. This is not possible in rest of world except may be US, UK and some of EU nations which got better infrastructure either mobile data or DSDL connections. For rest of the world like India, China and Africa, LA and Australia, they need to think differently. They are trying to launch a product in Nov 2010 which will be compatible to some net books.

More on privacy front.  Do no evil is just a slogan to say and not to act. They will definitely  use this stored information for Ad words and other stuff  like building search algorithm or to market Google products or will sell data to third parties to make money out of it.

I am worried that there will be world with loss of privacy using cloud computing. I am sure, EU Anti trust commission will not pass this as single OS, Single Browser system as they objected to Microsoft in case of IE and Windows.

But next year, I will definitely try to get first copy of netbook and try my hand on this new experiment by Google.

A lot more questions that needs to be answered before that..

Best way to send money to India from UK

There are many young Indians reaching to foreign shores in their early ages due to their IT jobs which demands partial Onsite presence and then they get paid in foreign currencies.  Most of the time, they want to know, how  can I convert this currency into INR or send money to India. Initially they do what their colleagues say but longer they stay, more options they look for better returns on their pounds or dollars or whatever currency.  I would like to share my personal experience about which way is best way to get better exchange rates on your GBP to INR conversions.

There are major 2 players in the market. One is backed by Times Group called REMIT2INDIA which is again backed by Citigroup or CITIBANK and Money2India which is backed by largest private sector bank in India called ICICI Bank.

All of these online money transfer agents or websites claims that they to free transfer and eat or cut at least 1 rs per pounds as a commission and also takes 3-5 working days to complete the transaction.

IMHO, SBI’s GLS UK and US might be the best one in terms of exchange rates. Well, you all might have surprised to know that SBI is also doing all sort of things. More about GLS is here.

Global Link Services (GLS) is an office functioning under the International Banking Group of State Bank of India, Corporate Center located at Mumbai, set up for handling foreign currency collections on behalf of all domestic branches of SBI. It also handles Inward Remittances on electronic Platform from Individuals, Banks and Exchange Companies in U.S.A., Europe, Middle East and other parts of the world.

ICICI Bank and other banks like HDFC Banks has recently came to this money exchange business but SBI is there since long time as they were only bank having branches in US, UK, Gulf and Europe ( apart from BOB and Bank of India). Now they do have online interface which works well in reasonable time frame.  I earlier posted about SBI’s global or UK ambition.  I would like HDFC Bank should also come to US and UK and do the similar business as they are one of the most preferred domestic private bank and now a days favourites of stock market. I know Axis bank is trying reach this market but not seen much of branches yet.

Individual experience matters here but I will go with SBI for better exchange rates and ICICI for fast and reliable service. SBI is there everywhere in India and small towns where ICICI or other private sector banks like HDFC or Axis will take another 5 years to reach. Due to its core banking opertions, its possible to send money to these branches from any other banks using NETFT facility of RBI.

What to do next in career???

I always discuss with some of my friends at Hyd about future of ours in IT Industry.

So many think that its boom time so make a hay when grass is green and sun is shining etc.

So suggest about do some technological upgrade. like join some cource in xxx techonology or YYY Company and then that’s it.

I see all the things are where they are even after 2-3 years donw the line.

Hence, I want to look for more answers using this blog.

If anyone got answer- please do post reply on this blog.

My Stocks portfolio – Part II

Its almost 6 months now since I posted my stock portfolio on this blog. So its time for review and new learnings or what I was thinking 6 months back is same or its different and if so, what are the reasons to find. I like the concept like stocks for life, or stock for next 15-20 year. But there is no such thing in real world. I read more about what buy and hold strategy is not good for equity and some of the bloggers telling about effective stop loss will be better idea to implement and profit from it. I will start with losers in last six months and then cover winners. What I would like to add if I have money to buy more.

1 Maytas Infra – I was thinking of booking profit in Nov end and reason was it was only stock (after PGCIL) I was in green at that time. Suddenly, Mr Raju and satyam thought of buying in 16th Dec 2008 and then cancelled it after rejection by FII and DII took heavy toll on this. Every day 5% down since then. It is competing with Bajaj Finserve for Rs 500 slot at the bottom. What I am not exiting this stock? Well, I feel or gut feeling says that it will be able to rebound once Real Estate story or Infra story catch up with Indian Economy and BSE/NSE or some suitable big brother rescue this firm in this turbulent time.

– I am completing this post as there are a lot of things happened when I first started writing about this.

Going for 1z0-042 at last

I am planning for second paper in Oracle DBA 10g Series which is 1z0-043- Oracle DBA II Workshop. I am planning for this exam since I passed first paper on Jan 2009 and thinking of doing some training before going ahead.

Seems little tough as there is more focus on RMAN and other advanced features of Oracle 10g. Let’s see

Follow-up on 17 Sept 2009:

I cancelled the exam and I am still planning to go for DBA Training in India and then appear for exam.

General Error Messages in Validations – New way to do it

I developed a lot of applications in Application Express and I do have some kind of freedom to choose error messages where validations are not defined. To add few types of validations which are defined but not what kind of error message lead me to another problem. Now application is going to UAT and external Testing team is testing these applications raised issue about grammer and consistance syntex of validations.
There are few set of validations which are commonly used in my applications like
Number Specific one

1. Item specified is Is number
2. Format mask fo item is is 99.9 or 9.9 or 99.9 ( like height and weight fields
3. Item range must be between x and y value
4. Item valuse must be greater than zero

Date Specific one

1. Item must be valid date
2. Item must be in format dd/mm/yyyy
3. Item must less than sysdate or some other date

General Items – Characters

1. Value must be specified (Not Null) one

Now, I created some of the validations and later came to know about its inconsistant nature of it.
I can’t visit all the validations, change the error message and test the application as it was time consuming, errore prone, and boring.

So, here is new way. I declared a varibale in defination which will be like

For number
V_NUMBER_ERROR_1 and Items specified must be a number.
V_NUMBER_ERROR_2 and Item specified must be greater than zero.

I declared all the validations error messages in defination. Then exported whole application in .SQL (which is default one for apex). Opened the code in SQL Navigator or SQL Developer (whichever is used in your organisation as PL/SQL IDE will be fine – Most use TOAD). Searched for validation type as ITEM_IS_NUMBER and replaced error message with
&V_NUMBER_ERROR_1. in single quotes.

Done all the changes (Find and intellegent Replace) and imported application with keeping same application id. Done. Now all the validations with similar nature of errors will have same error message.

User or anyone who don’t like error message can change it at central place only once and all the messages will be replaced.

Great feature of apex. It also saves time when I create more validations on other forms as I don’t have to type long error messages and worry about uppercase/ lowercase/ error text and just paste error message variable.

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Prolem in Apex – Not able to limit Text Area

I had created a lot of Text Areas in one my pet application and suddenly realised that I am not able to control lenght of it.. Well, I was first surpirse. Then my reaction was, how come I miss this major bug or known issue.
With quick discussion with collegue, I decided to change then with Text Area with word counter. Now it looks dirty but it does its job. Dirty because, it (text or character counter) appears below text area. Does its job because it counts how many words that you had entered automatically and once you reach limit, it shows text in red ( and counter as well) and trim the rest of the stuff to max limit.

Well done..there are other ways to deal with this error but let’s see if this solution is acceptable or not. Whole change took just 20 min of my time as I exported application, searched for textarea and replaced with textarea_with_char_counter..and imported application..

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