Parchayi.com – Personal Finance Simplified

I just ran an XRay on all our investments today and I was sort of surprised. I knew my International exposure would be less since I sold of a majority of my India funds. However, considering that my largest holding is VEIEX (9% of my portfolio), it was strange to see that my portfolio was still 62% US Stocks and 34% Foreign Stocks making it very similar to my allocation in July inspite of a lot of changes in my holdings. My style diversification is also very close to July’s with majority Large Cap holdings. So I really need to focus on moving some funds around to midcaps and internationals.

I’m waiting for a pullback in India before I dive in again. As of now the premium on INP is >10% while IFN trades at a 15% discount!! I’m not entirely sure which one I would buy. Right now I’m waiting and watching. I did acquire some FNI even though it invests only in ADRs and recently acquired some GOOG and AAPL hoping that next year will bring even more success as the iPhone goes international, Macs gain marketshare, Google takes over even more of the webs advertising dollars and hopefully launches a gPhone.

Wachovia Insiders (including the CEO and other directors) have been buying up a lot of stock lately as the stock has taken a severe beating. The yeild on Wachovia stock is currently over 6.5% and it probably can’t get too much better. So I got myself some Wachovia stock too, which I hope will payoff more in dividends than my savings accounts long term.

Here is a list of some ridiculous dividend yeilds from Financials

Some of these dividends have always been growing (e.g. BAC has raised dividends for 30 straight years). I would expect Bank of America and Wachovia to continue paying their dividend and even raise it as usual in 08. Citigroups ability has been called into question and I wouldn’t bet on it but that dividend will probably continue.

As for the other banks, do your own research. But in any case if you are looking at financials, now may be a good time to buy.

The Bombay stock exchange breifly crossed 20,000 twice before closing below 20,000. Is 20,000 here to stay or are we headed in for a wild ride and headed back to 18,000? Noone can tell. For now, I have unloaded my India funds and taken some profits. I will get back in at dips. However they maybe a while coming if the current pace continues. It took only a few weeks for the massive gains.

Along with India, China has also posted spectacular gains. Thanks in part to India (INP) and China(FXI), my mimf2007 contest portfolio is up more than 50% for the year.

Recently I ran across an interesting new ETF – FNI – First Trust Chindia – exposure to both India and China in the same fund – that’s nice. The only problem with this fund is that it invests in ADRs, not directly in the market. The problem with that is that there are not that many Indian ADRs to select from so the fund basically invests in all of them. I don’t know what the case for Chinese ADRs is, however. FNI has done well since it’s inception this year (obviously) but ADR premiums and discounts swing wildly and make for too much volatility. Inspite of that I might consider a position in FNI with some of the proceeds from my IFN and INP sale to gain some China exposure.

The BSE Sensex was up nearly 600 points yesterday, it’s 10th straight day of gains and 10th straight record close! The last few months have seen the market go up a couple of thousand points and it shows no signs of slowing down. However the index has also seen thousand point drops when it has risen so fast in the last couple of years. Eventually though it has always recovered and reached new highs very quickly.

I sold all my IFN in the India Funds rights offer and am waiting for dips below 50$ to buy some back. However this time around I might consider INP or FNI instead. I do own some INP already and it has given me spectacular returns. This has been an expensive year for me with travel, immigration and other expenditures, however my exposure to emerging markets is keeping me on track to meet my net worth goals for the year.

IFN will payout $56.4285 per share of IFN and from my account at scottrade it seems that they accepted all my shares!! So the rights offer was a great deal and I hope to buy some IFN back in time for the dividend after they deposit the money in my account. As of Friday (the day of the offer), the discount on IFN was nearly 12%.

I hope you made some money reading this blog!

The India Fund has made available NAV values for each day of this week. Yesterdays NAV was 53.12, making the price a 15% discount and the repurchase offer even more attractive! I’m going to wait until Friday before I make the decision but it looks like the repurchase offer is likely to be a good bet.

Today in Opera, I can see a new look for the Yahoo! Finance front page (as usual changes have not propagated to the rest of the site and probably never will in Yahoo’s tradition of half-bakedness in updating interfaces). In IE/Firefox, I needed to click the link for the new font page.

The Good I do like the new interface, whose additions include Europe and Asia tabs in Market Summary, Portfolios are conveniently visible alongside recent quotes. There are CD rates visible alongside Mortgage rates and in general a lot more information has been squeezed into the same amount of space without making it feel cramped.

The Bad Attempting to customize the page leads to pages related to the old interface, streaming quotes still do not work in Opera (Yahoo! when will you use your own UI Library????)

The India Fund announced the commencement of it’s semi-annual repurchase offer on Friday. The dealine to respond to the offer is 5PM Eastern on September 14. The shares will be purchased at 2% less than NAV on September 21.

On Friday, The India Fund traded at a discount of 7.3% to NAV and this is significantly less than the discount of 13% in June. However, if this discount continues at the same level the offer is still valuable as you can make 5% profits for doing nothing.

Be warned that Scottrade will charge a 25$ fee for this and you should check with your broker what they will charge. Also check the premium/discount to the NAV on Sep. 7 (the last one available prior to the deadline) before making your decision. Click here for a chart of the premium/discount history for IFN.

With the current situation, a lot of great stocks look like they are on a bargain basement sale. Even financials – most of whose stock prices are hurt more than justified by the current scenario. Wachovia, Bank of America etc. are amongst the bright spots today because they have become so cheap that is makes no sense not to buy them. The P/E of Morgan Stanley has fallen to 6.6!

It might even be time to get some techs with GOOG well below 500 and AAPL more than 20% off its 52 week high. In fact everything looks like a great buy. The stock market feels like a Big Lots store. Enjoy your shopping while it lasts.