Parchayi.com - Personal Finance Simplified

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.

Last time I covered the battle, I was recommending Netflix acquire/partner with a DVD rental Kiosk to compete with BBI but blockbuster is hell bent on one-upping netflix in any way it can and it has acquired movie download service Movie Link to compete with Netflix’s movie download service.

As of now Blockbuster plans to continue running movielink as a separate entity but will integrate in the future. Unlike Netflix’s streaming, Movie link offers downloads and downloaded rentals but I still think this is all bad for Netflix. as of now BBI is flat to slightly higher and NFLX is down over 5%.

Blockbuster is now going to limit in-store exchanges to 5 movies per month - New Plan Structures - or you can pay 24.99 and get unlimited exchanges in a plan called “Total Access Premium”. This will make investors happy but subscribers unhappy. I was wondering what drove the stock up nearly 6% today and this is what it was.

It seems some people got an email from Blockbuster informing them of the changes (and allowing them to keep their original plan for the same price). I have yet to receive the email but my account shows this:

Your current plan…
BLOCKBUSTER Total Access Premium
$17.99 / month (plus taxes)
3 at-a-time, unlimited
unlimited in-store movie exchanges
+1 FREE bonus Movie or Game Rental E-Coupon / Month
Next Billing Date:
August 07,2007

So I do have Total Access Premium and it still says 17.99 a month. After a little digging around, I found that the new plans only apply to new customers. Phew!

Update:: Blockbuster Pulls a Fast One = No more Total Access Premium for me.