Long time

OMG- the last time i posted inflation was at 5 odd percent:) Now it is 12% give up! Lehman brothers no longer exits. Fed became the largest PE investor by investing 80 billion in AIG with a debt+equity structure:) How the world changes in 6 months! We have a new airport in Bangalore. Good for early morning flights but not so great if you want to come back in the evening around 6! Markets are down to 13k again!

Hopefully it wont be that long till I post again:) Lets see how much more the world has changed!

finally!

I am so thrilled with this - Cleartrip Train Search http://www.cleartrip.com/trains
its still in beta and should work well soon. Its good they have done this without IR support which goes to show any search engine could have done this! NICE!

Inflation back up again

At 5.11%, the number is scary because this is a wholesale price index and a retail/consumer level price index - which is expected to be atleast a percent or more higher. A good part of the increase is due to the fuel price hike ( from about 4.25% a month ago). Whats scary is that the crude price isnt coming down and the new budget has been extremely disposoable income friendly which is bound to increase investment as well as consumption which in turn will lead to higher inflation. Again a bout of loan write offs for farmers which i think are good save for the usual problems-like did the deserving people really get it etc- will ensure some more cash flow albeit notional. Also loan write offs lead to a moral hazard problem - farmers will think they can usually take the loans and govt will always save them. The signalling problem is higher than anything else. So i am willing to switch to a home loan that offers a fixed rate of 9% anyday! my floating rate looks likely to go up again! Funnily the RBI and the Govt seem to be acting in oppossite directions towards inflation. Reddy garu must be worried!

Ada does a rajini!

After Baba, a lot of distributors who had blindly believed the rajini magic lost money. Rajini was the producer of the movie as well - so he did something which had not been done before - he just returned back the money to the distributors so that they still kept faith in the R Word! Now after the reliance power debacle I was wondering what would ADA do. Reliance is pretty much built on the retail trust - institutional investors rarely say nice things abt the company and it was Dhirubhai Ambani's faith in retail investors that made the company/group what it is today and if ADA sat quietly then the retail investors would go away atleast from his group. Moreover with another of his group companies coming up for listing - reliance infratel - he had to do something to ensure that issue doesnt bomb and voila he has decided to give free shares to reliance power investors - but it probably wont solve the problem for long term investors - for short term traders this is a good sign - with no revenues and profits and only projects that open in 2012 onwards - any price is expensive for the stock right now! He could have probably given RPower investors a discount in the Rel Infra issue - but he will still manage to regain some of the faith that retail investors had in the group.

Fed cuts 75 bps

As I was telling my bro - all this market fall is just plain blackmail to the fed - cut or else! It is important to understand that the two biggest recessions in US memory were caused by huge stock market crashes and the fed is very wary of that - in the US a growing or stable market also feeds in to their ever growing consumerism - alan greenspan himself says that in his book - so the fed is extremely wary of another stock market crash causing a cut in spending as well whenever it sees a huge market crash. The problem is that I feel that the market has been using this to blackmail the fed - u look at the days before sep 18- markets worldwide fell by a huge margin and in the US and the fed reacted by cutting 50 bps. My friend ganesha doesnt agree - he says no fund will take such a huge loss to make the fed cut - I disagree these losses are notional - and they will recover them quick enough. Now again the funds held the entire world to ransom pushed down every damn market - and then fed cut rates by 75 bps even before the us markets reopened. Amidst inflation concerns et al! Here are the markets sledging the fed to say u better cut that! While everyone I knew today was saying what to buy - how is this correction and all in my office and my batch mates and colleagues - the one question that crossed my mind was when will fed cut and by how much- and when my bro called - told him i expect the fed to cut 75 bps asap! and then cnbc breaking news - fed cuts by 75 bps! - for the love of coincidence

Google and Railway bookings

I have always kept wondering what google can do to improve its services in India - and one opportunity is to look at the railway booking thing. While railway booking has made tremendous advances - you no longer have to stand in the queue and all but with the kind of speed in India and the way irctc.co.in works sometimes it can get painful to choose a particular train, check availability, then type in names, pick berth, choose a payment gateway and then finally pay. Now I dont know how many of you have used google for a flight search - internationally like Bang to NY and then you can pick dates and choose a service provider to check fares along with availability. I keep wondering why cant google do the same for Indian Railways - you search for SBC (Bangalore) to MAS(Chennai/Madras) - fortunately there is only service provider - so you can probably key in the date after that as well - say SBC to MAS 23/2/08 in the search box. Then it should give you the list of the trains and availability on particular class - like

Train SL 3AC 1AC 2AC
Bangalore mail - 225 25 1 5

and let all of these are links and then you click on say 225, a small window pops up - you can give your name, age, id proof and birth preference (ideally you could just opt to enter this out of ur google a/c profile if its for u) and then it goes to a google check out payment gateway automatically and ur ticket is e-mailed to you Of course, google could also work with irctc and figure out what ads it should put on the print out so that it matches with origin station and destination station and age/profile of traveller!

I probably dont know how tough this is technologically but if its done it can make life easier for a lot more people. And i keep refering to google - any of the search guys could do this - live/yahoo. Its all about integrating technology with user needs!

What would warren do:)

One of my all time favorite articles is what would disney do which discusses what walt disney would in this amazing new world of technology. Now with the recent market crash I am wondering what warren buffet would do - the last time he gave an interview he said he was sitting with more than 50 billion dollars of cash - and he dint know any decent company that was worth his while. He has been recently investing in Burlington Northern and has invested over 4 billion in that co . I am wondering what he would do with the rest of the 46 billion. Will he go out and start buying now - what will he buy - my guess is he will go back to old fundamental stocks - probably stocks like GE/Amex(which has fallen quite a bit) - will he buy the beaten down sectors like housing/financial companies. Whatever he might be doing, I am sure he is just waiting there for a correction like this and has his mouth watering for opportunities like this! somewhat like how slip catchers are waiting on a bouncy track in cricket:)but will he look at investing in India?

Finally!

If you have been reading my blog and also ET for a long time, you would know that I had issues with BCCL investing in companies and not disclosing interest. Now after a long time BCCL has started giving disclaimers in news items concering their investing companies:) Which is good - but i still stick to my old stand - that ideally no one should do an ad for equity deal - it kind of disturbs the journalastic independence.