Seeking Alpha by Adding Beta

I have taken such a long break from my blogging that it almost felt like waiting for Star Wars movie or interest rate hike by FED. Both events: new Star Wars movie after 10 years and interest rate hike by Fed after 9 years. What a timing - both these events happened in span of less than 48 hours! These events and upcoming new year inspired to start blogging again. Year 2015 have been tough for my investing suggestions. I just looked it my recommendations and collectively they are down by about 15% (assuming shadow portfolio of equal amounts invested at start of year). It's bad - there is no other way to say it. I almost started doubted my own analysis. Hopefully you did your own diligence and did not lose as much. But that won't deter me to continue my passion of analyzing market trends and come up with some investment ideas. Here are few. I will follow up for 2016 recommendations in next blog. Sunny outlook for solar and wind - This was another significant development l

Yesterday me and Yash went to San Jose Airport to welcome India's PM Narendra Modiji. It was great experience to see one of the most popular world leaders in person and have slight of hand-shake two times. Yash managed to get a selfie also:-) The weekend is full of events culminating into Community welcome at SAP center which we plan to attend. It would be fun. What a change leader can make in terms of country's perception at world stage. 2 years back India was slowing, stuck in lack of governance and despite her potential no one was paying attention. After Modi became PM, he took on himself personally to travel extensively and use his charisma to change India's image on world stage. And what a success he got. He is only leader in world (other than Obama and Pope) who can fill a stadium of thousands of people to listen to him. His policies such as Digital India, Make In India, Clean India and many others have captured imagination of Indians across the world. No wonder he

Google is now Alphabet - very interesting move by one of the biggest company in the world and it came out of nowhere. This may be in works and may have been triggered by motivation of creating CEO positions for very capable candidates like Sundar P and others. Congrats to another Indian CEO at major tech company. This move by Google triggered me thinking. What are various companies which would complete Alphabet's A-Z? Here is my take: A: Airbnb (Hospitality) B: Baidu (Search in biggest market) C: Calico (Biotech/Life Sciences) D: Dropbox (Storage) E: Expedia (Travel) F: Flipcart (India's biggest online marketplace) G: Google (of course) H: Hulu (complementary to YouTube) I: Instacart (Grocery shopping) J: Jawbone (Wearables) K: Kickstarter (Fund-raising) L: LinkedIn (Professional social network) M: MonDB (Database for app developers) N: Nest (Home Automation) O: OpenTable (Online restaurant reservation) P: PayPal (Payments) Q: Quora (Search based on Q&A)

Last few weeks have been very interesting and blog-worthy. It has been while since I wrote my commentary regarding various events impacting economy and markets. End of Jun had multiple deadlines - all of which passed and still discussions going on: Greece/Creditors bailout discussions, Iran and world powers Nuclear deal. Unfortunately none of these are closed - deadlines gone and extended multiple times with leaders meeting over weekends. So what's in store over next few weeks and how it could impact markets? Here is my take: Greece and creditors would negotiate well into mid-night Sunday and may declare a last minute deal avoiding "Grexit" but it would only be temporary patch at best. The Greek drama would continue well till end of year creating repeat of Jun drama around holiday season. IMO, best course of action would be for Greece to come out of Euro and introduce local currency (which would be at 50% of face-value of Euro) and promote some structural reforms. Arg

Let's celebrate Super-pi day with 10 digits in famous "pi" aligning today with 3/14/15 @ 9:26:53. Some math and science geeks are planning to wed exactly on that time to show their love for each other and for mathematics. Today also happens to be Albert Einstein's Birthday! So I am happy that my son Yash is going to spend his morning volunteering at Tech Museum and Isha would be spending her day participating in three events at Science Olympiad. Well done kids with your pursuit of science and math! Now coming to my events in finance world. March always have been quite interesting (2nd to months of Sept/Oct). 15 years back Nasdaq reached its peak (above 5000) in March and it touched 5000 just few days back just to fall back. In 2009 markets reached it's bottom on Mar 9 and this year oil markets are reaching it's multi-year lows in March. Even in currency markets, Euro and Yen are reaching multi-year lows. Euro is racing towards parity with US dollar and sho

On Valentine's day, third biggest show on earth started it's latest incarnation in Australia/NewZealand (first and 2nd would be Olympics and Soccer WC). And what a start with most awaited India-Pak match. I was glad that India outplayed Pak in every aspect of the game and won the match convincingly. Hope "boys in blue" can repeat this performance in all games including knockout round which would be in March (the tournament goes on till Mar 28). Now let's look at geo-politics and its impacts on markets. Since my last blog in which I recommended 15 investment ideas, markets are on fire especially energy stocks. That makes sense for multiple reasons. First of all there was "irrational pessimism" in oil markets which pushed down crude to mid-40s and pundits were predicting it to go down to 30s. Crude came down by more than 50% just over 2-3% gap in supply-demand. If we look at normal macro-economic principles, it just did not make sense. However crude mar

Last week words with "de" were popular. It started with Patriots winning their entry into SuperBowl with "defaulted" balls and ECB coming out with their strongest measures to deal with deflation which is setting in Europe. Interesting week indeed! Next Sunday is SuperBowl and as always it's time to bet on who is going to win. While both teams are strong, my prediction is Seattle Seahawks would win. This could be good for Markets as SuperBowl Indicator (which is nearly 80%) accurate says that win from NFC would mean markets would end positive for the year. Or maybe it's reverse corollary. Already with so much stimulus, it's most likely that markets would end year with positive means NFC team (Seahawks) would win. Let's see what happens in 2015. It's almost month into 2015 so it's time to recommend 15 picks for the year. Hopefully 2015 picks would do much better than 2014 picks. These picks are just an academic exercise. One needs to do his/

First of all, Happy New Year to all. 2014 was a mixed year for my predictions. While my prediction of all indexes (DOW at 18K, S&P over 2014 and Nasdaq near 4800 were very close to my predictions at start of 2014). I am proud of my predictions at macro level. However my recommendations did not do that good. Overall couple of recommendations like Yahoo (up by 28%) and RAD (up by 57%), there were some bad ones like NBG (down by 68%) and SRPT (down by 28%). Overall portfolio based on my recommendations would have been down by 3-4% (assuming equal amount investments). That's pretty shabby compared to S&P returns of 13%. Most of my recommendations are normally in small cap. When compared to small cap index which returned about 4%, it's ok.  Maybe I should stick with macro predictions:-) So here are some: OIL had it's 2nd worst year of all time. So what's outlook for oil in 2015. I think it goes up from here. After coming down by 50% in 6 months, it would go up b