Dr M Khalid's global village blog

 Investing based on past performance This is the primary method for selecting a mutual fund. We look at the past performance of the fund and then choose to invest in it. Nothing wrong with that but, how long is the past that you check? There are multiple funds which have performed for 3-6 months but failed later. Consistency is what matters here. You should ideally be checking the 3 year and 5 year performances of the fund rather than for 6 months. It would tell you if the fund was able to tide over various market cycles and interest rates. The top funds have been those which withstand the downside and then performed when the time arrived. Giving time for performance of the fund is very essential especially for equity funds which usually fail in short term but have potential to perform in the long term. Markets You may have chosen the right fund with a great track record. However, one thing which is always uncertain is the market. The market here includes stock market in ...

Saudi Arabia  named Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz as second in line to the throne, the latest royal promotion as King Abdullah confronts unprecedented political instability in the Middle East and economic changes at home. Muqrin, the king’s half-brother who was born in 1945, was made second crown prince alongside his duties as second deputy prime minister, the official Saudi Press Agency said yesterday, citing a royal decree. King Abdullah named his defense minister and half-brother Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz, born in 1935, crown prince in June 2012, making the traditionalist former governor of Riyadh next in line to become king. “By many accounts, Prince Muqrin is a close and trusted adviser to  King Abdullah ,” said Fahad Nazer, a political analyst at Vienna, Virginia-based JTG, and a former official at the Saudi embassy in Washington . “His relative youth, extensive experience in government and knowledge of the West make him an attractive candidate. He appears to be a...

Norwegian economist Karen Helene Ulltveit-Moe got where she is by speaking out. Now that she’s joined the board of the country’s central bank, she’ll have to learn to zip her lip in public. She quit a committee charged with making industrial-policy recommendations in 2005 to protest how it was reaching its conclusions. Her research challenging a tax break for the shipping industry landed her in front of a parliamentary group to explain her findings. She’s been among the strongest voices saying  Norway  must prepare for the time when oil revenue no longer fuels the economy. Ulltveit-Moe, 46, is at one of Norway’s most consensual institutions. She was named to the bank board in December and participated in the decision to keep the key interest rate unchanged at 1.5 percent, announced today. Her career also includes being the first female professor in the University of Oslo economics department and serving on a dozen corporate management and advisory boards. As a Norges B...

Be wary of the  fees  you will be forking out, and the  rewards ,  perks  and  benefits  for each site. Be reasonable with your funding goals. And don’t make the mistake of leaving it all to the crowdfunding sites to do all the marketing for you. 1. Kickstarter Probably the hottest crowdfunding site on the Internet is Kickstarter, which raised a total of $220 million from 61,000 launched projects so far. Thousands explore its listed projects every second waiting to give away their money to the project they think is most deserving! According to the guidelines , Kickstarter accepts all major kinds of creative projects but not for causes or awareness campaigns, charity or scholarships, and definitely not for vacations or a new digital camera. The submission process is really intuitive and straightforward, you just need to  sign up an account , then  fill out your project details . You are encouraged to  describe everything in gr...

It all started as a science fair project. As a neophyte sixth-grader at Dorseyville Middle School, Suvir noticed he was getting a lot more handouts than he did in elementary school. Interested in applying computer science to promote environmental sustainability, Suvir decided he was going to figure out if there was a better way to minimize the constant flurry of paper and ink. Reducing paper use through recycling and dual-sided printing had been talked about before as a way to save money and conserve resources, but there was less attention paid to the ink for which the paper served as a canvas for history and algebra handouts. "Ink is two times more expensive than French perfume by volume," Suvir says with a chuckle.  Multitalented teen gets 150 scholarships Meet the world's smartest kid Epic spelling bee finally hails a winner He's right: Chanel No. 5 perfume costs $38 per ounce, while the equivalent amount of Hewlett-Packard printer ink can cost up to $75. So...

With all that methodology out of the way, we can get to the fun stuff. Here's the first big fat list: The ten schools with the highest-earning graduates over the next 20 years. By this measure, Harvey Mudd is America's one million-dollar college. Harvey Mudd's record here is impressive. But its net cost is more than twice as much as Harvard's due to their disparity in grant aid. So it's also useful to look at annualized ROI—the "bang-for-your-buck" measure. By that dollar-for-dollar measure, the best college investment isn't Harvey Mudd, Cal Tech, MIT, or any of those schools you might expect. It's the University of Virginia (if you're an in-state student) and Georgia Tech. Harvard and Stanford also crack the top 10. (A lert : I've shortened the Y-axis here to highlight just how far ahead UVA and Georgia Tech are.) Everybody graduates from college with a major. So I wanted to know not just which college grads get richest but whi...

Ever since Cindy Hasz opened her geriatric care management business in San Diego 13 years ago, she has been fighting a losing battle for clients unable to get Medicare coverage for physical therapy because they “plateaued” and were not getting better. “It has been standard operating procedure that patients will be discontinued from therapy services because they are not improving,” she said. No more. In January, Medicare officials updated the agency’s policy manual  — the rule book for everything Medicare does — to erase any notion that improvement is necessary to receive coverage for skilled care. That means Medicare now  will pay for physical therapy, nursing care and other services  for beneficiaries with chronic diseases like multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease in order to maintain their condition and prevent deterioration. But don’t look for an announcement about the changes in the mail, or even a prominent notice on the Medicare website. Me...

1. Coastal flooding will kill people and cause destruction. 2. Some people will go hungry because of warming, drought and severe downpours. 3. Big cites will be damaged by inland flooding. 4. Water shortages will make the poor even poorer in rural areas. 5. Crazy weather, like storms, can make life miserable, damaging some of the things we take for granted, like electricity, running water and emergency services. 6. Some fish and other marine animals could be in trouble, which will probably hurt fishing communities. 7. Some land animals won't do much better and that's not good for people who depend on them. 8. Heat waves, especially in cities, will kill the elderly and very young. https://in.news.yahoo.com/un-panel-8-reasons-worry-global-warming-051137736.html

Kanpur, Mar.29 (ANI): Family of Squadron leader of Indian Air Force (IAF), Ashish Yadav, who was killed in the cargo plane crash, resented no response from the Air Force authorities post incident, in Kanpur. "After the accident, nobody has come, either from the Indian Air Force or either someone from any administration or authority or a people's representative. It is very unfortunate that our brave hearts sacrifice their lives for the nation but there is no one who has the time, even the Air Force officers, to come visit the victim's family and be with them in their hard times to console them," said a relative, Shyam Singh Yadav on Saturday (March 29). An Indian Air Force cargo plane crashed on Friday, killing its crew of five, in the latest of a string of accidents to spotlight poor safety standards across the country's armed services. Yadav was a Squadron leader at the Hindon Air Base in Agra. Both his father and father-in-law have served in the Indian...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Nearly a million jars of peanut butter were dumped at a New Mexico landfill this week to expedite the sale of a bankrupt peanut-processing plant that was at the heart of a 2012 salmonella outbreak and nationwide recall. Bankruptcy trustee Clarke Coll said he had no other choice after Costco Wholesale refused to take shipment of the Sunland Inc. product and declined requests to let it be donated to food banks or repackaged or sold to brokers who provide food to institutions like prisons. "We considered all options," Coll said. "They didn't agree." MelindaJoy Pattison, executive director of the Food Bank of Eastern New Mexico, on Friday called the dumping of the peanut butter "horrendous." She said as long as there was nothing wrong with the peanut butter, her operation would have found a way to store it, remove the labels and distribute it to the people who depend on the food bank. "Those trucks carrying it to the...

(Reuters) -  Cisco Systems Inc  plans to offer cloud computing services, pledging to spend $1 billion over the next two years to enter a market currently led by the world's biggest online retailer Amazon.com Inc .   VS Cisco said it will spend the amount to build data centers to help run the new service called Cisco Cloud Services. Cisco, which mainly deals in networking hardware, wants to take advantage of companies' desire to rent computing services rather than buying and maintaining their own machines. The company said it plans to deliver the service with and through partners including Australian telecom service provider Telstra, tech distributor  Ingram Micro Inc , and Indian IT company Wipro Ltd. "Customers, providers and channel partners ... want to rapidly deploy valuable enterprise-class cloud experiences for key customers -- all while mitigating the risk of capital investment," Rob Lloyd, Cisco's president of development and sales, said i...