Dr M Khalid's global village blog

As seen in the different currencies, Gold is seen to be ready to rise. It will not come down now. If you plan to buy, it's a good starting time. Better to invest every year. A good option is to buy gold ETFs in stock market. Banks like HDFC, SBI and AXIS have gold ETFs listed in the stock market. For that, read my post in that topic. Search for ' how to buy Gold ETF in India ' in the search box on this blog. Click on Images to enlarge.

Use this site to know the various parameters not seen i most websites showing details of mutual funds:  https://www. valueresearchonline.com/ Pay attention to ' Expense' or ' Expense Ratio (%)'  and ' Exit Load'  of a mutual fund also. The above website compares the mutual funds in a category on the basis of 'expense' also.  For example, generally, Franklin templeton group of mutual funds has more expense charges as compare to others. If we don't include it in calculation of net return, we will do wrong expectations. However, t he NAV of a mutual fund is calculated after deducting expenses so the returns which are being calculated are also net of expenses (this is as per reply to my mail, by a mutual fund brokerage firm) The expenses take a toll in the long run. Mutual funds give big returns only if you invest for a long horizon using SIP to invest and SWP to withdraw. search for 'mutual fund SWP' in the search box on my blog for understandin...

Bitcoin, Ethereum , all these are called cryptocurrencies. For bitcoin purchase, the most reliable site as per reviews and comparisons I found is: https://www.unocoin.com/ It is based in India. the helpline number picks up phone after few minutes but is quite helpful. If you want to purchase ethereum (ETH), you can buy bitcoin and change it via many sites which enable the change with a fee of 0.5%. But I have decided not to go for ETH at the moment (as on 06-Dec-2017) as I see its technicals in chart going weak. https://bitinfocharts.com/cryptocurrency-charts.html To buy ETH, this org based in Hyderabad can be used, but they are not opening new account as of now. https://ethexindia.com/ How to change to ETH fro bitcoin. Read lower part of the webpage: \ https://cryptoauthority.in/how-to-safely-buy-ethereum-in-india/ Cryptocurrency charts to get a overview: https://bitinfocharts.com/cryptocurrency-charts.html Meetup coordinated by founder of https://ethexindia.com/ https://www.meetup.co...

1. Moving at least a substantial portion of your cash on hand to an  offshore banking jurisdiction , even if you are currently living or banking in a safe haven. 2. Keeping your bank accounts under any  government deposit insurance  limit. Governments in the west have already fired the first shot across the bow that they won't even honor their own limits in times of crisis, so it makes sense to at the very least divide your money across enough accounts so that it does not exceed those limits. 3. Keep cash or  gold  on hand for use when ATMs where you live go dry during a bank run. 4. Never say, "it can't happen here". Because it can. _________________ The best offshore banks for 2017 : http://nomadcapitalist.com/2015/03/27/the-best-offshore-banks-2015/ ______ Ref http://nomadcapitalist.com/2015/07/06/how-to-protect-yourself-from-a-bank-bail-in-in-greece-cyprus-or-anywhere/

It's not from a unreliable source dear fellow Indians.  News from The Hindu newspaper website: The 'bail-in' clause changes the nature of relationship between the customer and the bank. It would mean that money is no longer safe in a bank. An account would lose its sovereign guarantee and instead become an investment. Putting away money in a bank would be akin to buying shares of a company or units of a mutual fund. The customer would need to monitor the level of toxicity of his bank with respect to its losses and accordingly keep switching bank accounts. Read more: http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/banking-on-legislation/article20005363.ece

How to recruit the right person for the job::-- Put about 100 bricks in a closed room. Then send 2 or 3 candidates into the room & close the door. Leave them alone & come back after a few hours and analyse the situation. 1) If they are counting the bricks, Put them in Accounts deptt. 2) If they are re-counting the bricks, Put them in Auditing. 3) If they have messed up the whole room with the bricks, Put them in Engineering. 4) If they are arranging the bricks in some strange order, Put them in Planning. 5) If they are throwing the bricks at each other, Put them in Operations. 6) If they are sleeping, Put them in Security. 7) If they have broken the bricks into pieces, Put them in Information Technology. 8) If they are sitting idle, Put them in Human Resources. 9) If they say they have tried different combinations yet not a single brick has been moved, Put them in Sales. 10) If they have already left for the day, Put them in Marketing. 11) If...

page moved to  https://financeschool2000.blogspot.com/2023/01/important-lesser-known-rules-about-ppf.html

 The total credit card outstandings — money spent by card holders and not repaid to the card company or bank — surged to Rs 59,900 crore at the end of September 2017, against Rs 43,200 crore in the same period last year Ref: http://indianexpress.com/article/business/business-others/one-year-after-demonetisation-credit-card-use-up-but-balance-due-surges-by-39-per-cent-4916475/

HYDERABAD:In what appears to be a classic case of forgery , the owners of a plot and a builder have been charged by the  GHMC  with misleading not just the  civic body  , but also the district collector and  Hyderabad High Court  by presenting them with a fake building permit. GHMC commissioner B  Janardhan Reddy  approached the Hyderabad High Court and urged it to vacate the stay order it granted in respect of a 1,000 square yard plot at  Namalagundu  area of Seethaphalmandi in  Secunderabad  and the huge multi-storied commercial building raised on it in order to enable the corporation to take action against the owners of this plot and also their builder because they misled not just the GHMC with a fake building permit, but also the district collector and the high court as well. The GHMC chief, in his affidavit, detailed how the owners of the plot, P  Rukkamma and four others, along with their builder K Yedu...

Click on the link to see video https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3YYBp7HDkqWMzdqVWlMLVdWNzg/view?usp=drivesdk

Switzerland's financial watchdog FINMA has closed down what it said was the provider  of a fake cryptocurrency and is investigating around a dozen other possible fraud cases, in the latest clamp-down on the risks involving virtual money. The move by the FINMA watchdog comes on the heels of Chinese authorities' ordering Beijing-based cryptocurrency exchanges to stop trading and immediately notify users of their closure. FINMA said it had three other companies on its warning list due to suspicious activity in cryptocurrencies, and was conducting 11 investigations into other possible fake virtual currencies https://finance.yahoo.com/news/swiss-shut-down-fake-e-090544871.html

Purchases Are Not Taxed: There is no way for  third parties  to identify, track or intercept transactions that are denominated in Bitcoins, so one of the major advantages of Bitcoin is that  taxes  for sales are not added onto any purchases. Very Low Transaction Fees: Standard  wire transfers  and foreign purchases typically involve fees and exchange costs. Since Bitcoin transactions have no intermediary institutions or government body involved, the costs of transacting are kept very low. This can be a major advantage for travelers. Additionally, any transfer in Bitcoins happens very quickly, eliminating the inconvenience of typical authorization requirements and wait periods.

Activists say students cracking up under pressure to perform. Chandrababu Naidu tells college officials to set things in order. Experts say not only coaching centres but even parents are responsible ____________ Hyderabad:  Samyuktha had scored 95 per cent in class 12 exams and joined a leading coaching institute in Hyderabad three months ago to get through the national medical exam. She wanted to be a doctor. On Monday, she killed herself, leaving behind a note that talked about her inability to cope with her studies. In the last two months alone, more than 50 students have reportedly committed suicide across Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Child rights activists who have been tracking these cases link many of them to students cracking up under pressure to perform. Ref https://www.ndtv.com/andhra-pradesh-news/50-suicides-in-60-days-dark-reality-of-andhra-telangana-coaching-centres-1764675?amp=1&akamai-rum=off

Like it or not, Bitcoin now commands the trust of people as seen in its market cap surpassing leading banks. Was not even imagined by most of us. This might be a clear challenge to the different  central banks which control money across the world. https://www.google.co.in/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/10/13/bitcoin-market-cap-bigger-than-goldman-sachs-and-morgan-stanley.html

In an article by Albert Edwards, reasons are listed.

"Net job creation or elimination will vary greatly by industry; some industries will experience overall job loss, some industries will experience net job loss for only a few years; and some industries, such as healthcare and education, will never experience net job loss." AI is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. These processes include learning, reasoning, and self-correction. Applications of AI include expert systems, speech recognition and machine vision. "AI will improve the productivity of many jobs, and used creatively, it has the potential to enrich people's careers, reimagine old tasks and create new industries," according to Gartner. 'Sustainable pace' Daryl Plummer, vice-president and Gartner Fellow, said chief information officers needed to develop a pace that could be sustained "no matter what the future holds." "Technology-based innovation is arriving faster than most organi...

A futurist and clean energy expert, Toni Seba, has predicted that electric vehicles would destroy the global oil industry after a decade. By 2030, 95% of people won't own private cars which would wipe off the automobile industry, he says. Boeing and JetBlue Airways have announced they would begin selling a hybrid-electric commuter aircraft by 2022. Planned by start-up Zunum Aero, the small plane would seat up to 12 passengers and reduce travel time and cost of trips under 1,600 km. Ref http://auto.economictimes.indiatimes.com/amp/news/oil-and-lubes/the-future-of-oil-is-almost-here-and-it-doesnt-look-very-pretty/60972841

KT Rama Rao, IT minister of Telangana, Hyderabad said   T-Hub provided aspiring entrepreneurs access to mentorship, investors, markets and governments. It gave start-ups an opportunity to dabble with the painstaking efforts that common man confronted and to come up with solutions. Asked to comment on the Centre's 'Startup India' initiative, Mr. Rao said the way forward for an initiative like that was to encourage children to innovate from a young age. Expose them to the pain of common man and ask them to come up with solutions. Just allocation of money was no answer. Earlier, Mr. Rao met industry and business leaders, notably Godrej group chairman Adi Godrej, Infosys executive vice-chairman Kris Gopalakrishnan, chairman and CEO of ReNew Power Sumant Sinha and LuLu group international chairman Yusuff Ali M.A. Read more www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Hyderabad/t-hub-to-be-worlds-largest-technology-incubator-ktr/article19803438.ece/amp/

Almost half of the graduates are women, compared with 32% in the U.S. Brunei leads the pack in Asia-Pacific for its high share of women graduates in science, technology, engineering and math. Almost half of the graduates are female, compared with just 32 percent in the U.S, according to a report published by the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation this week. The country of 417,200 people had fewer men than women among tertiary students as of 2015, with the ratio at 67 per 100 female students, according to the nation’s Key Indicators annual report. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-29/brunei-leads-apec-in-science-and-tech-female-graduates

Tamil Nadu RERA has launched a portal to ease the working.  It is http://apnarera.com  Public may view the details of the agents, their names, registration numbers as well as their address. With RERA, there would be mandatory disclosure of project details, including those of the promoter, project, land status and clearances. This would increase the credibility of developers and protect consumer rights as well. The Real Estate Regulatory Act (RERA) is a revolutionary step which will change the way real estate business is done in India. Its implementation will ensure financial discipline, transparency and compliance in the sector. This Act is customer-centric and upholds builder's accountability which will make the sector more process driven and quality-oriented.  http://www.financialexpress. com/money/how-homebuyers-are- set-to-get-booster-shot-in- purchasing-property-this-big- relief-will-drive-confidence/ 875624/lite/

For developers, the company launched three major new tools today: the Azure Machine Learning Experimentation service, the Azure Machine Learning Workbench and the Azure Machine Learning Model Management service. In addition, Microsoft also launched a new set of tools for developers who want to use its Visual Studio Code IDE for building models with CNTK, TensorFlow, Theano, Keras and Caffe2. And for non-developers, Microsoft is also bringing Azure-based machine learning models to Excel users, who will now be able to call up the AI functions that their company's data scientists have created right from their spreadsheets. Ref  https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/25/microsoft-launches-new-machine-learning-tools/amp/

Experts from Google, Amazon, Mphasis NEXT Labs and Kalaari Capital participate in an interactive session at ISB Hyderabad. Artificial intelligence (AI) was the new electricity and it can almost be described the second industrial revolution. It would affect everyone and pervade all sectors from education to health, fintech, agriculture and old school industries in the next 5 to 10 years, said experts at a panel discussion. India should gear up for the entrepreneurial and job opportunities that would come out of new technology, they emphasised. Experts from Google, Amazon, Mphasis NEXT Labs and Venture Capital company Kalaari Capital participated in an interactive session on 'Technology Tomorrow' as part of the ISB Leadership Summit-2017 held at Indian School of Business here on Saturday. Pankaj Gupta, Director of Engineering, Google Next Billion Users, said students should ignore the sensational newspaper headlines about the impact of AI, but listen to the experts involved in th...

He said, We're teaching children the wrong thing: that machines are better than humans. He believes this mindset will cost young people jobs in a future dominated by AI and computing. Rather than encouraging humans to become more like machines, we should be building our machines to be more like humans, he suggested. "A machine does not have a heart, [a] machine does not have soul, and [a] machine does not have a belief. Human being have the souls, have the belief, have the value; we are creative, we are showing that we can control the machines," https://qz.com/1082709/alibabas-jack-ma-says-successful-leaders-need-eq-iq-and-lq-baba/

The Public Provident Fund (PPF) will now offer 7.9% but experts say it is still a good option for investors. Given that consumer inflation is down to 3.65%, the real rate of return of the PPF is a healthy 4.25%.  "This is quite impressive for an option that offers assured returns," says Amol Joshi, Founder, PlanRupee Investment Service. "Investors should continue to take advantage of this long-term tax-free product," he adds.  Even if you compare the PPF rate with the 10- year government bond yield, the scheme is attractive. "The 10-year bond yield is a better benchmark for PPF than consumer inflation," says Manoj Nagpal, CEO, Outlook Asia Capital   Currently, the 10-year bond yield is around 6.8% and the PPF at 7.9% makes it for a premium of 110 basis points. "Historically, the average premium has been around 75 bps. So, the PPF investor is today earning a higher real return," says Nagpal. Even so, some investors may be feeling disappointed by t...

As technology started to evolve at a lightning pace, the need for engineers who could take ownership of the functional features and build solutions end-to-end became the need of the hour. These engineers would fundamentally work along with the product owners and understand the business significance of the problem domain and craft solutions using technologies that are relevant to that domain. They would typically possess the skill to learn, unlearn and relearn programming languages and frameworks in an agile manner, consistent with the business need. With DevOps becoming more mainstream, these engineers would also need to understand the operational landscape of the solution they were building. This would mean, that they would not only be involved in creating the solution, but also be proficient in deploying the solution to its intended production environments. Going forward, as full-stack becomes the flavor of the day, specialization will tend to move more towards technology stacks and ...

Apple's iOS devices contribute about 50 per cent to Google's mobile search revenue. The impact- Google paid $3 billion to Apple to be the default search engine on iPhone . Details: http://m.economictimes.com/tech/hardware/google-to-pay-apple-3-billion-to-remain-on-iphone/articleshow/60070901.cms

Login to official Aadhaar website https://uidai.gov.in/ Under Aadhaar services, go to option 'Lock/Unlock Biometrics' Website will take you to the below screen. Click on image to enlarge. After the above steps, website will take you to the below screen. Click on image to enlarge. Video on the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w22hRDJy40s Related links: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/wealth/personal-finance-news/scared-of-aadhaar-misuse-lock-your-biometrics-now/articleshow/59285676.cms

Kaspersky has started to roll out the free version of its anti-virus software globally. The software will provide an ad-free antivirus solution for protection across files, emails, browsing and more.This will help the companies machine learning artificial intelligence engine learn to identify malware and threats from the global data gathered through its antivirus by the consent of the users. Ref  https://www.google.co.in/amp/www.digit.in/article/amp/software/36221/kaspersky-free-antivirus-software-headed-to-india-in-september

Here are the main ways in which British and American spelling are different. Words ending in –re British English words that end in  -re  often end in  -er  in American English: British US centre center fibre fiber litre liter theatre theater  or  theatre Words ending in -our British English words ending in  -our  usually end in  -or  in American English: British US colour color flavour flavor humour humor labour labor neighbour neighbor Words ending in -ize or -ise Verbs in British English that can be spelled with either  -ize  or  -ise  at the end are always spelled with  -ize  at the end in American English: British US apologize   or  apologise apologize organize   or  organise organize recognize   or  recognise recognize Words ending in -yse Verbs in British English that end in  -yse  are always spelled  -yze  in American English: British US analyse analyze breathalyse breathalyze paralyse paralyze Words ending in a vowel plus l In British spelling, verbs ending in a vowel plus  l  ...

British and American English often spell the same word differently, for example:   labour/labor ,  enthrall/enthral , or  centre/center . You can find out more about these differences  here .  There are also many cases in which the two varieties of English use different terms to describe the same thing. Here's a list of  various  British words and expressions together with their American  equivalents . British English American English accommodation accommodations action replay instant replay aerofoil airfoil aeroplane airplane agony aunt advice columnist Allen key Allen wrench aluminium aluminum aniseed anise anticlockwise counterclockwise articulated lorry tractor-trailer asymmetric bars uneven bars aubergine eggplant baking tray cookie sheet bank holiday legal holiday beetroot beet(s) biscuit cookie; cracker black economy underground economy blanket bath sponge bath block of flats apartment building boiler suit coveralls bonnet ( of a car ) hood boob tube tube top boot ( of a car...