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Trading and Investment Setup 05-October

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Overall Market Sentiment This is very confused today. The OPEC meeting did not turn out to be great. They are NOT going to increase the oil production, so the prices are going to remain high. That means BANKNIFTY will most likely not do great. There was another major problem that came up. Facebook plunged in the US since they had a downtime of more than 6 hours. This led to NASDAQ falling by close to 2% in a day! This did not sustain and we can see a recovery. However, there is a China Taiwan crisis looming on the horizon. So International Markets and especially the Asian markets are going to remain choppy for some time to come. India is in a sweet spot. FIIs and DIIs were both buyers yesterday and this trend is likely to continue today offsetting some negativity.  NIFTY AND BANKNIFTY Nifty has opened relatively flat and I think it will remain rangebound, between 17500 and 17750 for the week. Then we have results coming out, starting with TCS on October 8. So if you want to buy these,
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Trade and Investment Setup 4 October

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The global cues are still weak. But we are seeing some signs of improvement. Bad news first - Evergrande trading has been suspended in the Hang Sei market (Hong Kong) stock market for the next few days. Their index fell more than 2 %. That is huge. In general the Asian markets were under selling pressure. For NIFTY, a gap up opening was assumed looking at SGX NIFTY. It is hovering around 17650 as of publishing this post. I will not enter into a trade until it crosses 17700 and stays there for at least half an hour. There is a lot of anxiety and this may result in some profit booking. BANKNIFTY is up by close to 1% by now and we can expect some profit booking right now. I will just wait and watch. There is not much for me to trade with. I have signed up with Zerodha over the weekend and will buy a few bonds or gilt funds this week. I intend to use this as a pledge for getting my collateral margins in place. As for India, the signs are positive, and the results are coming out from the ne
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Trade and Investment Setup for October 1 - Plans and Results

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I have started actively trading and investing in the Equities and Futures and Options markets. This is a simple journal of what I do and why. The format will be simple. I will jot down my points during the start of the day and make some plans.  During the day, (when the market opens), I will execute them. After the market ends, I will note down my observations and see where we stand and how far the strategies worked and why. Disclaimer: This is my personal journey. I am not a financial advisor of any sort, so copying my trades or scrips is NOT recommended. Background After rallying almost 1200 points, Nifty finally showed some weakness and and has come down from the highs of 17950 to 17600. That is a big fall. I see a few major problems:  US bond yields are getting higher. Source There is an ongoing energy crisis ongoing. Coal is in short supply, gas stations are running dry . Monthly expiry was on September 30. This led to a lot of positions closing. Ok. This was a minor point. FIIs h
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The curious case of the dairy farm of Bahalrampur

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Bahalrampur is a sleepy little village in Western Uttar Pradesh, India. Before independence the only thing people did there was rear sheep and farm in their fields. The highways connecting Delhi and Kolkata in the early 21st century brought what we call as modernity and development to this place. Now it is bustling (for a village) with people opening up businesses, tractors ploughing the fields and large fertilizer dealerships. There are also large dairy farms, each housing more than 200 cattle and selling milk to the ever increasing demand in the National Capital Region. In the summer of 2020, just after the first hard wave of COVID was reaping its deadly harvest, this little village was coming to terms with a slackening consumer demand. Instead of the hundreds of large tankers of milk that flowed every day from the village to the Noida collection center of Amul, there were barely barely a few. The price of milk increased and the few remaining firms made a lot of money. It was at this
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Reaching the peaks of my own stupidity or not

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 I have never considered myself to be particularly intelligent. Though I have not had myself clinically diagnosed, anecdotal evidence and day to day activities amply demonstrate how stupid I am. Now wait. This does not mean I am indulging in self pity.  No. Far from it. I have had successes in life. I continue to do well in things that I love to do. I have no complaints there. It is just that I do feel my intelligence lacking. My success is, therefore, despite my stupidity and I take some pride in it. Of course defending the statement - 'I am stupid' is difficult. Especially without a test that ascertains the fact for certain. I will make a more nuanced statement as a result. I have less intelligence than the average person around me. That is a more defensible stance and there are tests (even other than IQ) to confirm it. Aptitude tests are a good example. I do horrible in them.  Okay, there is an exception - I got into IITB. But that was me trying for a third time. In any case
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My love affair with ThinkPads

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I had never used a ThinkPad in my life till 2018. To be honest, I did not really see the benefit of using them anyway. Consumer series laptops (with plastic bodies) were the ones that I had always used before. Then I was introduced to the rugged looks of the T60 and T61 original IBM ThinkPad designs that came out way back in 2004 or so. And I loved it. Finding a ThinkPad that old did not appeal to me. I was impressed with the smaller compact X series laptops and decided to have either an X230 or an X220. Both of these are fairly similar and were launched about 8 years back. But they still sport good processors, plenty of memory upgradability, provision to add a maximum of three hard disks and a decent battery backup to boot. My reasons to get this were simpler -  They are rugged, I like to use my laptops well Memory is not soldered. There are plenty of options to upgrade. The keyboards are probably the best in the world. Why not get the latest ThinkPad? Again, simple.  They come with a
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Thoughts on Money and Life

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Money can not buy everything.  But it does make things easier.  Money can't make you feel good. But an AC on a hot day may make you better better than otherwise. It is one of the biggest cliches that you must have come across numerous times in life. It is not necessarily true though. There have been a lot of dramas, stories and philosophers' notes on this topic. But at the end of the day ONLY those who have the luxury of meeting their basic needs in life can ponder over these questions anyway. The poor do not have this luxury. For the vast majority of them, money is actually ALWAYS a good thing. The next higher rung in society is what we know as the Salaried class today. I am one. We work the week (and sometimes beyond) and get paid for it. We are the ones that actually run the factories, drive the cars for businesses, teach kids in school and colleges, report stuff to papers, manage projects for businesses and so on. We differ in two very crucial aspects to the group that sits
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