Anthony Tongbram’s Blog

Michael Jackson’s sudden death have left many a fans devastated at the loss, and my facebook hope page is full of RIPs. I didn’t know I know so many MJ Fans. I didn’t exactly grow up listening to Michael Jackson, and I always wondered how he was so popular, King and all that. But even Slash acknowledge that “He was Talent from on High” so he must have been talented. You could also say he sold 500 million copies of his albums, but then we sell more Govinda tickets, and even more Mithunda starrer movies’ tickets, so I won’t relate the talent and the sales. But again, I haven’t listened to any of his pop music seriously enough. There always were other songs on my playlist. But then again, I am not judging, just my taste.

But he seemed to have had enough fans to shake up google.com and twitter. So I respect him for that. May his soul rest in peace.

Back to Mithunda, the Famous Bollywood Star Mithunda, was more than Fan of Wacko Jacko. Oh did I mention that Michael Jackson had equal number of

Fans if not more for his dance moves than his music. Even our Sridevi acknowledges that there was a lot of MJ in her dancing. farah Khan also happened thinm of MJ as her Guru, like Drona, only the statue was replaced by the Music Videos. But the Biggest Indian Fan turned out to be Mithun da.

I never knew that his to-be-star dancing son Mimo’s real name is Michael Jackson, and he acknowledges that he did try to copy him, but he was nowhere near Michael Jackson. So Modest of him and all that. “I am Disco Dancer” was no less than the Moon walk eh?
Wait let me watch the Moonwalk first..

In an interview with Ghulam Zia, National Director Research & Advisory Services, Knight Frank (India) Pvt Ltd by moneycontrol, he mentioned that real estate prices in india might correct by 35-40% on properties that have peaked.

Good news for everyone who have waited for 1 year (two years?) now?
I have been saying this for two years now.

A house I wanted cost 40 lakhs then. Sometime in early 2006..
By 2007, it had become 50 Lakhs..

Sometime in July 2007, I was offered a cosy flat very near (3-4 house away) from a posh locality in delhi for 30 lakhs. Someone bought it for 27. The same guy approached me sometime in july-august 2008 with a new offer. Great!!

People are willing to sell homes now? When people start selling, the price should fall right?
He approached me with an offer of 45 lakhs. Someone I know said, he can negotiate it for me for 42.

I’d rather be paying rent.
Price should fall, so I wait. In the same aprtment, a friend of mine just bought (november 2008) the 1st floor aprtment for 50 lakhs. I plan to rent it from him.

Well!! But this is Delhi. And in selective places, prices might not fall. The games Village Apartments won’t correct.

I still agree that prices have fallen. Just approach a real estate dealer/broker and tell him you want sell your flat. let another of your friend approach the same broker with the intent to buy, and he will say that prices have not risen but not fallen either.

Check out ares in Greater Noida, Faridabad, Indirapuram.. prices are softening.. So I heard in Pune also… But Mumbai, Delhi etc we can wait for a few more months, no?

An excellent article on why we should buying stocks now, though we hesitate..
As the author says,

When new clients come to me, I ask them a few questions about risk. One is “What would you do if the value of your stocks fell by 50%?”

The vast majority answer that they would buy more stocks. So now that the market has lost about 40% of its value, why are some of these same clients clamoring to sell?

Well it depends. When the markets are such, and you enter at this point, we often end up catching a falling knife. I caught a couple, and am still bleeding. I have convinced myself that I will not sell them for 3-4 years, but it still hursts you see.

Your investment strategy should instead be based on your goals, your time horizon and what you’ve saved so far. Success will come from sticking to your plan.

The article.

16.7% of all new business owners are Immigrants?
I thought it might be more. Hasn’t that always been the case?

First it was the Irish and polish Immigrants, then the chinese immigrants, and now Pakistanis and Indians.

Now, a November 2008 study by Robert W. Fairlie, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, gives the strongest evidence to date that critics of open-immigration policies have misjudged the impact of immigrants on the U.S. economy.

Issued under the auspices of the U.S. Small Business Administration, the peer-reviewed study pulled data from three large, nationally representative government data sets, and found that immigrants are almost 30 percent more likely to launch a business than non-immigrants. According to the study, roughly 16.7 percent of all new business owners in this country are immigrants, yet immigrants make up only 12.2 percent of the workforce in the U.S. It also found that immigrant-owned businesses contributed roughly $67 billion to the country’s business income, out of a total of $577 billion in 2000. Although this total is slightly below a one-to-one ratio of immigrant population to immigrant-owned business, it is still a very significant chunk of economic activity. And keep in mind, these economic activity findings were from eight years ago, so the total economic activity contribution has likely increased since then.

source.

Jai Prakash Associates net profit up 96% in Quater II
ZEE Q2 PAT up 84%
Polaris Software PAT up 89%
NIIT Q2 Net up 41%
Opto Circuits PAT up 100%

PTL ( Punjab Tractors Limited) Sales up 41%

These are from the Economic Times, Today.
Had it been 2007, I would have smiled.
But today, the overall sentiments are so bleak, we still have a bad day today.
Now, the Sensex is down 442 points to 10,241 and the Nifty fell 152 points to 3,082.

I have never had it so bad.
Good quality stocks, that gives dividen yields in the range of 5% to 10% are today trading at less than half the book value. Will the book value erode in the coming quarters? Won’t they be in a position to give dividends in the coming 12-18 months…

I have no Idea..
Are these attractive stocks?
By God they are?
Would it be wise to buy them?

This is a god given given opportunity, and this is the time when one should Ideally enter.
That is what the books say, and history too.

But these are no ordinary times, and the extent of the current crisis is still not known.
But damn… the stocks are so damn attractive.

Good time to enter they say!!!
But the collective sigh is..

YAWN!!!! But Where is the money!!!!!!

We forgot to sell.
We forgot to cut our losses.
And we have no money……….

No cash.. Only some useless portfolio…
What a time…..

One more good news for the SaaS enthusiast..

Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), today announced that Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, a Fortune 500 financial services membership organization, is standardizing on Salesforce for Wealth Management. The company is deploying Salesforce for Wealth Management and will leverage the Force.com Platform and the Force.com AppExchange to build custom applications designed to improve client engagement as well as the productivity of financial representatives.[more]

The nuclear deal will spin off a 100000 new jobs. Good for the country.
Good for Rahul Gandhi.

And the game goes on. So this was all it was about..
And the opposition never looked so stupid..

Its been a crazy week. I guess its been three weeks. Even went home… for just a day, missed my best friends wedding, bahhh but I managed to meet my DEAD line.

Got invite for the first tweet-up. It is like a blog meet, but for twitter users. It is going to be a blog meet and a tweet-up and it sure is going to be fun this sunday.

The stock market continues to be in a hysteria. I stopped guessing a long time ago. I don’t like to see red in my portfolio though, but then who does. I kept some amount in stocks thinking I will sell off in march just in time to buy into ELSS for the years tax savings, but since they are in deep red, I didn’t dare sell. Well, this year might not be a very good year.

There already are rumours about firing freeze and IT spendings cut and what not.

India should grow though. Chidambaram’s master stroke of putting more disposable income onto the hands of the middle class might give a much needed boost to our consumer driven economy, and it might actually start to show in the second Qtr results. I am still bullish..

Thank god that my TV no more has more of Obama, Hillary and Britney Spears.

Slide got a 50 million funding. Big time valuation for a company that makes facebook apps and other social widgets. Facebook apps are getting big, even though there is no indication of any revenue in the near term. Two partners of Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Bayers has already started a 100 million facebook apps only fund.

Iphone and Facebook seems like the only great invention since the invention of the wheel.

Iphone’s innovation lies in the design. But its greatness will be how people adopts it as a platform.
Facebook’s innovation lies in its platform. Anybody with a good idea can implement it on facebook. The possibility that facebook offers is endless.

Newyorktimes added mixx chiclets. Mixx looks great, the voting button makes it look so boring. They had to copy digg, but calling the button as migg or mixx would have been a downright copy of digg, so they used the more generic vote button, which made it look like the rating plugin that many wordpress users have.

Also the MIXX homepage breaks on my IE…. If you want to have the second mover advantage, you need to be far far better than the first mover. Just like Digg did to delicious.

And delhi bloggers, see you at the meet!

I usually play the FM sometimes on my drive to Office everyday, but I am not a big fan of any of the Channels or RJs. I just browse the channels at random. And there was this soft spoken RJ today who narrated an Incident. I think, she said something like, it was an incident from the time she used to work as a volunteer in a Hospital. Or maybe it was some story, but it really did touched my heart. It was about a 5 year old Boy. If the RJ knows about the boy, I would love to send some Toys and Chocolates

Let me share the story.

This little girl had this rare desease of the blood, and in order to survive she needed a blood transfusion from her 5 year old brother, who had miraculously survived the same desease, and in the process developed some anti bodies that can fight this desease.

So it was decided, and the doctors asked the boy, the 5 year old boy, if he would be willing to give blood in order to save her sister. The boy, after a moment of hesitation, said he was willing.

So, the doctors took the siblings in, and blood transfusion was started. As blood started to flow into the baby sister, and her color began to glow, everyone one in the room including the doctors and the parents smiled.

The boy, also smiled!
And then he asked the doctor, “Will I start to die now?”

All the while, the boy had misunderstood the doctor since he didn’t know what blood transfusion was. He was just 5 after all.
He thought, he would have to give his live for her sister.
And he was giving his life with a smile.

Dailytech writes that a twelve month long drop in world temperature wipes out a century of global warming. Sounds good.

But then, we don’t want an Ice Age situation like The day after.
Moreover, what we should remember is that the cooling could as well be a result of the Global Warming disrupting the natural atmospheric balance?