Anthony Tongbram’s Blog

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!

For the past half an hour, I have been trying to make some buys, so that I could at level out my losses, or even make a profit, and I can’t bloody log into my account. The internet speed is like a freeway here, and I can continuously stream youtube, but our Icicidirect won’t open. What is the use of an internet trading account if the website cannot respond on such a critical day? Just because I can’t login, I don’t know if I will lose potential profits, or even make a loss. Because my portfolio is lying unattended when the market is fallen by more than 1500 points.

This is trading account for god’s sake. Why would I need an online trading account if I were an IPo investor. I buy and sell shares according to market movements and I bloody want the service provider, whom I am paying a premium, and brokerages in thousands, that they at least provide me with a website that is not DOWN. For god’s sake. I had a kotakstreet account which I closed because I thought they had an IT insufficient infrastructure. I am paying a brokerage about 1% with ICICI, which is about 300-400% average brokerage, just because I thought they had a robust IT infrastructure and won’t fail me.

I definitely don’t recommend icicidirect.com as the preferred broking services, even after spending more than 4 years of trading and brokerages that I can’t even think of. It sure is time to switch to a new provider. If you know any Net trading set that was not do today, do let me know by adding a comment.

And the brokerage that I paid in the four years. All for nothing.