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.

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…..

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!

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.