Arbitrage Funds have become all the rage over the last couple of years because of their debt-like returns but with equity-like taxation. Yet, few people fully understand how they operate and there’s significant confusion about what these funds are …

Adding factor tilts to your portfolio is harder than it sounds: you have to decide which factors to invest in, in what proportion, how to combine them, and whether to vary the weights over time. Problems with Single-Factor Bets Most people get …

One might expect passive funds to mirror the returns of the index, but in practice, they always underperform. The difference in performance is where three metrics—Expense Ratio, Tracking Error and Tracking Difference—come into play. Some folks …

If you have filed taxes on foreign RSU income, you know how notoriously tedious and error-prone calculating capital gains can be. One needs to go over each sale transaction, make a note of the acquisition date, sale date, number of shares, sale …

Recently, my wife and I spent a week in Sri Lanka with our toddler son. The whole experience was quite amazing, but there were some unexpected learnings I thought I’d share: Getting a Local SIM is Trivial I was able to get a working, local Sri …

“Do I invest via PMS?” is a question that pops up every now and then. I haven’t tried Portfolio Management Services (PMS), and have no intention of doing so. This post details my reasons. Downsides of Active Investing PMSs, by …

If you browse any credit card forum, you will quickly notice an obsession with Life-Time Free (LTF) cards. There are innumerable queries about how to get one, and countless show-off posts when someone gets a premium card without any annual fees. I …

We have previously discussed why you should frequently sell your employer-granted RSUs (Restricted Stock Units). But the rules governing the proceeds from sale of the RSUs were archaic and cumbersome. I recently came across some regulatory changes …

Goal-based investing (“Accumulate X amount by date Y to be able to do Z”) has become quite prevalent in recent times. However, its implementation for long-term goals requires a careful step that few people do—reduce equity allocation as …

Like death and taxes, stock market crashes are a matter of when, not if. While crashes invariably cause pain, they also provide an opportunity to save on taxes by enabling tax loss harvesting. But first, what is tax loss harvesting? The essential …