What to do with your money right now?

If you are just retired and with plenty of cash, retirement benefits, naturally you will have a dilemma what do with the money safely with maximum returns, liquidity and with minimum income tax liability. While equities and mutual funds seems to get you good returns, never go by television recommendations unless you have in depth knowledge of what you are set up to do.

• Never lose money. Focus on capital preservation strategies.
• Remember, risk exists every where. 
• Spread your money across asset classes; debts, equities, mutual funds, real estate and gold. 
• Retain certain amount of cash both at home and in bank to manage unforeseen situations.
• Make sure to have enough life, accident and health insurance cover for you & family.
• Stay away from hyped markets. That would be the right time to exit.
• Avoid cryptocurrencies unless you are tech savvy, prepared to gamble and lose.
• Don't lend money to friends & relatives. You may end up losing money and also relationships.

INSURANCE

• Insurance is not investment. It is the price you pay for some kind of protection of your family against contingencies of unforeseen events like death / accidental death / hospitalisation shocks. 
• Do take appropriate life, personal accident and mediclaim policies for self and family.
• Don't buy equity-linked insurance plans (ULIPs). Your money goes to the agent and the insurer and not into your investments. They are losing propositions.
• Buy either term policies (these are the cheapest) or buy money-back schemes, which are also cheap but you get your money back. Read the fine print carefully rather than trust an agent's verbal assurances.

80C INVESTMENTS

• Investments in PPF, NSCs, 5 year Bank deposits, NPS etc. may save you on income tax liabilities, But be aware of 5+ year lock in periods.

EQUITIES

• The last two years equities have seen terrific returns from the stock market. Is the economy booming? No, but a lot of investors hope that it will start growing faster. 
• The World Bank and other institutions forecast that growth should accelerate in 2018-19. Many savvy investors have already entered the stock market on that expectation. 
• As more money has come into the market, it has boosted share prices and created a positive feedback loop where investors have pumped even more money into stocks.
• Despite forecasts, markets could go in either direction.
• Unless you are an active watchful person, on daily basis, with propensity to exit as per strategy, risks are high.
• Index funds have shown persistent growth over years with lower risks. Invest in less risky index funds rather than in risky equities.
• Equities may not get you periodical returns but in long term they are sure get you impressive gains.
• Good to be a equities trader rather than and equities investor.
• Those who have time and inclination to do their own research may invest directly in stocks or via equity mutual funds. The second route is fire-and-forget. Both methods can fetch great returns. Both methods also carry the risk of capital loss.
• May be it is good to stick to mutual funds and commit to systematic investment plans (SIPs) for three years, or longer. These are likely to fetch excellent returns.
• The economy may recover. But uncertainty exists.
• Series of assembly elections and a general election scheduled in the next 15 months. Political uncertainty might cloud short-term returns. What happens if there are apprehensions that the Narendra Modi government will not return?

DEBTS

• Debt comes in many shapes and sizes. Bank fixed deposits are the default option. You can also buy mutual funds dealing in different types of debt. In addition, you can buy corporate debentures, or subscribe to corporate fixed deposits.
• Interest rates rise when inflation rises. If inflation rises, the value of money erodes faster. If interest rates rise, any portfolio of previous debt instruments loses value because that same money invested now could be earning more interest.
• Bank deposits are safest, highly liquid but with low returns. The new FRDI Bill highlights the fact that bank deposits are not guaranteed beyond the limit of Rs 1 lakh. That limit was set in 1993. The limit might get raised to Rs.5 lakhs, prior to the passing of Act. Be informed of this.
• Avoid PSU banks with huge NPA's. Also avoid private banks with low equity, lower reserves and higher NPAs. Any government would be reluctant to take this step, fearing a political backlash. Since many PSU banks are struggling to cope with bad debts bail-ins are now neither impossible, nor illegal.
• Mutual funds exploit changes in interest rates. Safety varies. Mutual funds that focus on corporate debt give much higher returns but take larger risks. It's important to understand that you can lose capital in a debt fund. So understand safety, risks and returns before investing.

REAL ESTATE

• Real estate is entirely local market. The investment is illiquid. Selling may take several months. But returns are impressive. 
• This segment has huge percentage of 'black money' intertwined with 'white money'. 60:40 is the default ratio. Even 80:20 is not uncommon. 
• Booms and busts are cyclical and occur side by side too.
• Sometime legal complications might get your investment locked for several years.
• Apart from politicians, corrupt bureaucrats and unethical businessmen, you may get entangled with mafia and local goons.
• So invest only in legally clear properties. Obtain the help of known advocates and chartered accountants. Remember brokers are not your friends.
• Stay away from hypes.

GOLD

• Gold and precious metals are the age-old hedge against inflation and uncertainty.
• But gold yields no interest and capital appreciation is uncertain.
• Making charges for jewellery add considerably to cost. It's still worth investing as security. 

Neither a borrower nor a lender be ... William Shakespeare

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Bill Gates, Steven Pinker and Philip Galanes

Excerpts from conversation between Bill Gates, Steven Pinker and Philip Galanes over a lunch of pizza and salad. Published in New York Times dated Jan 27, 2018.

• You don’t want a tech company run by somebody in their 60s. At least I didn’t want to ... Bill Gates
• Mr. Gates readily acknowledged that the person he is today is not one he would have recognized when he was in his 20s and single-mindedly building Microsoft. “I was a zealot,” he said. “I didn’t believe in weekends. I didn’t believe in vacations. I knew everybody’s license plate so I knew when they were coming and going. That was my life: doing great software.”
• Given this wealth and our value system, what’s the highest-impact way to give it back? Melinda and I chose global health as our biggest issue, and U.S. education as our second one. And we’ve surrounded global health with agriculture and sanitation, family planning, antismoking. So, it’s a broad definition ... BG
• For a young man in his 20s, writing software night and day may be the best way to add to human welfare ... BG
• We have to resist the temptation to say that the fantastic good that’s done by foundations and innovators takes governments off the hook ...  Steven Pinker
• The motto of the foundation is: “Every life has equal value.” But in truth, I want better things for my husband and my kids than for you ... Philip Galanes
• When we give ourselves over to the law, we want it to be executed impartially. We gain stability. But if you could get your son off, of course you’ll try ... BG
• Those under the influence of reason desire nothing for themselves that they do not desire for all humankind ... SP
• But reason is not a powerful part of human nature. Innately, we favor family over strangers, our tribe over other tribes. It’s only when we convince others of the right way to act — that we conclude that all lives have equal value ... SP
• There’s a tendency in journalism and political debates to assume that it’s easy to achieve a perfect society. But we have no right to expect perfection ... SP
• Why throw money at the developing world? They’re just going to have more babies and be just as poor ... SP
• I embrace more risk. Most philanthropists don’t take huge risks. If I didn’t have the success I had at Microsoft, I would never have the bullheadedness to embark on this project ... BG
• The person who invents an affordable and efficient toilet should be made a saint ... SP
• One of the biggest enemies of reason is tribalism. When people subscribe to an ideology, they suck up evidence that supports their preconceptions and filter out evidence that goes against them. And a move toward greater rationality would unbundle them and let evidence inform what the optimal policies ought to be. ... SP
• Innovation drives progress, not Washington ... PG
• Is AI going to proceed so quickly that work, which is something people worship, will suffer bad distributional effects, and people won’t know what to do? This is an unfortunate time for saying, “Take all your damn negative thoughts, and I’ll innovate away from them.” People are seeing difficulty with that argument ... BG
• There are certain things that governments are always going to do better than private innovators. Basic research, for instance ... SP
• All three sectors — philanthropy, which is about 2 percent of the economy; government, which is about 30 percent; and the private sector, which is the balance and largest by far — each have their role ... BG
• Disease elimination is something that runs against people’s general pessimistic outlook. It’s amazing to think that polio might be gone. That one is pretty near ... BG

With advancing age, enlightenment is natural especially for people with book reading habit. The winner is who gets this at an early age and doesn't intimidate juniors and respect their rights.

Extreme wealth is indefensible

What is difficult to understand about those who make millions of dollars a year is why they ever need that kind of money for? Who could ever use that much? What are they even spending it on? Why do they actually want it?

• These people live like monarchs. They live in almost ludicrous luxurious excess.They make no effort to curb their consumption. 
• When they want something, like a piece of designer clothing or a fancy dinner, they simply buy it. An expensive meal does not require an occasion. If the family wants to go out to a pricey restaurant, they just do it.
• They don’t have to do household chores. Everything is taken care of by the housekeeper, gardener, housemaid, driver etc. It is difficult to fathom living like this.
• Yet most of their income still just gets tossed into their savings account. This is truly extraordinary. 
• Whether increased taxes on the wealthy will have useful consequences is arguable. What is unimaginable is that increased taxation would deprive these people in any serious way.
• These people donating to charities may not exceed 1% of their annual income. It’s almost as if they care far more about feeling like they are charitable than actually being charitable.
• They rarely encounter criticism for the moral aspects of this kind of life. In wealthy circles, everyone has a strong interest in allowing each other to feel like they are good people. So if one person mentions about their donating to charities, the friend is unlikely to criticize. Rarely do elites tell other elites that it is wrong to be an elite, for obvious reasons. 
• And the most contact this person has with the working class probably comes during chance encounters with the pool man, who is unlikely to voice any judgment he may secretly hold about their decadent bourgeois habits.
• Even $400,000 annually is far too much to live on. It is very difficult to even grasp the amount of money possessed by the 20 people who own more than half the country’s wealth. If it takes a lot of effort to fritter away $400,000 each year, imagine how the billionaires struggle to think of things to buy. That’s why their spending becomes outright ludicrous. Once you go past the first million, there’s not really much more pleasure you can buy, so you have to resort to nonsense.
• The tax policy implications are debatable. But it’s uncontroversial to conclude that the possession of enormous wealth, especially in a time of great suffering, is just indefensible in every way. Even $400,000 a year provides enough to live in extreme luxury. Anything over that is just obscene. 
• Risk-taking investors deserve higher returns, but actual returns do not necessarily reflect merit. The determining quality of  billionaires is to be lucky -- the other qualities being necessary but not sufficient. And luck is not meritocratic.

Inequality does not cause poverty. Capitalism has resulted in much more economic inequality in China, but much less poverty. Studies have shown that lower taxes for the wealthy don't necessarily result in increased economic growth. Extreme wealth contributing to inequality were seen as irrelevant and a prerequisite for the growth that would also help the poorest, as the wealth created trickled down to the benefit of everyone. But rather than creating jobs and lifting others out of poverty super-rich minorities cause social unrest and depress demand for goods and services, limiting growth and innovation as a result. Extreme wealth causes extreme inequality that impedes poverty alleviation, slows economic growth, compounds gender inequality, drives inequality in health and education outcomes, undermines economic mobility over generations, fuels crime, undermines social cohesion, and harms democracy.

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That man is rich, whose pleasures are the cheapest ... Henry David Thoreau
Honesty is incompatible with amassing a large fortune ... Mahatma Gandhi 

At least 50% of the world’s billionaire wealth is non-meritocratic owing to either inheritance or a high presumption of cronyism. Another 15% is not meritocratic owing to presumption of monopoly. All of it is non-meritocratic owing to globalization. By contrast, crime and technology are found to be negligible sources of extreme wealth. The argument that "These eight billionaires, through the salaries and stock paid to their employees and the stock owned by millions of shareholders, have made millions of people rich and improved the lives of billions of people through the use of their products. They have not made anybody poor." is fine but governments must tax them at higher tax rates and spend the proceeds for accelerating eradication of poverty. These billionaires have a greater obligation for contributing for this cause. 

The economy of debt

• Economies work best, generally speaking, when people are making decisions based on economic fundamentals, not on tax considerations.
• Debt magnifies risk. If companies or individuals rely on large amounts of leverage, it’s much easier for bad decisions to lead to insolvency, with significant ripple effects in the wider economy. 
• A debt-ridden economy is inherently more fragile and more volatile. Encouraging people to take on debt qualifies as a genuinely bad idea.
• Subsidizing debt seems harmless simply because we’ve always done it. But the fact that you’ve had a bad habit for a long time doesn’t make it less dangerous. 
• All of the debt-created money has to be spent into the economy so it will be available for paying off debt. If that doesn’t happen then there will be a scarcity of money even if enough new loans are made to keep recreating the money that disappears when debt is paid off.
• Money saved is money held out of the working economy. Savings that earn interest, compound the problem because not only is the saved money held out of the economy, it’s acting as a magnet to draw additional money out of the system. The accumulated interest money is generally added to the savings rather than spent, compounding the interest and drawing more money from the system.
• What is real in the real economy is the people, talent, knowledge, technology, infrastructure, resources, etc., and most importantly the good will, industriousness, and positive intentions of the people.
• The working economy is trying to pay huge debt out of those tiny blocks of money. To avoid default, it pays the interest, and borrows more money. The producing economy is suffering from a severe scarcity of money, and it’s working under a system where the only way to get more money into the system is to borrow it. So we have a vicious circle where the necessity to pay the existing debt creates scarcity of money, and the only way to relieve the scarcity is to borrow more money, which aggravates the scarcity, which is only relieved by borrowing more money.
• Essentially it’s operating like a pyramid scheme. In order to stay alive it has to grow, and the only way it can grow is to cannibalize and destabilize itself further. The more it grows the more and faster it has to grow, and the more unstable it becomes. 
• Exponential growth is when something grows by multiplying itself. If something grows by a percentage, eventually it will double. The numbers are becoming completely disconnected from the real world.
• Debt isn’t the only thing forced to grow in the economic model. To feed the expanding debt, the whole economy has to grow. It has to expand whether the people in it need it to or not. Manufacturing must increase, sales must increase, and consumption must increase. Businesses have to expand to stay afloat. Their marketing departments convince more and more people that they need to buy more and more stuff. Stuff that uses valuable resources to produce and then often gets sent to landfills a few years later.
• Since the money scarcity and debt pressure keeps increasing, economic growth becomes more and more of a squeeze play. Businesses in the working economy must grow, but overall they have less and less money to do it with, so they’re continually trying to get more from less. The trend is to cut the work force, cut wages, cut benefits, cut the quality of the product or service, and of course, outsource the labor to foreign countries with low wages and poor labor protection -- anything that can be done to get more out of less.
• In the process of creating more debt we are also creating more money, yet the scarcity of money gets worse and worse. 

WHERE IS THE MONEY GOING?

• Economy ends up with a two-class society—interest payers and interest receivers. The interest payers would be working hard and scrambling to stay afloat. The general trend would be that they work harder and longer and receive comparatively less and less for it. 
• The interest receivers would be accumulating more and more resources, living more and more lavishly, and inventing new games to play with money.
• Financiers and investors of all sorts are essentially interest receivers. That includes pension funds, insurance funds, charitable trusts, and various institutions in many areas of society. 
• People who are paying on mortgages, student loans, auto loans, and credit cards are obviously payers, but many people in the modern world are both payers and receivers.
• Financial progress in the middle class has generally been to work your way from payer to receiver. You start out buying a house and putting money into a retirement fund. You work your mortgage down and your retirement fund and investments up, and eventually you can retire as a receiver.
• Then there are the people who fall out the bottom of the payer class. Sometimes they become a different type of receiver—receivers of charity or receivers of welfare.
• If you yourself have made the transition from payer to receiver, you might hope that your children and grandchildren will be able to do the same. With relentless exponential debt growth, the transition becomes less and less possible.

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem 

brings us face to face with another problem ... Martin Luther King, Jr.

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While debt is unavoidable, it is wise to keep to as minimum as possible. While we all have debts, debt ridden entities must take extra care in prioritizing spending, avoiding extravagance and wastage. Under all circumstances frugal living is best and that generates lasting happiness. Economic progress at the expense of ecology in reality is destructive.

Life's most important question

• Everybody wants what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy and easy life, to have amazing relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and admired. It’s so ubiquitous that it doesn’t even mean anything.
• Everybody wants to have an amazing job and financial independence. But not everyone wants to suffer through 60-hour work weeks, long commutes, obnoxious paperwork. People want to be rich without the risk, without the sacrifice, without the delayed gratification necessary to accumulate wealth.
• Everybody wants to have awesome relationship. But not everyone is willing to go through the tough conversations, the awkward silences, the hurt feelings and the emotional psychodrama to get there.
• Happiness requires struggle. The positive is the side effect of handling the negative. Positive experience is easy to handle. It’s negative experience that we all struggle with. We get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad feelings we’re willing and able to sustain to get us to those good feelings.
• People want an amazing physique. But you don’t end up with one unless you legitimately appreciate the pain and physical stress that comes with living inside a gym for hour upon hour, unless you love calculating and calibrating the food you eat, planning your life out in tiny plate-sized portions.
• People want to start their own business or become financially independent. But you don’t end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to appreciate the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, and working insane hours on something you have no idea whether will be successful or not.
• People want a partner, a spouse. But you don’t end up attracting someone amazing without appreciating the emotional turbulence that comes with weathering rejections. It’s part of the game of love. 
• What determines your success isn’t “What do you want to enjoy?” The question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The quality of your life is not determined by the quality of your positive experiences but the quality of your negative experiences. And to get good at dealing with negative experiences is to get good at dealing with life.
• If you find yourself wanting something month after month, year after year, yet nothing happens and you never come any closer to it, then maybe what you actually want is a fantasy, an idealization, an image and a false promise. Maybe what you want isn’t what you want, you just enjoy wanting. Maybe you don’t actually want it at all.
• You can’t have a pain-free life. It can’t all be roses and unicorns. And ultimately that’s the hard question that matters. Pleasure is an easy question. And pretty much all of us have similar answers. The more interesting question is the pain. What is the pain that you want to sustain?
• I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love not with the fight but only the victory. And life doesn’t work that way.
• Who you are is defined by the values you are willing to struggle for. People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who get in good shape. People who enjoy long workweeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who move up it. People who enjoy the stresses and uncertainty of the starving artist lifestyle are ultimately the ones who live it and make it.
• This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes. So choose your struggles wisely.

No pain. No gain.
You can’t win if you don’t play.
God seldom gives us all we need to understand, 
but He always gives us all we need to obey

Ten life lessons to excel in 30's

30 second speech by Bryan Dyson

My View:

If one doesn't learn life's realities on his own, then adversity will teach him the lessons in a bitterest way. If you try to be cool, you will never be cool. If you try to be happy, then you will never be happy. Happiness is not something you obtain, but rather something you inhabit. Happiness is not achieved in itself, but rather it is the side effect of a particular set of ongoing life experiences. You can’t buy happiness and you can’t achieve happiness. Pleasure is great but it’s not happiness. Pleasure does not cause happiness. Happiness is what you get when other parts of your life are in order. 

Excess Profit is deeply immoral

• Profit shows that entrepreneurs are welcome.
• Profit proves that the economy is not a zero-sum game.
• Profit is a moral concept, since without profit we will suffer from a misallocation of resources, a failure to provide the goods and services that the economy needs, the loss of tax revenue, a reduction in employment and the inability to provide for social need whether through the private sector or the public sector.
• Profit is the surplus generated by individuals (or groups of individuals) putting capital at risk. It is the price of risk. Hence profit is also the reward for innovation and ideas. Without a reward for risk capital and innovation then the economy will not grow, provide for the needs of people, or create the wealth necessary for well-being.
• Profit is not exploitation. Profit generally arises from transactions that benefit both parties. Profit actually represents the creation of wealth from mutually beneficial transactions. Unless wealth is created there is no investment, no employment and no opportunity for social good.
• Exploitation is not a good thing and economic surplus may arise as a result of immoral behavior. The problem there is the exploitation, rather than the profit itself. 
• The idea that the economy is a zero-sum game. If one party makes a profit, that must be due to another making a corresponding loss, and moral outrage against capitalism ensues. Once profit is generated it is simply removed from the economy into the hands of the already wealthy.
• Profit shows that entrepreneurs are welcome. Entrepreneurs are the lynchpin of an economy. They are the creators and innovators of new ideas which then attract the capital investment needed. If entrepreneurs are not welcome, then an economy will stagnate. Entrepreneurs needed to be attracted by the prospect of profit, so that they will bring their ideas to fruition for the mutual benefit of all. An entrepreneur is not there to be squeezed (or even exploited) but for the economic and social good of society.
• Profit generates investment and employment. However, beyond the rewards which are taken, without profit then there is no means of investment whether in capital goods or human capital; in other words, no profit, no new markets, no new production and no new employment; indeed to the contrary we are likely to see a reduction in both. Many business people see the provision of employment, not necessarily as the primary aim of a business, but one of the aims of the business enterprise.  
• Profit provides the means for social transformation in society. Perhaps this is more controversial. If we take that position we damage the moral underpinning of the rationale for profit. Profit is a surplus. To argue that profit provides a basis for social transformation is not a statement that such transformation has to be achieved by the state.
• Government has a role to play and the generation of wealth and profit and lobbyists influencing for abnormal profits. Profit also allows individuals to act. Distributing profits for the well-being of individuals and families. Similarly profit provides the means for philanthropy. Profit doesn’t seem so bad.
• While profit is moral if earned ethically, morally, legally and in reasonable quantities, while excess profit is deeply immoral. The diving line is hazy.

The vice of capitalism is its unequal sharing of blessings; 

the virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. 

Whatever moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. 

And if it stops moving, subsidize it .... Ronald Reagan

My View:

There is no question that profit motivates entrepreneurs, boosts economy, creates jobs and boosts state revenues. Left view profit as exploitation. A company has profited at someone else’s expense. and that person stands exploited and hence profit is immoral. But unbridled profits arising out of monopoly or cartel forming or lobbying or consumer ignorance leading to abnormal profits is exploitation, immoral, illegal and crime. Excess profits also indicates that labour are underpaid and/or consumers over charged. Profits results in rich becoming richer while others remain as they are is socially unsustainable. All the above statements are true in a expanding economy but fails when economy is stagnating or shrinking. Excess consumption leads to wastage and ecological imbalances. Capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people. While capitalists desires to keep all profits to themselves they will come out with evil plans to socialise the losses. Capitalism only produces a small privileged rich who are beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor. Finally profit beyond certain point is immoral, exploitative and crime. 

Investment Advice

Investment advice is a tricky thing with parameters like investor's age, risk, returns, appreciation, liquidity, term etc. The details are in the below matrix

	Risk	Return	Liquidity	Capital Gain
Cash	Nil	Nil	High	Negative
Gold	Nil	Nil	High	Moderate
Bank Deposits	Low	Low	High	Nil
Private lending	High	High	Uncertain	Nil
Equity Share (Blue Chips)	Moderate	Low	High	High
Mutual Funds	Low	Moderate	High	Moderate
Pension Schemes	Low	Moderate	Low	Nil
Real Estate	Low	Nil	Low	Uncertain

Types of Risks are:

• Credit Risk: You may not get back your money.
• Inflation Risk: The longer you have in cash, inflation erodes its value.
• Liquidity Risk: In long term investments, turning asset into cash takes time and carry penalties.
• Time Risk: A better investment opportunity might present itself.
• Market Risk: Values fluctuate as per market sentiment.
• Business Risk: Profitability may not be as anticipated.
• Interest Rate Risk: Interest rates might get lowered in the economy.

Invest in  continuous learning:

• Invest in yourself. Anything you can do to develop your own abilities or business.
• Attend conferences, seminars, and meet-ups.
• Take a free online course.
• Talk to people and ask them questions (listen more than you talk).
• Research something you are interested in.
• Travel.

Some important tips:

1. The worst investment you can make over time: cash.
2. Never lose money. Focus on capital preservation strategies.
3. An investment in knowledge pays the most interest.
4. Beware of expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship.
5. Diversify your investment portfolio.
6. Invest in a broad-based index fund. The economy will do fine over time.
7. Don’t be afraid to drop your poor performers.
8. Working with an adviser could help you earn more toward your goals. 
9. Sometimes, hiring an adviser can actually be riskier than doing things yourself.
10. If you’re determined to pick stocks, don’t buy into a business you don’t understand.
11. Invest for the long haul.
12. To be a successful investor you must divorce yourself from the fears and greed of the people around you, although it is almost impossible.
13. It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.
14. Remember, price is what you pay; value is what you get.

Most people lose money in disastrous investments, gambling, rotten business deals, greed, poor timing, in the stock market, in options and futures, in real estate, in bad loans, and in their own businesses.

My view:

1. Provide adequate capital.
2. Remember, risk exists everywhere.
3. Do your research & home work properly.
4. Formulate your investment strategies.
5. Focus on capital preservation and risk mitigation.
6. Select good broker and verify his credentials.
7. Start investing over time.
8. Diversify your portfolio.
9. Monitor investments periodically.
10. Enjoy the profits.