Your Broker As A Cheat (Part 10)

There is a joke:

What's the difference between buying a lottery ticket and buying a penny stock?

In the first case, you help finance your local municipal swimming pool. In the second case, you help finance the stock broker's home pool.

A typical broker charges hefty commissions only because he is able to detect your greed for a quick buck.  However, in the event you do wish to work with a broker who charges top fees, you must see whether his advice adds value to your portfolio and is in excess of his brokerage.  Specifically, you must look for

-          An investment strategy that suits your needs and your risk profile.  The broker must be able to align and  integrate your goals with the market ON A CONTINUOUS BASIS.

-          Your broker must be able to realistically assess the direction your portfolio is taking with the ongoing market moods, sentiments and the overall financial and economic milieu.

-          Your broker must be able to answer every question about every stock he recommends.  However, it will be your duty to do the due diligence.

-          Your broker must manage your portfolio in a tax efficient manner.

-          Ask your broker to benchmark your portfolio to a comparable index.  Ensure that there is regular and substantive communication from him to you as regards this.

-          Your broker must have a passion for his work.  You must observe from his body language and communication as regards what drives him – his desire for excellence or his desire for his brokerage. 

If your broker is unable to provide you something on the lines of the above list, do yourself a favour and take your account elsewhere.

©Nitesh Kotecha

Purity Quote #1

“I have also seen children successfully surmounting the effects of an evil inheritance. That is due to purity being an inherent attribute of the soul. ” - Mahatma Gandhi

Give A Hug!

We need 4 hugs a day for survival. We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance. We need 12 hugs a day for growth - Virginia Satir

We all have various expressions for communicating our affection for another.  However, our body language reflects our affections.

Our need to share or bask in another person’s aura prompts us to hug that person.  Metaphysics explain the pockets of energy shortfall that occur in our aura.  Our thoughts and reactions to life events deplete our aura.  We then have an urge to replenish this deficit and we thus increase our proximity to someone whom we perceive to have an abundance of such energy.  This is the reason a crying child feels comfort in the arms of a loved and trusted one.

It is difficult to accept the concept of energy and its loss in physical and tangible terms.  However, the idea that we do not understand something until we have a picture of it in our heads is a by- product of the Newtonian way of looking at the world.  If we want to understand that, we have to get past Newton.

Here is the deal – Go out and Give a Hug.  It is easy to give a hug to children.  The trick is to get out of your comfort zone.

All the Best.

©Nitesh Kotecha

The Overflowing Cup (Reprise)

From the moment of our birth, learning is a process.  Our parents, siblings, schools, colleges, work and home environment all provide us with learning experiences.

There is an inflection point at which the mind begins to interfere.  This interference comes from all the social labels that we acquire during the course of our life.  The schools and colleges dish out certificates and awards.

Our education has degrees that provide us with labels and expectations of our supposed command over knowledge and behavior.  These very labels soon create a perception of mastery and invincibility.

There are ways to learn and here are some of them:

Your experiences are a valuable teacher.  A habit of keeping a diary helps us record our thoughts and allows us to revisit those thoughts at a later time when we are more evolved on account of our life experiences.  Discussions about your life experiences with a good friend can help you learn more about them – and may offer you an opportunity to transmute pain into stepping stones.

Vicarious experiences – learning from the mistakes of other people – teach us.  Great biographies and autobiographies offer us opportunities to use other people’s mistakes as resources.  We may mature up to those experiences and have better skill when we encounter similar situations in our lives.

Get in touch with what your enemies think about you.  There are reasons to believe that it may expose truths about you that you may have taken great effort in concealing.

Change is all around us and it is our attitude of pomposity as regards our pre-existing knowledge that will determine how we make sense of the changes around us.  The Chinese have a saying “For a person who knows how to use a hammer, every problem is a nail.”

©Nitesh Kotecha

The Overflowing Cup

There is a zen story…

A university professor with multiple PhD’s and extensive studies went to Japan and sought out a Zen master who was known to have great knowledge of the sublime.

The Master welcomed the Professor and invited him in, offering tea. As the Master was preparing the tea, the Professor listed all his degrees and experiences and studies, going on and on showing how much he knows.

The Master was quiet all this time, attentively preparing the tea and listening to the professor.  As the professor kept talking, the master poured the tea, filling the cup, and kept on pouring. When the professor noticed the tea overflowing from the cup - he cried out; “Master, the cup is full.  You are pouring more tea over it.”

The master replied; “As the cup is full, putting more tea in is only a waste. It must be empty first to receive and hold what it gets.”

Understanding Positive Thinking (Part 4)

I learnt a lesson from one of our works contractors.  He mentioned the way his father handled sticky situations and other such blocks that we may run into.  Let me elaborate.

His father undertook contracts for civil construction.  There were occasions when people got hurt, or the cement block did not shape up as expected.  Worse, there were situations when cash was short and trouble brewing on that account.

His father would then take a stroll to a nearby market shop and purchase some vegetables.  He would then just silently spend time in fine cutting the vegetables and cooking a meal.  He had a meditative way about it.

Miraculously, his father always so some light at the end of the tunnel.  This is a powerful lesson.  Let us see its merits.

Picking up a mundane task and immersing ourselves in it gives us an emotional distance from the "other" pressing problem at hand.  The emotional upheaval that may arise on account of a stressful situation can be potentially be short circuited on account of such an activity.

A mundane task invariably offers an opportunity for immediate and instant success – be it cooking, or gardening or just cleaning up your closet. This feeling of success and achievement feeds in to our consciousness.  This feedback in to our consciousness opens up mental pathways and allows us to evaluate the pressing problem for alternate view points and consider options for further action.

Go ahead and do something mundane and relax.  Be positive that the very mundane nature of the work will act as fodder for further positive action.

©Nitesh Kotecha

Understanding Positive Thinking (Part 3)

One of the reasons why positive thinking is difficult is because of the education system and patterns that we follow.   Let me explain.

We have been conditioned to think in terms of extremes, opposites and absolutes.  If a thing is not good then it must be bad.  If something is not white, then it is black. If a thing is not lovable, then it is to be hated.  Antonyms make good and challenging questions for children and schools, but to believe that it reflects life would be an exaggeration.  Nothing in life is cut and dried like this and put into compartments.

So, let us take an example of fear of failure as a negative mindset.  If we were to treat this positively, the mindset would not be that of “an assurance of success”.  This is being silly and not positive.  A positive way of approaching this would be “being confident of doing the best we can”.  This kind of positive thinking is nurturing and not a trip to Wonderland!

The core strategy of positive thinking lies in your ability to avoid the extremes in thought.  The positive thought is not necessarily an ideal state.

©Nitesh Kotecha