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Human civilization has an insatiable lust for gold. Because gold is dispersed widely throughout the geologic world, it became prevalent in human cultures and religious ceremonies across the globe. Dating back millennia. Last year, two large tombs were discovered and excavated at the site of the ancient city of Pylos in southern Greece. Inside the 3,500-year-old tombs, archaeologists found remains of gold jewellery and thousands of pieces of gold foil, remnants of the sheets of gold that once lined the tomb floors. The ancient Egyptians considered it a symbol of eternity and referred to it as “flesh of the gods”. Consider the tomb of the boy-king Tutankhamun. He was enshrined in three gold coffins and his finery included a gold funerary mask. Gold may no longer be used in tombs, but it does line the walls of the vaults of central banks. Gold has been a symbol of wealth and power, a store of value, a means of exchange, legal tender, and has facilitated global trade. It is evident ...

The subject of luck in investing is a fascinating one. MORGAN HOUSEL of Collaborative Fund once commented that luck and risk are the opposite sides of the same coin but we treat them very differently. Being a fan of his writings, I went through his views on “luck” and decided to reproduce a few them from 2017 to 2020. *What have you changed your mind about in the last decade? - 2017* I respect the role of luck more today than I did a decade ago. I used to view successful people as clearly having more intelligence and drive than others. I’ve come to appreciate how much of success is due to luck, not the least of which is being born into a good family in a good country. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see that if Bill Gates were born in Berlin in 1920, his outcome would have been different. The common rebuttal to this is “Luck is what you’re dealt, fate is how you play your cards.” Which is 100% true. But some people are born with a pair of aces. Worse, they never reali...

Financial Services Intermediaries usually focus on various factors while promoting a mutual fund to the investors, but seldom do we give any importance to the factors that warrant exiting an investment. While the benefits of investing, especially in equity funds, are derived in a longer time frame, that doesn’t mean one should forget about these investments and only take a look at them as the goal nears its target. This is because there are various factors that impact the growth journey of investments. Here I would like to highlight the importance of the right time to redeem mutual fund investments in the financial planning process and look at the major scenarios under which investors should be advised to take an informed decision to exit their mutual fund investments. *When to sell* While it’s true that mutual fund investments should be for the long term, a smart investor must also know when to make an exit and sell his or her mutual fund holdings. For most investors though, deci...