Ecofinglobe.com and its statistics from an year ago

I was chancing to look upon my blog’s readership and it has skyrocketed in last few months. To give you an idea of how much the readership for http://www.ecofin.wordpress.com has gone up by, Alexa rating has shown a consistent rise in my webpage ranking (it currently stands at 755139 worldwide and its India ranking is better at 58137. Furthermore, my year old blog stats shows my blog to have averaged 9999 hits way in May 2007. The current count stands at 77791.

Above means nothing if people don’t read posts. Simple page views/hits serve no value absolutely. The most important indicator that indicates the health status of a blog is its post:comment ratio. My blog’s average post:comment ratio is at about 1:2. This means, for every post I put up, I get double the # of comments. This ratio was about 2:1 last year at about the same time and it had not even reached breakeven. So, it is a satisfaction that my blog is a success in terms of these critical metrics.

Thank you, all for making this blog readable! Its only my readers who can turnaround this blog and I hope to keep you as repeat readers so the value of this blog is enhanced further!

Keep visiting back - you know where to look for me: http://www.ecofinglobe.com!

Derivatives, the sub prime mess, US recession, Bear Stearns bailout by the Fed/JPMChase

 We know this story so we will not repeat this again: JP Morgan Chase set to acquire Bear Stearns for a paltry $2 a share - based on the transaction price of March 14th 2008!

http://www.bearstearns.com/sitewide/our_firm/press_releases/content.htm?d=03_16a_2008

http://investor.shareholder.com/jpmorganchase/press/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=299805&ReleaseType=Current

You can refer to the following article to get the update from the WSJ (Wall Street Journal) on Bear Stearns - NYSE: BSC(http://www.bearstearns.com/) and its survival thanks to the revival package of the Fed and JP Morgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120580966534444395.html?mod=hpp_us_inside_today

Some macro economic predictions for 2008

Here’s a caveat: I fully understand economic predictions are foolhardy and its a bunch of crap since it is not something that can be predicted. Famous investors such as billionnaire Warren Buffett etc. also share the same viewpoints about economic predictions not being practical due to the changing dynamics of economies worldwide!

I still choose to defy this and some of my predictions for 2008 are as follows. Do not worry - I will not try to state the obvious and this is a result of some tad bit of analytical analysis thrown in for it to have some meaning.

Blogging guidelines - my two cents

What are the important factors one needs to consider before one begins to blog:

1. First, get over this obsession of Google adsense. 99/100 bloggers I meet first think of making a quick buck on adsense rather than focus on quality of their blogs and its relevance towards the topic(s) chosen! This is really very disturbing statistics.

Technically, what is a recession?

There is so much talk of the world’s most misused word i.e. recession. When can we exactly use the term recession?

Forex/currency markets trading not allowed in India

I spoke to a couple of top investment bankers in India who said that currency trading is not allowed in India. I had written an earlier post on the Forex markets - http://ecofin.wordpress.com/2007/07/19/foreign-exchange-exposure-of-indian-it-bigwigsforward-exchange-contracts/.

There is some speculation about the Indian rupee’s full convertibility but that might not really change this policy.

I personally find this concept of currency markets quite fascinating. We did an entire course on International Financial management and I have a lot of key takeaways from my experience whilst at IIFT (Indian Institute of Foreign Trade - http://www.iift.edu) - my alma mater during my EMIB stint.

Research reports to come shortly - aka McKinseyQuarterly style

All our research reports would be in PDF format and we are going to do comprehensive consulting analysis for our readers on myriad topics especially on the business sectors.

All research reports would be made available at http://www.acc101.com

Watch that space for more.

The US subprime crisis - increasing chance of a US recession/burst of the US housing bubble

Cross posted in http://www.acc101.com 

First of all, there’s been a lot of talk about this US subprime crisis and it causing a worldwide economic slump.

Lets look at it methodically and analyze it with an analytical perspective before jumping to conclusions about how the entire world economy can sink into a recession.

What is the subprime lending (B-paper, second chance or near prime lending) market - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime ? 

Rising rupee / Foreign exchange exposure of Indian IT companies due to appreciation

Cross posted in http://www.acc101.com

In the last few weeks, we have been hearing of the top Indian IT service export companies declaring their Q1 results (remember the Indian financial year is from Apr 1st - Mar 31st) and almost all of them without doubt have been hit by a rising rupee. I have written an earlier post on the same topic and it made for interesting analysis back then - http://ecofin.wordpress.com/2007/05/10/currency-markets-is-the-indian-rupee-really-appreciating/

I read in the papers today about some steps taken by some of these IT majors such as asking employees to work on Saturdays to compensate for their exposure to the rupee appreciation! I am not so concerned about the fact that they are asking their people to work on Saturdays but I am concerned about the fact that they are trying to relate two different events (from an employee perspective in an employee driven organization) to justify their need to make employees work on Saturdays to cover for their risk exposure to the outside forex market. Is this justified - is what I am trying to analyze.

Currency markets - is the Indian rupee really appreciating?

http://ecofin.wordpress.com/2007/07/19/foreign-exchange-exposure-of-indian-it-bigwigsforward-exchange-contracts/ 

There is a lot of talk in recent days about the Indian rupee appreciating vis-a-vis the US Dollar and that the exporters are losing out on exports etc.

Let us take a holistic view of this in terms of hard facts and numbers rather than go by hearsay. The facts first:

1. The Indian rupee has risen sharply in recent months to just under Rs. 41 to a USD from Rs. 49 in 2002 - an appreciation of nearly 16%.