Simply safe dividends – that’s what every dividend stock investor wants. Even if you are undecided on the ‘eternal’ debate between index fund investment and dividend stock investing, it stands to reason that you want your investments to grow. Growth, keeping up with inflation or going beyond it, can only happen if the business you […]
Funny thing, this financial planning stuff. You are asked to guess, for the coming years or even decades, how much will you be spending every year, and how much income or growth will your money deliver, and also, when will you die! If we knew all of this with certainty, there isn’t much left to […]
I have made no secret of the fact that I like both index investing and dividend growth investing, and use both to build my passive income and net worth. My series comparing the two can be found here. For international investing, I prefer indexing and ETFs mainly because of inconsistent disclosure norms, accounting standards and investor […]
Efficiency is beautiful. Nature gives us so many examples. Out of the millions of sperm that try and enter the fallopian tube, only one finally enters the egg. The moment it does, the door is shut for all others around it. No matter how many millions of sperm try, only one can enter. The fertilized human egg […]
“You pay a heavy price in the market for a cheery consensus” says the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett. The nature of human mind to seek out favorable facts, approvals and confirmations in support of what we already want to believe is called confirmation bias. By nature, most of us have a strong confirmation bias because we […]
You may have read several studies that successful long term investing requires the ability to invest efficiently, have enormous patience and faith in the markets to eventually deliver the goodies for your retirement. We also saw in an earlier article, that patience, especially to survive the dog years of investing, is a key requirement. How […]
The journey of life is long, complicated and is never a straight path. Same applies to our financial journey as well, as finances mirror our lifestyle and choices. So, we must stay humble and kind. The elegance of steadily compounding financial returns are merely that…just elegant. It’s funny we model financial portfolio growth using […]
Loss aversion defines much of human behavior. We are so worried about the prospect of loss, that many studies show that finding $100 doesn’t give the same joy to offset the pain of losing $100. Some say, it takes as much as gaining $200 to offset the loss of $100. In other words, a loss feels twice as painful than a gain […]
This website is fortunate to have high quality of visitors, based on what the analytics tell me. TFR is also fortunate to have a global audience and people from various industries (both working and retired). So, I am counting on your advice in this post. This is my first attempt at discussing a specific stock holding of mine. […]
Opportunities in life are like a train in an impoverished country. You better get on it whenever you see one going in the direction you want. Otherwise, you don’t know when the next one will come!
This post is a confession of my screw up where I passed on a rare chance to retire early….real early. Read this tale and avoid the mistake I made, so you can catch the express train to early retirement. Otherwise, you never know if it will stop by your station again. (more…)
Raman Venkatesh is the founder of Ten Factorial Rocks. Raman is a ‘Gen X’ corporate executive in his mid 40’s. In addition to having a Ph.D. in engineering, he has worked in almost all continents of the world. Ten Factorial Rocks (TFR) was created to chronicle his journey towards retirement while sharing his views on the absurdities and pitfalls along the way. The name was taken from the mathematical function 10! (ten factorial) which is equal to 10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 3,628,800.