Once again Betaal was seeking out Vikram. It had been a while since he had run into him and the puzzle of “duration in debt fund investing” was giving him sleepless nights. But this was to change soon as he spotted Vikram walking in the forest. As usual he flew towards him and landed on him. Vikram smiled. He too was expecting to meet his ghost friend. Said Betaal, “Explain “duration” in debt funds. I need to know in your style.Tell me or I shall crush your skull into many pieces.” Vikram, never one to care about such empty threats kept smiling. However, Vikram loved the challenge of making concepts easy. “So here we go Betaal with your lesson for the day. Imagine you are allowed to set up a food stall. In one case you get a contract to set up the stall in the market for just two days at a time And in the second case you get to set up a stall for the entire year. Now tell me Betaal in which of the two cases you will you be able to forecast your sales better?”

'News' is nothing more than noise. The less one is exposed to it the better life around looks.   From an investing stand point, the more we expose ourselves to 'News', the higher the chances of making investing mistakes and blunders. News thrives on negativity ; negative images; negative stories; negative words.  The 'News' anchor invariably makes one believe that equity investing is suicidal because markets are a curse upon us. Unfortunately people spend a lot of time "listening" to 'News' and in a sense "News" has become the source of education. Therefore, I always say that people are not "uneducated in personal finance". They are in fact "wrongly educated". Therefore, for Financial Advisors the challenges are two fold.  First we have to make investors 'unlearn' and then we have to make them 'learn'. A lot of 'trash' accumulated over the years has to be