Measure, analyse, and soar!

Business guru Peter Drucker has been quoted as saying, "What you cannot measure, you cannot manage." Of course, Drucker is a consultant for big business, and in contrast to what he says, many small and medium-sized businesses do very well based just on the strength of the entrepreneurs' instincts. For running a small business, instinct is just a different way of measuring, but in the subconscious.

Be that as it may, I'm quite sure that this instinctive way of operating does not work with investing, at least not for the ordinary saver. In investing, it's always true - without exception - that what you cannot measure, you cannot manage. Put simply, if you don't have a fairly precise understanding of your various investments and assets, it becomes very difficult to meet your life's financial goals. What's worse is that you won't know whether you will meet them or if you have systematically thought through those goals.

When you measure what you haven't measured earlier, you can be surprised pleasantly, unpleasantly, or sometimes both. This has happened to several people I know. A fascinating example is an acquaintance who had been investing sporadically in mutual funds for his entire working life. Many of these investments were tax-saving, mostly of the order of Rs 25,000- 50,000, all equity funds. Loosely, he estimated that he had invested about Rs 15-20 lakh, which had about doubled in value.

Once upon a time, there was no easy way to analyse such investments without a lot of data entry or by buying some expensive software. However, recently, after the launch of the new Value Research Online website, we have a (free) way of easily importing an entire history of investments with just a few clicks. In a few minutes, he had an in-depth consolidated report of both sets of investments going back to the beginning. The total came to Rs 1.75 crore, more than six times what he had initially assumed.

Equity investments over a long time can easily create a bonanza. Unfortunately, this feeling of being rich didn't last much longer. As they went through the reports generated by Value Research Premium, they realised that the analysis engine of the website had exposed many big problems in their portfolio. Almost one-third of the funds had turned duds many years ago. Since they never paid attention, they never came to know. Some were outperformers and deserved much more money being allocated to them. There was so much that could have been optimised earlier, some of it years earlier. Had they done that, they could have something like Rs 30-40 lakh more. Not just that, they could even see how much inflation had eaten away from their savings and how they would have fared had they used other asset classes like fixed deposits.

That was a high price to pay for not paying attention, not measuring and not optimising investments, and not spending just an hour or so every month seeing where their money was going and what it was doing. Anyhow, they have still come out fine - they've made money, less than they could but still a lot. Countless others in India are doing all the hard work of earning money, even saving it and then not managing it and losing the opportunity of reaching their financial goals. Don't get me wrong - I'm not blaming my friends or anyone else who has failed to optimise their investments. It's not easy; it takes a lot of learning and motivation. Unless... Unless you use the right tools. Tools of the kind that Value Research has created for you. Value Research Premium is tailor-made for this kind of analysis. This is why it was created.

Value Research Premium provides a collection of exceptionally useful tools, arguably the best resources available to any Indian mutual fund investor. Let's briefly discuss some of the benefits you can expect:
Portfolio Planner: These are custom portfolios suggested to you as part of your premium membership. The algorithm that we have evolved takes into account your goals, income, saving capacity and a number of other factors.

Portfolio Analysis: Only a few members are starting their investing from scratch. For most of you, a big question is whether your existing investments fit into your goals. This is often a hard question to answer because there are a lot of implications of switching old investments, not the least of which is taxation. In the Premium system, you can get an evaluation and a suggested fix list based on our expert teams' inputs.

Analysts' Choice: Often, investors want to choose their funds for some particular investment purpose. There are over 1,500 available to you, and even with the help of our rating system, it's a lot of work to zoom in to the right set. However, that won't be a problem for you because, as a Premium member, you will have access to Analysts' Choice. Instead of the 36 official types of funds, we have created eight investor-oriented categories that match precisely with your financial goals. In each of these, our analysts have carefully selected a handful of funds to serve you with the best outcomes.

There's a lot more to Premium, of course. So, head over to Value Research Premium, read more details of these features, see glimpses of what Premium has to offer, read testimonials of our members and subscribe at a discount of up to 30 per cent.