Posts

Most investors know roughly how mutual fund taxes work but are surprised by the exact numbers at redemption. Exit loads reduce the amount you receive before taxes are calculated. Capital gains taxes apply on the gain portion. The interaction between exit load timing, holding period, and fund category determines your actual take-home. This is the complete reference. Equity Mutual Funds Large Cap, Flexi Cap, Mid Cap, Small Cap, ELSS, Multi Cap, Thematic Exit Load (most funds): ...

useEffect and useState misuse are the leading causes of performance problems in React applications. Most engineers learn the API without learning the footguns.

OpenTelemetry has stabilized across traces, metrics, and logs. The vendor lock-in problem it solves is real, and the integration path is now practical for most teams.

A Systematic Withdrawal Plan (SWP) is the mirror image of an SIP. Instead of investing a fixed amount monthly, you withdraw a fixed amount monthly from your mutual fund corpus. The math of SWPs has a dangerous asymmetry that most retirement planning discussions in India do not adequately cover: sequence of returns risk. What Sequence of Returns Risk Means Two investors each earn 12% average annual returns over 20 years. Investor A earns good returns early and bad returns later. Investor B earns bad returns early and good returns later. If both are accumulating, they end with the same corpus. If both are withdrawing, Investor B runs out of money much sooner. ...

The M-series chips did not just make Macs faster. They restructured the cost-performance calculus for developer laptops in a way that competing PC hardware has not matched.

In 2024, the Sensex crossed 80,000 points and financial media treated it as meaningful. News anchors made special graphics. AMC marketing teams sent congratulatory emailers. Investors asked whether they should buy or sell. The honest answer: the index crossing 80,000 provides exactly zero information about whether markets are expensive, cheap, or likely to rise or fall from here. Why Index Levels Are Meaningless The Sensex is a price-weighted composite index of 30 large Indian companies. The “number” - 80,000 or otherwise - is calculated by multiplying the prices of constituent stocks by their weights and dividing by a historical divisor. The divisor changes every time there is a constituent change, bonus issue, or rights issue. ...

Gold has three primary investable forms for Indian retail investors: Sovereign Gold Bonds (SGBs), Gold ETFs via stock exchange, and physical gold (coins, bars, or jewellery). The headline gold price return is the same for all three since all are linked to domestic gold prices. But the after-tax, after-cost return over 10 years differs significantly, particularly because of SGB’s embedded 2.5% annual interest and its capital gains tax exemption on maturity. ...

Partial indexes and expression indexes have been in Postgres for years and are routinely ignored. They can cut index size by 80% and query times by an order of magnitude for the right workloads.

Pharma was supposed to be the COVID winner. And it was - for about 18 months. Then came three years of underperformance that wiped out much of the excess returns. The full story of Indian pharma stocks during and after COVID is a useful case study in sector investing, narrative timing, and mean reversion. The Pre-COVID Starting Point In early 2020, before the pandemic, Indian pharma stocks were already recovering from a multi-year headwind. US FDA warning letters, pricing pressure in the US generic market, and domestic pricing caps had weighed on earnings from 2015 to 2019. The Nifty Pharma index was trading around 7,500-8,000 at the start of 2020, below its 2015 peak of approximately 11,000. ...

A green CI build is not the same as a safe deployment. Most pipelines have structural gaps that create false confidence about code quality and production readiness.

Bun is not just a fast Node.js replacement - it collapses the entire JavaScript toolchain into a single binary and makes the developer experience dramatically simpler.

The Nifty 500 index contains 500 companies compared to Nifty 50’s 50 companies. The intuitive conclusion is that Nifty 500 is 10x more diversified. The reality is more nuanced: the top 50 stocks of Nifty 500 account for roughly 60-65% of the index’s weight, meaning Nifty 50 stocks dominate the Nifty 500 as well. How Nifty 500 Is Constructed The Nifty 500 represents approximately 94-95% of total NSE free-float market capitalisation. It includes: ...

Go is simple to learn but the patterns that distinguish experienced Go engineers from beginners are non-obvious. Here are the ones that show up most in code reviews.

Balanced Advantage Funds (BAFs) are marketed as smart, self-managing hybrid funds that automatically reduce equity exposure when markets are expensive and increase it when markets are cheap. The pitch is compelling. The reality is that different BAFs use fundamentally different valuation models, and two funds can have equity allocations that differ by 30-40 percentage points even when looking at identical market conditions. What BAFs Are Supposed to Do The theoretical appeal: in a market crash, the fund automatically moves to high equity; in a bubble, it moves to low equity. This mechanical discipline replaces the investor’s need for timing decisions. ...

The Total Expense Ratio (TER) is the annual fee that a mutual fund deducts from its assets to cover fund management, administration, marketing, and distribution costs. SEBI sets maximum TER limits, and these limits directly cap how much an AMC can charge. The 2024 SEBI circular tightened these limits further. Understanding TER math is not optional for investors - a 0.5% difference in TER over 20 years can cost you 10-15% of your final corpus. ...

Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and now OpenAI are all designing custom AI chips. This is not vanity - it is a structural economic and strategic imperative.

A missing trailing slash in an Nginx alias directive is one of the most common and most serious misconfigurations in web infrastructure. Here is how it works and how to audit for it.

When comparing AMCs, the question is not which fund had the best 1-year return - that is random. The question is which AMC has delivered consistent alpha above its benchmark across multiple funds and multiple time periods. The answer is not straightforward, and the last three years have been humbling for several AMCs that had strong prior track records. Defining Alpha Correctly Alpha is excess return above the benchmark. A large cap fund is compared to Nifty 100 TRI. A mid cap fund to Nifty Midcap 150 TRI. A flexi cap fund typically to Nifty 500 TRI. ...

The 3-fund portfolio is the simplest evidence-backed investment framework that exists. It was popularised in the US by Bogleheads (followers of Vanguard founder Jack Bogle), but the logic translates perfectly to India. Three funds, covering Indian equity, international equity, and debt, give you exposure to thousands of companies across the world with minimal complexity and low costs. Why Three Funds? Most investors overcomplicate their portfolios. They hold 8-12 mutual funds across multiple categories, many of which overlap significantly. Studies consistently show that beyond a certain point, adding funds adds complexity and cost without meaningfully improving diversification. ...

Kubernetes complexity is not accidental and it is not just a learning curve problem. It is the result of solving genuinely hard distributed systems problems that simpler platforms paper over.