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What makes investing in property really a good investment option? When there are other investment avenues open, why is it that investment propertynever fades out? Even while the other avenues are offering better rates of return, people still go in for investing in the real estate. The reasons are abound, from the purely financial consideration based on profitability to the more emotional and psychological reasons. Let us explore some of the reasons which make investment property hot.

Absolute returns matter: Investing a big sum in the real estate sector over a period of time can actually make you earn big after some period of time. While some other options may be offering you better returns, there might be requirement of lower sums which might in fact make you diversify more rather than putting all money in one option to get maximum returns. In property, you have to invest big.

A thing which you can own and use: Commodities or metals, most of the times, can not be used. These can only be used by selling these off or mortgaging them to convert these to money which is then used for doing anything else. Property can be used as such either for living or for work anytime that you like.

A more secure investment: Can a thief take away your property? He can of course take away the investments done on papers and deprive you of possessions but this is not possible to be done with property unless there is intentional white collar crime done against you with malicious means.

Earn income in more than one way: With investment property, you can take the rental income by leasing out your unit or you can even sell off the same during the peak rate season to get the maximum profit. Rental income can be substantial in some areas. You can retain the title to the property even while earning income from it.

While it is true that there are some distinctive advantages of it, there are some peculiarities of this investment as well. You need big sum to invest which might not be possible for everyone. This investment needs to be locked in for years if it is some under-construction project. Also, the market demand may not be all that good for selling the property or renting it at the desired rates. You might have to wait for the opportune time in future or compromise with the rates that you are seeking.

Despite these peculiarities, the investment property is still desirable since, historically, the property prices have not crashed often. These are far more stable or are always witnessing the upward trend. Downward curve happens very rarely. In a buoyant economy, the need for more residential, commercial, industrial and other spaces grows considerably and the high demand for limited spaces pushed up the prices. You can design a portfolio of investment in different properties depending on their special features and your objectives.

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“There are no orphan shares …istock_000009147687xsmall”. A lot of what passes as serious investment commentary is simply “gobbledygook”, i.e. nonsense or drivel. It defies share market realities and is at odds with the philosophy that markets work.

Yet, unfortunately, some of the people and organizations generally regarded as finance experts are the main proponents of this gobbledygook. Let’s consider a couple of examples.

In a recent article in the “Sydney Morning Herald”, a private client adviser of a major stock broker explained why the share market had fallen for the past three days, after a period of strong gains, as follows:

“I think it comes down to a bit of profit-taking. I guess the market is acknowledging we’ve had it pretty good for the last couple of months and it’s time to take a breather.”

In a similar vein, the finance reporters on the evening television news will often attribute a rise in the share market, after a period of weakness, to “bargain hunters” taking advantage of lower prices.

Sometimes, more glibly, since they believe they are stating the “bleeding obvious”, they will explain a rise in the market as due to “more buyers than sellers”.

But all these types of comments overlook one indisputable share market fact. That is, for every buyer, there must be a seller – there are no orphan shares. So if a seller is “profit taking”, what is the buyer doing? Or, if the buyers are “bargain hunters”, what does that make the sellers?

Share markets do not move because of the weight of buyers or sellers. Rather, they respond to changes in expectations of the factors that drive share prices i.e. expected profits and the discount rate used to convert those profits to today’s dollars.

Lower current share prices compared with two years ago almost certainly reflect lower expected company profits.

And, perhaps, a higher discount rate (or expected return) to entice investors to take the necessary risk. It is not because investors have “fled” share markets as is often suggested in the financial media. Because, in aggregate, they simply can’t.

The Arithmetic of Active Management:

Another prevalent example of investment gobbledygook is the claim that depressed share market conditions are best suited to active, stock picking investors as opposed to passive investors who simply hold share portfolios designed to replicate the market’s overall performance.

Since the share market peak of November 2007, hardly a day goes by without a financial journalist opining or quoting some stock broking source that “it’s a stock pickers’ market”. No proof is provided. It is simply asserted.

We recently received an invitation from a major financial institution to a seminar to hear three prominent active fund managers present on why they believed they would outperform the overall share market in these difficult times. The invitation explained:

“At the peak of the bull market most fund managers were able to produce strong absolute returns with ease. Moving forward active management and fund manager skill will play a far greater role.”

The implied claims appear to be:

1. now is a good time for active funds management; and

2. you can pick the most skilled active managers.

A response to Claim 2. will need to be the topic of another article. However, in summary, the best available research suggests it is very difficult (some say, impossible) to distinguish luck from skill.

But rebutting Claim 1. doesn’t require research – simple arithmetic will do. The essential message of Nobel prize winning financial economist, Professor William Sharpe’s classic 1991 paper, “The Arithmetic of Active Funds Management”, is that:

-Since active and passive investors make up the entire share investor universe; and
-Passive investors earn the return of the total share market less their relatively small costs

it follows that active investors, in aggregate, must also earn the same total share market return less their relatively high costs.

This will always be the case. There are not good times and bad times for active investors, compared with passive investors. In our view, given the higher costs of active investment, there are only bad times!

The moral of the story …

Often, in investment markets, propositions that sound plausible, and are being put forward by people or organizations with apparent expertise, prove to be total bunk when subjected to appropriate scrutiny.

As a smart decision maker, serious questions you should ask yourself are:

-Do I have the knowledge and wisdom required to distinguish between often self serving investment gobbledygook and the opinions and research of the world’s leading financial economists and behavioral scientists;
-If not, is it the best use of my time to acquire that knowledge and wisdom;
-What are the costs, risks and foregone opportunities of not accessing that knowledge and wisdom; and
-Am I prepared to accept those costs, risks and foregone opportunities?

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Investment Procedures

Almost certainly, the discussion has been at such a high level of generality that it provides little concrete guidance for real investors. After some more similar, general, and abstract discussion of related topics, such as capital asset pricing and risk, we hope to provide some help in translating these general concepts into usable investment procedures. In order to define Markowitz’s efficient set of portfolios, it is necessary to know for each security its expected return, its variance, and its covariance with each other security. If the efficient set were to be selected from a list of only 1,000 securities, the volume of necessary inputs and the computational costs would be intolerably large. It would be necessary to have 1,000 statistics for expected return, 1,000 variances, and 499,500 covariances.* It is not realistic to expect security analysts to provide this volume of inputs.

If 20 analysts were responsible for the 1,000 stocks, each analyst would be responsible for providing almost 25,000 covariances. The volume of work would be intolerable and, furthermore, it seems to be quite difficult to have an intuitive feeling about the significance of a covariance.

Because of this practical difficulty, the Markowitz portfolio model was exclusively of academic interest until William Sharpe suggested a simplification which made it usable.1 Since almost all securities are significantly correlated with the market as a whole, Sharpe suggested that a satisfactory simplification would be to abandon the covariances of each security with each other security and to substitute information on the relationship of each security to the market.

In his terms, it is possible to consider the return for each security to be represented by the following equation: where Rtis the return on security i, atand b,Lare parameters, ciis a random variable with an expected value of zero, and / is the level of some index, typically a common stock price index. In words, the return on any stock depends on some constant (a) plus some coefficient (b) times the value of a comprehensive stock index (say, the S & P “500″) plus a random component. Sharpe’s simplication reduces the number of estimates that the analyst must produce from 501,500 to 3,002 for a list of 1,000 securities.*

There have been other efforts at simplification derived from Sharpe’s ideas. Cohen and Poague suggested that several indexes rather than a single index be used, with the return for each security being related to the index most appropriate for it—perhaps some index of production which is a component of the aggregate Index of Industrial Production of the Federal Reserve Board. Their empirical results suggest that the cost of using simplifications—either Sharpe’s or theirs—is small. That is, the portfolios which are efficient as a result of their simplified processes are very similar to the efficient portfolios that result from Markowitz’s more complex process. Furthermore, if results are evaluated in terms of the two criteria, expected return and risk, the efficient portfolios from the simple process are insignificantly worse than the efficient portfolios from the complex process.

Bond investing basics are simple. When you buy a bond, the bond issuer – either a government or corporation – pays you an agreed-upon rate of interest known as the coupon rate. In addition, you get your original investment back when the bond reaches a maturity date.

Bonds come in many flavors: taxable and tax-exempt, long- and short-term, AAA-rated and junk, inflation-protected, fixed-rate and variable-rate.

Before investing in a bond issue, you should consider several factors.

Do you want to go long- or short-term? Normally, longer-term bonds pay higher interest than shorter-term bonds. However, monetary policy and inflation expectations vary with time, so sometimes the normal yield curve may flatten (meaning short- and long-term rates are equal) or invert (short-term rates are higher than long-term rates).1 When this occurs, it can be very hard to sell a long-term bond because investors can get the same or higher rate investing short-term.

The big question here is: where do you want to be on the yield curve? How long do you want to invest your money for a given return on your investment?

How much risk do you want to assume? As interest rates go down, the value of a bond goes up and when interest rates climb, a bond’s value falls. If an investor wants less risk, he might choose to buy a short bond, as its value will fluctuate less when interest rates vary. Long bonds usually offer higher interest rates because they typically carry more risk.

If an investor wants no risk, short-term U.S. Treasuries may be a good choice. After all, Uncle Sam backs them up – but they pay a comparatively low rate of return.

A bond’s duration relates to risk. (The duration of a bond is a measurement of how long it will take for the price of a bond to be recouped by internal cash flow.) A debt instrument with a 1-year duration is not very sensitive to interest rate fluctuations, while a really long bond with a 35-year duration will have its value fluctuate sharply with even a small interest rate change. Generally, a bond that pays a higher interest rate and has a longer term will have a higher duration.2

How important is the rating to you? Investors usually look to Standard & Poors or Moodys for bond ratings. Government bonds are perceived as less risky than private sector bonds. Some bond investors do have relatively high risk appetites, with some even buying “high yield” or “junk” bonds from troubled firms whose interest payments are in doubt. The riskier a bond, the higher the interest rate investors will demand.3

Do you want a tax-free or taxable bond? Many federal and municipal bonds are tax-exempt to some degree. Correspondingly, their coupon rates are lower than corporate bonds. You need to compare muni bond and corporate bond rates on an after-tax basis. You do this by calculating the tax-equivalent yield, which equals the tax-free interest rate divided by (1 investor’s federal tax rate, or federal tax bracket).4

Consider two investors. Investor A pays a 25% federal tax rate while Investor B is in the 35% federal bracket. Should they buy a municipal bond paying 4%, or a highly rated corporate bond paying 6%?

Well, the real question becomes: What will they take home after taxes?

They run the numbers on the muni bond. Investor A calculates his after-tax yield as 5.33% (4%/(1-.25) = 5.33%). Investor B gets 6.15% (4%/(1-.35) = 6.15%) after taxes.

Investor B chooses the muni bond. However, Investor A figures out that the tax exemption saves her less, so she selects a corporate bond and pays taxes on it.

Other options include inflation protection and variable rates. Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) are issued by the U.S. Treasury, and their principal depends upon the Consumer Price Index. Their principal increases with inflation and decreases with deflation. TIPS appeal to investors who fear that inflation could erode the value of their investment. When TIPS mature, the investor redeems either the original value of the security or the inflation-adjusted value, whichever is greater.5

Investors who can tolerate varying interest payments may decide to buy a variable-rate bond. The return on these bonds reflects the general level of inflation, and commonly rises with rising interest rates.6

Bond investing demands educated decision-making. Fortunately, bonds come in enough varieties that investors can find bonds appropriate for their tax situation, time horizon, and risk tolerance.

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Having a credit card is the latest substitute to cash money. The issuer of the credit card gives credit to the customer. In return the customer pays interest, and some other prescribed charges. Credit cards cannot be issued by the credit card company to everyone, depending on their financial background. One can easily cheat the credit card company if he was issued a card without verifying his credit history. Credit card companies have to be extra careful regarding the criteria to issue the credit cards. One mistake can cause huge loss. Credit cards with no credit history required are issued people who dont have good credit records or have no credit records.

Bad credit history refers to people who have defaulted in payment of dues, pertaining to any previous credit cards or other bills. People who have failed to pay the dues to the issuer of credit cards or loans taken are people with a bad credit history. Some people have never used a credit card in the past and have never taken loans from any financial institutions. They are said to have no credit history. Credit card companies world wide have started issuing credit cards to such people. Credit cards with no credit history required as criteria for getting the card have some different charges and different interest rates as compared to normal credit cards.

Credit cards for those with no credit history can be instrumental in shaping or building ones credit record. It can improve a persons goodwill, if the user complies with the conditions and pays off his dues on time. Initially, the credit limit enjoyed by such people is less. The interest rates are high in case of default. This can be money made up for the risk taken by the credit card company.

Such cards are common and attract lots of people around the world. They can be very instrumental for people who want to increase their credit worthiness.