Every term is defined twice: once the way a filing would put it, and once the way somebody would explain it to you across a table. The second one is usually the one that sticks.
Showing 32 terms
The schedule on which granted employer equity actually becomes yours, commonly over four years with a one-year cliff.
Unvested equity is a retention device, not wealth you own. Counting it in your net worth is how people talk themselves into staying in a job they should leave.
The cash flow bucket covering money spent on or received from long-term assets such as plant, equipment and acquisitions.
Negative is the normal state for a company still building something. Persistently positive usually means assets are being sold, which flatters this year and shrinks the next one.
Operating a declining business for the cash it will return before it stops, rather than reinvesting to sustain it.
Valued as a perpetuity with the decline rate added to the discount rate. A business shrinking 8% a year is worth a low multiple of its cash, not nothing — provided the cash actually comes out.
An approach that starts from the expectations embedded in a price rather than from a valuation forecast.
Turns "is this a good company?" into "can this company grow 25% a year for ten years?" — a far more answerable question.
Systematically buying characteristics — momentum, value, quality — rather than picking stocks.
Mechanical by design. Overriding the rule is where the edge disappears.
Dividing money by what it is for and when it is needed, and letting each horizon determine the asset class.
The alternative is one undifferentiated pot plus an opinion about the market. Splitting by goal turns allocation into arithmetic instead of mood.
A style that buys companies whose earnings are expected to grow fast enough to justify a high multiple.
The bet is that the market's forecast is too low. It fails when growth disappoints, or when rates rise and the multiple de-rates violently while earnings are still fine.
The longest of the four trading styles — positions held for years and reviewed around quarterly results.
Cost drag separates the styles more reliably than strategy does. Holding for years means paying friction once, and at the lower long-term rate rather than the short-term one.
A philosophy that buys durable, high-return businesses at a fair price and holds them, betting that excellence persists longer than the market assumes.
The bet is on duration rather than cheapness. Its failure mode is overpaying — a superb business bought at an extreme multiple can be dead money for a decade while earnings catch up.
Deliberately realising gains up to the annual long-term exemption, or realising losses to offset gains, before the financial year closes.
The exemption does not carry forward — unused, it disappears. Selling and rebuying resets your cost base higher at no tax cost, spreading one large future gain across several years of exemption.
A philosophy that buys what the market has over-punished, betting that the pessimism is excessive and will revert.
It requires owning things other people find embarrassing, sometimes for years with no signal that the wait is ending. Its failure mode is the value trap — cheap because it deserves to be.
Treating investing knowledge as permanently incomplete rather than as a course to finish.
A course compresses other people’s lessons. Only time supplies your own, and nobody skips that part by reading about it.
A mutual fund investing in bonds and other fixed-income instruments.
Not an FD with better returns. It carries credit risk and duration risk, which behave completely differently.
Investing toward a known future education cost on a known timeline.
One of the few goals with a fixed date. Start early and de-risk about three years before the fees begin.
Foreign Institutional Investor — an overseas fund investing in Indian securities.
Big, fast, and often reacting to the dollar or US rates rather than to anything Indian.
Understanding how money, saving, borrowing and investing actually work.
Children absorb it by watching how money is discussed at home, years before anyone explains anything.
The sequence of clearing costly debt, building a buffer and insuring before investing.
The foundation under the portfolio. Skip it and the first emergency dismantles what you built.
Investing a large sum in a single transaction rather than spreading it across time.
It wins more often than staggering, because markets rise more often than they fall. It also produces the one experience — everything deployed the week before a 20% correction — that makes people abandon equity altogether.
A company registered with the Reserve Bank whose principal business is lending or investing, but which is not a bank — it sits outside the payments system and, apart from a small separately authorised category, may not accept public deposits.
Every rupee it lends was first borrowed from somebody who priced it and can decline to renew. That single fact on the liability side reorganises every ratio on the asset side.
Tax at your slab rate on the difference between the market value of employer shares at vesting or exercise and what you paid, treated as salary income.
The first of the two taxable events, and the one that catches people. You owe cash on a paper gain before you have sold anything — particularly harsh at an unlisted startup where there is nobody to sell to.
An individual investing their own money, as distinct from institutional, proprietary and promoter participants.
Small individually and very large collectively. The genuine edge is a long horizon, no redemption pressure and the freedom to hold cash — never speed or information.
Restricted Stock Unit — a grant of the employer's shares themselves, delivered once vesting conditions are met, with nothing to pay.
Unlike an ESOP it cannot become worthless, only worth less. The real problem is correlation: your salary and a large slice of your savings then depend on the same company.
Investing a fixed amount regularly, buying more units when prices are low.
True, and modest. The real benefit of a SIP is removing twelve decisions a year.
A level of involvement in investing that can be maintained indefinitely alongside the rest of your life.
Stopping is a spectrum rather than a switch — shrink the satellite, lengthen the timeframe, automate the core, take a defined break. Scaling to what you enjoy is a different decision from quitting.
The hours an investing approach genuinely requires to be done properly.
Choosing direct stocks and giving them mutual-fund hours is the most common personal-finance failure.
Income on assets gifted to a spouse or minor child being taxed in the giver’s hands.
The reason investing in a minor’s name gives no tax advantage while they are still a minor.
The tendency to sell winners early and hold losers too long.
The most expensive pattern in retail investing. Ask: would I buy this today if I owned none?
The annual fee a fund charges, expressed as a percentage of assets under management.
Charged on your whole balance every year whether the fund wins or loses. It is the one certainty in investing.
The effort required to take an action, used deliberately to encourage or discourage it.
Remove it from investing regularly; add it to unplanned trades.
The tendency to believe you understand something in more detail than you actually can explain.
Everyone knows how a bicycle works until they are handed a pencil. Investing has the same gap, and it is wider.
A pooled vehicle that collects money from many investors and buys a portfolio of securities on their behalf, priced daily at NAV.
Its expense ratio is charged annually on your whole balance whether the fund wins or loses — the one completely certain variable in investing.
Deploying a large sum in tranches on fixed dates rather than all at once.
Six to twelve months on fixed dates gives up a little expected return and buys a much lower chance of a first experience bad enough to end your investing.