Sample Wealth Management Statement

Here is a sample wealth management statement/report:

Source: Cheshire Wealth Manager

Top Quant Hedge Funds

AQR Capital

Bluecrest

Bridgewater Associates

Citadel (Chicago, IL)

D. E. Shaw (New York, NY)

Getco

Highbridge

Hudson River Trading

Jane Street Capital (New York and London)

Jump Trading

Knight Capital

Man Group AHL

Millennium

Morgan Stanley PDT (New York, NY)

Renaissance Technologies (East Setauket, NY)

RG Niederhoffer

SAC Capital

Two Sigma Investments (New York, NY)

Winton

Popular Online Brokerage Houses in USA

In the US,  following are some of the most popular ones:

a) E*TRade
b) Charles Schwab
c) TD Ameritrade
d) Scottrade
e) OptionsHouse
f) Sharebuilder
g) Fidelity
h) Merrill Edge
i) TradeKing
j) Just2Trade

You can check the image below for some high-level comparison (Taken from Scottrade website)

Bitcoin Demystified

Bitcoin is a pseudo currency. It was designed by an anonymous person/group of people to bring in efficiency into the financial transaction. Basic idea is to introduce a revolutionary concept of e-money. Bitcoin is a form of virtual currency that has gained some significant traction in the United States. Bitcoins allow anonymous transactions. There are some organizations which accept payments in the form of bitcoins. There are investors who are ready to buy bitcoins from you. The symbol of bitcoin is BTC. The original paper by the creator of bitcoin is available on http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf.

Bitcoins can be mined by using software. There is no clear proof that bitcoin mining is profitable. However, the value of bitcoins has climbed steeply in the past few months. As of today, the bitcoin is trading at about USD 55. This is far more than the prediction given by the most authoritative sources. But not many people seem to know exactly what is going on. But I wouldn't advise anyone to naively buy or try to buy bitcoins from anyone unless you have a proper channel. Of course, there is no harm in trying bitcoin mining. But it will involve significant expenditure in terms of computing power. There are specialized devices available which are known to mine bitcoins in a faster way. Hence, I believe that common personal systems may not be suitable for bitcoin mining.

Latest market capitalization of BTC can be viewed on http://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap

Total bitcoins in circulation can be viewed on http://blockchain.info/charts/total-bitcoins

Some additional recommended sources for reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/06/technology/innovation/bitcoin/index.html
http://fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G001.html
http://www.weusecoins.com/questions.php
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/bitcoin-questions/
http://bitcoincharts.com/bitcoin/
https://mtgox.com/

Dacoit Menace in Modern India

About 30 odd villages in Raya block of Mat tehsil of Mathura district of Uttar Pradesh have been facing repeated raids from a gang of dacoits since past few months. The gang has about 30-40 people who come in tempos / trucks late in the evening or night.

They carry away women, cattle, jewels, money, clothes ... anything they can lay their hands on. They have killed at least 2 villagers who put up a fight.

Initially they started by raiding houses which were isolated and on the outskirts of villages. Now they have become much more bold. They not only raid houses inside the villages, but even tell householders one day in advance that tomorrow your house will be raided.

The villagers have made any number of complaints to the police, but the police simply refuse to do anything. The first time they had arrested two people, but they were let off within hours. Since then they refuse to even lodge a FIR. They say these are being carried out by a minister in the UP govt and therefore they are helpless to act.

To minimize their losses, the villagers are trying the following:
1. Send all young women away from the village to stay with relatives.
2. Hide all assets in different houses, so that the loss is limited.
3. All male members who live in cities have been told to come back to their villages to help protect them against these dacoits.

This was told to me by one of my service providers who too has decided to go back to his village to protect his family and village.

I had seen such stories in movies, but never thought that such a situation could happen in modern India.

Please help spread the word in the hope that someone somewhere can help these poor villagers.

Source:Som Bhatta on Quora