Dhiraj Shekar's Blog

Zimbabwean dollar was the official currency of the country since 1980 prior to which the country itself was called Rhodesia and the currency was Rhodesian dollar. The economy of Zimbabwe has been in deep trouble for the last several years and the last 3 years has been terrible. The country has been in serious hyperinflation since the beginning of 2007 and in fact official inflation numbers are not even published anymore by the government. The last recorded inflation was in the order of sextillion % year on year, yes that crazy! In the meantime, the currency has been revalued 3 times and the latest one is worth  10 25  of the first Zimbabwean dollar and eventually has collapsed. In 2009, the printing of the Z$ was stopped. Subsequently, there has been no local currency in Zimbabwe whatsoever as of now but instead 7 other country currencies are in circulation, including the South African Rand, Chinese Yuan and Indian Rupee!

"How to have my foreign currency income converted at a fixed exchange rate vis-a-vis INR?" Exchange rates have been a worry for a lot of us for a variety of reasons. The most common cause of concern with foreign currency income is the fluctuating nature of the currency which at a lower exchange rate would translate into fewer Rupees. This is no brain-jammer, its relatively a simple problem to deal with and that's exactly what this post is all about. This is mostly useful when the Rupee is already quite depreciated, i.e. when you get more of INR for every USD as is the case now. The current Ex Rate is Rs. 46.81 / USD. Now, if you are happy with this exchange rate and are not willing to take a risk with the possible Rupee appreciation, you can even lock your future USD income at this rate. That is, even if the rupee appreciated to Rs. 45/USD when you get your next month salary, you can still have the USD converted at Rs. 46.81! Basically, when Rupee appreciates, it mean...

HFT has been the way to trade for quite a while now in the developed markets. Stock markets have evolved from physically transferring papers between participants in closed rooms called 'Market Place' to now being capable of electronically trading shares in plain nano-seconds. While a few years ago, a sophisticated market participant was one who adopted disciplined investment strategies considering fundamentals and valuations of companies, investing with a time horizon, with patience being the rewarding factor, today its the quants that are considered sofisticated scraping alpha with the use of quantitative strategy models, identifying patterns of trades programmatically, interacting with the market through algorithmic trade execution systems, etc. Stock exchanges in developed countries are being pounded with millions of trades in matter of seconds in the name of HFT. While the biggies in the trading community have systems of robotic compound that have the capacity to push ul...

SEC claims the following about GS.. Goldman Sachs had played a vital role in this case according to SEC. Paulson & Co, a big Hedge fund in the US had approached GS to help it sell a CDO (Collateralized Debt Obligation) consisting of a basket of unworthy assets. The idea was that, GS sells this CDO to investors and Paulson would go short on it. A CDO is basically a pool of debt obligations. This could be used for balance sheet adjustment purposes by companies with unbalanced credit structure or for arbitrage purposes. As investors generally do not prefer to invest in CDOs packaged by Hedge funds, GS approached ACA, whose principle business is to select assets for CDOs, to include their name in the brochures and marketing materials. GS is said to have mislead ACA and ACA believed that the CDO would be packaged by them and Paulson jointly. On the other hand, investors have been told that the CDO was packaged by ACA and weren't informed about Paulson's hands on i...