Thursday 25 August, 2011

High-risk Low Return Opportunities

High-risk Low Return Opportunities

All of you must have heard a lot about fly-by-night "blade companies" which promise extremely high returns and disappear after your friends invested their hard-earned money.

Some of you must have a first-hand experience with one or more of such companies from the past.

Typically, such companies offer returns which are too good to be true.

Often, indeed they are too good to be true! Simply because they are false!

To be more precise, when such companies offer "assured" returns significantly in excess of the kind of returns offered by bank deposits, you know that you should run from them at the first available point.

Taking this on a global plane, I'd invite you to take a look at the following yield curve that I got from the net:


If a finance company offers a return of anything over 14-15% per annum, I'll have grave doubts about whether I'll get my principal back!

When the yield of a sovereign nation scales levels of 30% and above per annum (as the above figure shows), essentially it indicates the high probability of soverign default.

When a company defaults, people who had invested their money in it and a few stakeholders like employees, suppliers, etc. suffer to a certain extent.

When a bank defaults, (like Lehman Brothers did in 2008) a lot more people suffer, because of the impact of "linkages". This is what so-called experts call a "systemic risk".

When an entire nation defaults, believe me, all hell is likely to break loose.

And the danger of highly indebted nations like Greece actually defaulting is increasing every day.

If something like that happens, all bets are off as to how the world markets would be impacted.

That's one of the reasons why traditional "safe" assets like Gold & Silver are going up so much these days.

Take care of your portfolio.

Regards,

N
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