rohitc99

i could be mistaken on this as i dont have one. i was told that an S-corp can withhold earnings and pay the owner a salary. that way the 'employee' gets paid less and is taxed at a lower rate. if you want to pull the earnings, then you pay yourself a dividend and get taxed accordingly. thats my understanding which could be wrong If thats not allowed, i hope those who are doing it better be careful

So true. I have friends who do the same work as me, but as an independent via S Corp. They paid themselves less than 60K, got great tax breaks and also some of the Covid Loans. In effect for similar skills and work, they are able to extract far more from the system. I know of doctors and business owners who do the same. Its perfectly legal stuff and they are even proud of it

@Gregmal what would be a good way to play this ? XLE ? other commodity ETF ?

More of a procedural question - if you want to invest 10K for yourself and another 10K for spouse, does that require opening two accounts in treasury direct ?

thank you. can you explain what you mean by 'very high CPI U and the Nov reset occurrence '

can you then invest upto 10K per account, 40K in total each year ?

There is also a level of keeping up with the joneses and status to it. How do you show that you are successful in life ? i have looked at housing as functional but realized that a lot of friends have bought into communities near to mine which are atleast 50% more expensive to show that they are successful. my neigbour moved out from a good 3000 sqft house to 6000 sqft after he became an empty nester. why would you need 5 bedrooms for a couple. he did it because his friends did the same and he could afford it housing also is like a luxury good like a 5000$ hand bag or shoes

Maybe its also that after a certain level of income, you will spend more on discretionary stuff like cars, 5$ lattes and better housing ? ofcourse does not explain why this happened only after 71. ofcourse cars dont have limited supply (unless its a ferrari), whereas premium locations have finite supply

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/13/politics/social-security-cost-of-living-adjustment/index.html Social Security recipients will receive an annual cost of living adjustment of 5.9% next year, the largest increase since 1982, the Social Security Administration announced Wednesday

Overall chemical/petrochem space is in a multi-year bull run in the Indian markets. Yesterday most of the stocks in this space were up 3-10%. Other PVC manufacturers also up, possibly due to the supply shortages from china hopefully the management will sell some to take advantage of these prices

I agree noida toll bridge is not a perfect comparison here and i shared it as an example. It was messy to say the least. Government initially promised 20% ROI on cost of the asset and then eventually almost completely reneged on the contract. It was not like ...20% is too high, lets bring it down to 10%. No...it was like , you guys are cheating us and hurting the broader population. Never approved any toll hikes for 10 years and then finally it was taken to the court and the whole thing scrapped i know this closely as i was invested in it i am from the country (though dont live there now) and have seen a lot of short sighted decisions on a lot of such public infrastructure assets especially when politicians can gain votes by calling the investors as greedy. the typical modus operandi is to renege on toll hikes and keep dragging it on. the worst thing is when these cases, land in the court, it is no different where a judge would pass some kind of a moral argument and ignore the terms of the contract other considerations such as passenger safety, international tourism etc are rational points. however i have seen none of these considered when such decisions are made. no wonder there is not much pvt sector participation in the infrastructure space i am invested in fairfax india, so hoping that does not happen this time around and keeping my fingers crossed.

i would suggest being careful wih BIAL valuations. there is precedent (search for noida toll bridge) of past contracts not being honored and even courts allowing for that. public hand wringing is par for the course. a lot of people want world class infra but for free and there are enough politicians to pander to it

+ 1 there was some shareholder lawsuit which proved it to that effect ...but i dont think most of us got much out of it

I am baised to the airport opportunity too. Lived in bangalore for a long time and worked there too. still have an apartment in the city. Its difficult to see how traffic will not grow over time. also the land around the airport is very big optionality and the way the city is growing will accrue value. Covid has delayed the whole thing by 2 years but not impaired the opportunity. question is how soon we get to see the value

Honestly its a mixed bag and not very different from the past. There have some bold decisions but a lot of questionable decisions too like the demonitization episode. Overall i think the investments made by FIH are not as dependent on the modi or the current govt to do well. There are a lot of tailwinds and long term growth opportunities. The best any govt can do is not screw it up ps: i am from the region

Fairfax has a successful long term track record when it comes to investing in India. And i think they view Fairfax India as their growth vehicle of the future in India (for non-insurance companies). It appears Fairfax/Fairfax India likes what they have learned with BIAL and want to expand in ‘infrastructure’ type assets in India. The problem is these types of assets will likely be very expensive to buy. And Fairfax India simply does not have the $ today. And currently, neither does Fairfax (a spare $500 million or more kicking around). Anchorage should be a good way to monetize BIAL at a premium valuation and sign on the right like-minded partners with deep pockets and a long term view (like OMERS). If they are successful obtaining more infrastructure assets they should be able to find more partners and fund their contributions from further sales of Anchorage. So they use BIAL as a way to flip into a growing collection of infrastructure assets; and collect some nice recurring management fees along the way. But this will likely be a slow process as approvals can take longer than expected. The recent budget has also increased the spending on infrastructure by the government by 25%+. There are plans to monetize existing assets to fund the increased spend. A lot of norms are also being liberalized. Also the number of contracts being awarded to domestic construction companies is rising rapidly. so the plans around anchorage make sense to take advantage of this change and plans around infra

I am buying ETFs with "physical" backing. I would prefer to buy bitcoin and ether directly (what I have done in the past) but reasons not worth discussing here have me not doing so until about next summer. Then I will sell the ETFs and use the proceeds to buy bitcoin, ether. Can you give names of such ETFs ? Is GBTC one of them ? are there any other ?

Thanks for commenting. Very helpful to understand the GVK purchases in 2009 and 2011 and the bigger picture. The growth of the airport the past 10 years has been impressive. Phase 1 (Terminal A1) expansion was completed in 2013 increasing passenger capacity to 25 million. The second runway was just completed in Dec 2019. And the new terminal (phase 1) is scheduled to open March of next year (2021) and when fully completed will add passenger capacity of 25 million. And they already have plans to add a third runway. Bottom line, the development of the airport is in the early innings of another growth phase. Link to article discussing plans for the new terminal: - https://www.trbusiness.com/regional-news/asia-pacific/bial-outlines-commercial-vision-ahead-of-t2-opening/170859 I lived in bangalore from 1995 to 2005 and have travelled through the old airport and now through the new one for the last few years (the difference is stark). There is a lot of pent up demand for air travel and the traffic growth is quite reasonable. A very small fraction of the population is flying for now and this should increase over the years. For a lot of indians, flying is still aspirational. Both domestic and international travel is increasing. Also the new airports like bangalore, and other cities are world class now and provide a good flying experience - far better than some of the cities in US. My guess is that this deal allows Fairfax to fund other assets via this platform. The risk aversion very high in the infra space and so hopefully then can get good risk adjusted returns. There is almost no appetite for such assets among the domestic investors Something similar applies to financial services - my family has accounts with IIFL and the service levels are good and the number of investors/ borrowers is still a fraction of the potential.

One point to keep in mind is to look at the history of infrastructure development in India. From 2003-2008, there was big boom in this (and real estate). a lot of capital flowed into airports, roads, power plants etc. There was a lot of optimism in these sectors. Since 2008, it has been a complete bust. A lot of these projects got stalled due to regulatory reasons, land not being available, coal linkage issues and so on. A lot of companies including GVK have been under financial distress and the whole banking sector has been hit badly. The NPA from all these infra projects have hit close to 10% of GDP and are still being worked through. If you go to a bank and suggest an infra project, they wont even talk to you. there is absolutely no capital flowing into these sectors and the only capital is from the likes of fairfax, Blackstone etc. So it is not surprising that Fairfax got a good deal in 2011. GVK was a distressed seller. If you look at the projections for BAIL, they have taken 3-4% as volume growth in their DCF in the past. I have lived in bangalore in the past ...nothing grows at 3% :) ...the city is growing rapidly and the area around the airport is becoming more valuable by the day even if it doesnt show up on the balance sheet.

----------------------------------------------------------- i have worked in the enterprise software space for last 20 years and was with oracle when it accquired PSFT. These software have a stickiness but there is limit and pricing elements to it. It also depends on the type of application. replacing core operations software such as for banking or supply chain for a manufacturing company is tough. very few companies bother to do that unless there is a merger or accquisition. however outside of the core, in areas such as HR, analytics, expense management etc ..the stickiness is much lower. we have moved from psft, to oracle SaaS to SAP SaaS in a span of 2 years for various reasons. it needed 6 months to make the transition and was not a big deal. also most of these softwares at least in the enterprise space are very similar ..they are different flavors of vanilla with a lot of marketing speak and BS thrown in by the vendor. After having worked in the SaaS space from a user and company IT standpoint i can tell you that the onpremise software is richer in function (as they were developed over 20 years) and a lot of SaaS products are more show and tell for now. they are ofcourse developing rapidly and reaching there. But there isnt a massive difference from the old ERP software ..there are benefits for sure ..but its way oversold

if the current business doesn't work, they can always diversify into weed to achieve their mission :D

Why do you think it would compound at 8% in dollar terms when the investments seem to doing better. IIFL (inspite of the recent NBFC issues), BAIL etc are all growing at 12-15% range when the economy is going through a lot of stress and liquidity issues. 8% in dollar terms is the broad market returns over the long term. If that is what they achieve, then yes the outcome will be bad. However the entire thesis is that team can do better than that in the pvt and public markets.

i am facing the same issue. how did this work till now if it was listed only on TSX

I have access to purchase toronto shares and tried that. It gives the same message : 144A restriction

It trades as FFXDF on the OTCmarkets. is this not a US traded instrument. sorry, i am not clear about it, but i thought its traded in the US and hence needs to registered with the SEC