Prajna Capital - An Investment Guide

Five major challenges faced: Potential for outliving one’s assets; Threat of rising living costs; Impact of increasing health-care costs; Uncertainty about future level of social security benefits; and Damage to long-term financial security With so much at stake when planning a retirement income stream, it pays to take a step back and see whether your plan takes into account the major obstacles to retirement income adequacy. When you take this big-picture view, consider the five major challenges most retirees face: the potential for outliving one’s assets; the threat of rising living costs; the impact of increasing health-care costs; uncertainty about the future level of Social Security benefits; and the damage to long-term financial security that can be caused by excessive withdrawals in the early years of retirement. Understanding each of these challenges can lead to more confident preparation. Standard & Poor’s suggests you consider these five risks to your retirement income, in...

Most investors want to play safe in turbulent times, yet expect reasonable returns on investments. Below is the list of five themes to help you come out unscathed DARE to bare your wisdom in the current market situation? You better shelve the idea if you have the faintest clue of the factors behind the negative sentiment. In fact, over the last six months, weak global market cues, skyrocketing commodity prices, particularly crude oil, high inflation, suspense over signing of the nuclear deal and political uncertainty have all cast a pall of gloom over the markets and made even the best laid-out investment plans go awry. And if you are a first time investor, this can’t be a more inappropriate time. All, however, is not lost yet. Out five investment themes which may help you to beat the market blues over the next six months. DEFENSIVE POSITIONING No investor likes a range-bound, highly volatile market, marked by spikes and falls at regular intervals. And if you believe industry analysts,...

Stocks offering healthy dividends can pay off in tough economic times. But be careful of high yields in the financial and utility sectors EVEN if stocks go nowhere this year—a distinct possibility as US recession looms—investors can get returns by hunting for companies that pay healthy dividends. You receive the company’s quarterly payouts even if its stock, and the entire market, heads south. While this is a popular and often successful strategy during bear markets, it also entails some dangers. Watch out for stocks that offer an especially high dividend yield. That could signal that a company might not pay its dividend. For example, since the credit crisis began in July, financial firms have been disappointing investors by slashing dividends. At the other end of the spectrum, profitable companies with airtight balance sheets often offer pitifully low dividend yields. The other traditional dividend play is the safe, boring utility sector. Heavily regulated, utilities offer slow growth...