February 2008 « What Ho!

20Feb/0829

ICICI Bank Online Banking – Fund Transfer Changes

ICICI Bank has made some very big changes to it's Online Fund Transfer service. It seems RBI has discontinued it's ETF service and now only the NETF service is available. This means you can no longer transfer funds to banks and branches that are not yet on the NETF service. For example the SBI branch in Cyber Towers, Madhapur is not on the NEFT service yet.

In addition to the above, ICICI Bank has introduced time restrictions. They will not accept transactions outside these timings:

NEFT Transaction Timing from Monday to Friday: Cut Off time 3:45 PM (IST).
NEFT Transaction Timing on Saturday: Cut Off time 11:45 AM (IST).

Also no transfers allowed on NEFT holidays. I will try to post the holiday list here.
ICICI also lists EFT timings! Not sure what this means. They said that EFT is not supported any more and they list EFT timings!

EFT Transaction Timing from Monday to Friday: Cut Off time 1:00 PM (IST)
EFT Transaction Timing on Saturday: Cut Off Time 11:00 AM (IST)

Note also that there is no Start Time mentioned. Is it 9.00 am? Does anybody know?

One thing I don't understand is why Electronic Fund Transfers are time bound at all. And why holidays? Defeats the whole purpose of Electronic Transfers! RBI are you listening? Do you have a human being sitting at a terminal managing these transfers? Wake up and sniff the 21st century air buddy. You have just taken a step backwards into the last century!

Tagged as: EFT, ICICI, India, NEFT, RBI, Stupid! 29 Comments

15Feb/082

Fidelity Mutual Fund & CAMS – SIP Application Rejection

On Feb 12, 2008, I walked into the CAMS office in MG Road, Secunderabad with a few Mutual Fund SIP applications and cheques dated Feb 15, 2008. Also included were ECS forms for the remaining SIP payments for each fund. It was 12.30 and the girls behind the counter were winding up for the day. The CAMS office closes at 1.00 p.m. on Saturdays.

Anyway, I submitted my application forms and walked away. One of the forms was for a Fidelity Equity Fund.

Today I received a fat envelope from CAMS and I saw Fidelity through the plastic address window. I put it aside for later and went to have dinner, thinking it was the statement for the first SIP installment.

When I opened it after dinner, I was surprised to see a SIP Rejection Letter!

SIP Rejection Letter from CAMS (click picture for full size image)

Reason given:

Post dated Cheques are not accepted (Except for SIP Plan)

And guess what I had applied for? A SIP!

SIP Application Form (Click picture for full size image)

I have to take the damn form back to CAMS tomorrow. And I think I will do something $%#@*&^## to the idiots there. Also in the plan is a visit to the local Fidelity office.

Fidelity Secunderabad

No 1-8-304-307, 3rd Floor,
Kamala Towers, Pattigadda Street No 1,
(above Mody Ford showroom), Begumpet,
Secunderabad 500003.

CAMS Secunderabad

102, First Floor
Jade Arcade
Paradise Circle
Secunderabad - 500 003

Tagged as: CAMS, Fidelity Mutual Fund, Stupid! 2 Comments

15Feb/080

Mo Chitra – My New Online Photo Album

I have finally finished uploading the first batch of photographs to the new photo album web site. The web site is called "Mo Chitra" which means "My Pictures" in Odiya, my mother tongue.

Mo Chitra - Our new photo album web site (click picture for full size image)

Mo Chitra is powered by Coppermine Photo Gallery, the leading open source photo album management software.

Tagged as: Coppermine, Family, Mo Chitra, Open Source, Photo, Photo Gallery No Comments

14Feb/085

ICICI's PruTracker – Analyze Scheme Performance

ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund is one of India's leading AMCs. They manage a lot of money (AUM) and are innovative in their product offerings. They also have a good track record of technology use. Their web site was one of the first to offer direct purchase of Mutual Fund units as well as portfolio tracking.

The PruTracker is a good product though it lacks some fundamental features, particularly on the usability side but that is another post

Of late I have been using their web site a lot and thought I would write about my experience. Late yesterday night I stumbled upon their Analyze Scheme Performance page. This page lets you select a Mutual Fund from ICICI Prudential's stable, give a date range and select a Performance Measure for analysis. Available measures are:

NAV History
Dividend History
Performance Simulator
Comparison vs Benchmark

I decided to take the Performance Simulator for a spin.

ICICI Prudential FMCG Fund (Click picture for full size image)

What you get is analysis for a single lump sum investment on the start date and an analysis of a monthly SIP between the start and end dates.

Performance Simulator
If you had invested Rs. 1,000.00 on 31-03-1999 (dd/mm/yyyy) in the chosen scheme, then the value would have become Rs. 4,663.00 on 13-02-2008 (dd/mm/yyyy). The corresponding dividend amount paid would have been Rs. 0.00 . Your gain/(loss) would have been Rs. 3,663.00.

Systematic Investment Plan (SIP) Simulator
If you had invested Rs. 1,000 in the SIP option of the chosen scheme (on a monthly frequency), starting on Mar-1999 , then your value would have become Rs. 4,11,486.00 by Feb-2008 a return 28.83 % ( CAGR ). Your gain/(loss) would have been Rs. 3,03,486.00 , on a total investment of Rs. 1,08,000.00.

Note that this screen defaults to the launch date of the fund for start date and today's date for the end date.

The information returned is useful to some extent. It tells you how the fund has performed over the time period selected. Note that this is real performance (based on certain assumptions) and not a projection.

I then decided to try out a couple of other ICICI Prudential funds I invest in.

ICICI Prudential Power Fund (Click picture for full size image)

ICICI Prudential Infrastructure Fund (Click picture for full size image)

The Analyze Scheme Performance functionality of the PruTracker is a good way to understand performance and compare similar schemes over the same period of time. For the sake of this article I have used the same three funds as above for performance comparison.

Now, FMCG, Power & Infrastructure are all Equity Diversified funds but have very different objectives, investment styles & portfolio capitalization. As a result you cannot compare their performance against each other.

Caution: Do not use this information to make investment decisions. As noted above these funds are totally different from each other and this is not a valid comparison for investment decision making. This is done here for illustration only.

The first thing is to ensure that the comparison is for the same time period. The Infrastructure fund is the newest (launched Sept 9, 2005) and hence I used that as the start date for all there funds. Left the end date as Feb 13, 2008 (yesterday) for all three funds. See the results below:

ICICI Prudential FMCG Fund - Sept 9, 2005 to Feb 13, 2008 (Click picture for full size image)

ICICI Prudential Power Fund - Sept 9, 2005 to Feb 13, 2008 (Click picture for full size image)

ICICI Infrastructure Fund - Sept 9, 2005 to Feb 13, 2008 (Click picture for full size image)

Results:

	SIP Amount	Total Investment	Value	% Return (CAGR)
ICICI Prudential FMCG Fund	Rs. 1,000/-	Rs. 30,000/-	Rs. 38,629/-	22.17%
ICICI Prudential Power Fund	Rs. 1,000/-	Rs. 30,000/-	Rs. 41,759/-	29.56%
ICICI Prudential Infrastructure Fund	Rs. 1,000/-	Rs. 30,000/-	Rs. 54,126/-	56.14%