INVESTMENT GUIDELINES

1. Track your spending - and plan for your savings from your known sources of income - learn a lot of behavioral finance 

2. Bucket your investments based on your risk profile, dont deal in stocks if you dont know the risk and wait for price to come up to your buy price - you will lose on time 

3. Diversify your portfolio and dont pull all investments into only 1 bucket 

4. Understand behavioral finance and note down how your behavior is on any instrument 

5. Don't run behind "Get rich quick" schemes, most of them are scams

6. Have an end number in mind along with the timeframe. Most of us don't do this. 

7. To arrive at 6, use a simple formula - if today school fees for a kid in engineering is 1.5 L - it can be roughly 6 L in 10 years with most factors considered. And it is a fair estimate. So your goal in 10 yrs should be to reach 6, 12, 18 or 24 L capital - and not 2 crores. Yes, I am not counting inflation here as the inflation takes it from 1.5 L to 6 L 

8. As and when you near your target, always rebalance your portfolio from more riskier stuff to less riskier stuff - most of us dont do this as well. 

9.  Track your investments regularly and dont be afraid to change and adapt to changing needs. Be ok with hiccups and slowdowns in between - part of the process 

10. The stock market is not like a bank where you put money and forget. Please monitor from time to time if dealing with direct equities.