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Best Kept Secrets: Tata Sons MUMBAI: Tata Sons has over 100 subsidiaries of which over 80 are unlisted. Most of the big unlisted subsidiaries are incurring big losses. The biggest of them, Tata Tele, incurred a loss of over Rs 800 crore in FY08. DTH Venture Tata Sky’s FY08 performance is almost as bad as FY07. Tata Group’s life insurance JV with AIG, too, posted losses of over Rs 200 crore though its revenue increased by over 50%. Its general insurance JV did marginally better, posting a net profit of Rs 12 crore, though revenue growth was quite unimpressive. Retail chain Chroma, too, continued to bleed, increasing its losses by three times over FY07. Notwithstanding these losses, Tata Sons made significant investments in these companies, since most of them are start-ups. Notable among them are Tata Realty & Infra where Tata Sons pumped in over Rs 1,700 crore, and Tata Capital, which received over Rs 570 crore in equity investment from Tata Sons. The rationale? Tata Sons’ ...

Fibonacci Retracement A term used in technical analysis that refers to the likelihood that a financial asset's price will retrace a large portion of an original move and find support or resistance at the key Fibonacci levels before it continues in the original direction. These levels are created by drawing a trendline between two extreme points and then dividing the vertical distance by the key Fibonacci ratios of 23.6%, 38.2%, 50%, 61.8% and 100%. Fibonacci retracement is a very popular tool used by many technical traders to help identify strategic places for transactions to be placed, target prices or stop losses. The notion of retracement is used in many indicators such as Tirone levels, Gartley patterns, Elliott Wave theory and more. How to Calculate Pivot Points There are several different methods for calculating pivot points, the most common of which is the five-point system. This system uses the previous day's high, low and close, along with two support leve...

There are two basic methods that traders use in determining when to enter the market when trading the stock, forex, and futures markets, which are:Fundamental analysis which seeks to determine the value of a financial instrument by analyzing all the things such as the balance sheet of a company when trading stocks, or interest rate expectations when trading currencies to try and estimate whether a particular financial instrument is over or under valued. Technical analysis on the other hand focuses purely on historical price action of a particular instrument to determine whether the instrument is more likely to increase or decrease in value in the future, and therefore how it should be traded. Although there are exceptions to this, as a general rule, longer term investors tend to base their trading decisions on fundamentals and shorter term traders tend to focus more on technicals. From my experience, although active traders tend to focus more on technicals than fundamentals, they still...