Mad_About_Money_final April 2017 | Page 13

Mad About Money SAY THE MAGIC WORDS AND ENCORE! The four magic words for the fourth disruption: Press the Right Buttons. Technology has transformed the way financial markets are organized. FinTech is the elusive golden hen. There are no limits to the growth of FinTech. With the right software, the right approach and portfolio, and the right risk appetite, you can earn as much as you want. Money is evolving with time. Trading went digital in the nineties. Now, currency has gone digital, transformed by the revolutionary blockchain technology. Bitcoin is one such market disruption. It would be smart to use this commonplace knowledge to advance your mon etary interests in the currency market. And this is just the first stroke of the multiple opportunities that lay before you in the leisure time that the fourth industrial revolution brings with it! KEEP DREAMING LIKE LALAJI BECAUSE THIS PARTICULAR LALAJI IS HAVING THE TIME OF HIS LIFE! THE SEDUCTIVE APPEAL OF FINANCIAL MARKETS Researchers at IBM and Google have proclaimed that the entry of quantum computers in commercial applications is not far. The appeal of quantum mechanics laid in its weirdness. Simplistically speaking, a change in one particle could cause a change in another particle across space. This is exactly how financial markets work. Federal Reserve is due to announce a possible hike in interest rates this month. This means a capital flight from India to United States because the dollar is a safer currency for investment purposes. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party wins the UP elections and the stock market jumps in joy (pun intended). Or on a grimmer note, Lehman Brothers goes bankrupt and stock markets across the world collapse (a financial tragedy). Financial markets are where sociological, political, regulatory, and economic agendas intersect. And hence, a popular photograph that circulates around when a tragic incident occurs is of people staring at the building of the Bombay Stock Exchange in Mumbai. So when your regulatory authority decides to decrease the amount of cash a Non-banking financial corporation can dispense for gold, it is time to sell your stocks! With all its complexities, a passion for wealth cannot exist without a passion for financial markets. AS LAZY AS YOU CAN GET, LALAJI There is an old man of forty. He lives with his parents in a rented three- room apartment in a well- connected part of New Delhi. He is unmarried, by choice. He is a freelance software developer who invests in Bitcoins (1 Bitcoin = 82089.92 Indian Rupee), sold his shares in a famous NBFC today, has a general store and a shoe shop where he intends to install the software the popular ‘Amazon-go’ supermarket uses, has bought a three-storey building in the north campus that he rents out to students and has invested in Exchange traded funds of the recently floated public sector insurance companies. 13