Published on May 18, 2023May 18, 2023 by Nayar

2 Years investing in Mauritian Stock Market.

Today marks exactly 2 years since i first purchased stocks on the Mauritian stock market.

Yeah. I bought 100 shares of MCB. But then the prices dropped after that so I purchased more and more as I gained more confidence.

I regret to not having bought more of the stocks at those cheap prices but anyways. It’s good that I started. I invested in 11 companies since then.

So how is my return today, after exactly 2 years you ask?

Well well well, I made some substantial loss of around Rs 40k with 4 stocks (18k + 19k + 0.5k + 2k). But these are just paper losses as I haven’t really sold them since I bought (unrealised loss). But on the the rest of my stocks, I made some quite some money; again just paper gains as I haven’t sold them for a profit. I did receive like some 60k of dividends throughout these years.

How much did I lose as compared to the US Dollar? On 18th May 2021, USD was Rs 39.45. Today is it 45.50. That’s about 15% loss in purchasing power.

But my portfolio grew about 10% in these 2 years. Therefore my purchasing power compared to USD was around -5%.

If I would have just bought USD in May 2021, It would have been more profitable. But anyways, I think I’m kinda satisfied with my portfolio. It’s quite liquid and gives dividends. My Compound annual growth rate (CAGR) is 4.88% currently which is slightly above what banks would give as interest on fixed deposit. Fixed deposits don’t go down in value though.

Yeah. Sometimes the stock value goes down and you’re like wondering is it transitory or something really bad happened. But as I said, I did lose substantially with some stocks. I also made the mistake of listening to some of my friends instead of just trusting my guts and my analysis. Fortunately my main stocks are covering my losses.

I hope you enjoyed reading my experience. Have a great day or night wherever you are 🙂

Published on December 10, 2022 by Nayar

Speaking at DevCon 2022 Mauritius

I had the opportunity to speak again at the Developers Conference at Caudan Mauritius. It’s a must attend event for any person working in IT.

Upon my arrival I was given a speaker gift.

Reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg a bit. Maybe I’ll destined to be rich as him too. Lol 🤣

My first topic was “My First Baby Steps with Git”. It was aimed towards students held developers who have not yet started using Git. Despite being in peak lunch time, there was quite a good turnout on attendees. There were good interaction with the crowd. Thanks to my friend Avish to have taken photographs during my sessions.

The second talk which I held was more geared towards IoT enthusiasts. I showed a little demo on how we can integrate social media with internet of things. For example, I demoed how to turn on a light bulb using a Facebook message.

Bonus: My friend Vidush invited me to his talk as a guest along with Priyeshan and Alex. We got the opportunity to share our story on how we got into the entrepreneurship journey. And the question time was lit. The audience didn’t hold back their questions. They took full advantage of the panelists present. There’s indeed a huge interest in entrepreneurship in Mauritius. I hope we can become the silicon valley in the Indian Ocean. There’s still a long way to go.

The other sessions I attended were of really high quality. I was really happy with the conference overall. I hope the future events get even bigger and better.

Published on February 1, 2022November 27, 2023 by Nayar

The Cornman and The Hen

There was once this man who whenever he saw a hen, he started running away as fast as he could. His friends asked him what’s the matter with him and hens? He replied: “I am a maize kernel. If the hen sees me, she will eat me”.

His friends spent lots of time and efforts to convince him that he’s not a maize kernel but rather he is a man!!!

Few days went by and the guys sees a hen nearby and his friends watched his reaction. As soon as the guy noticed the hen, he ran away as soon as he could. His friends asked him why did he run away? He replied: “I know that I am not a maize kernel but does the hen know that?”

I laughed at the joke when my cousin told me this like 20 years ago while we were still kids.

I have been rejected multiple times in my life in different areas. I feel down. I feel useless. I want everything to stop. I want to go back to my cocoon. Then I say to myself: No! You’re awesome. You’ve accomplished so much in your life. You matter.

But then the other side of my brain says: Yeah. We know that you are awesome but do the people around you know that too?

Published on January 24, 2022 by Nayar

Meeting with openSUSE Leap’s Release Manager in Mauritius

I got the invitation by the Linux User Group of ~~Mauritius~~ Meta (LUGM) 2 days before the event but I managed to make the time to attend it. The guest was Lubos Kocman.

I’m mostly an Ubuntu person – my laptop has been KDE Neon since quite some years now which is based on Ubuntu – so it would be interesting to see what are the other side of the world are doing. Here’s a few interesting points I learnt:

1. openSUSE is now an Umbrella for several distros such as Tumbleweed, Leap and MicroOs. They are different distro suited at different environments depending on your needs.

The event ended by a sponsored drink by OceanDBA. I chose a non-alcohoic drink ofcourse 😛

OceanDBA is a company which provides expert consultancy for open-source databases within the MySQL eco-system. You may read more on them here: https://www.oceandba.com/

And who doesn’t like goodies? The attendees got a copy of LINUX MAGAZINE which also includes an installation DVD. Unfortunately all the laptops which I bought in the last 10 years, I made sure it doesn’t has a disk reader as they have become almost obsolete nowadays (except for Play Station games which I noticed are still sold on BluRay disks)

I hope we’ll be able to have more physical events in the upcoming days in the tech community. Let’s hope this covid thing ends once and for all.

Published on September 18, 2021 by Nayar

First Time Attending Company Annual Meeting: SBM Holdings Ltd.

I started investing in the stock market since May 2021. I had bought few shares of SBM Holdings Ltd (SBMH.N0000). And I was therefore sent the Annual Report and an invitation to attend the Annual Meeting. BTW, SBM stands for State Bank of Mauritius.

Due to COVID-19 pandemic, the meetings were separated into multiple rooms so I could get to see the board members live.

Basically the meeting starts by the board members saying all is good. Then QA session where board members are asked questions about scandals, mismanagement of funds. The board will answer these:

We are only a holding company so we cannot answer what the operating company are doing
We cannot divulge loans given to certain customers as these are private
We take note, we will relay the information to the children company board members.

So basically what I understood is that the actual banking company is shielded from any scrutiny as I have shares only in the holding company and thus will not get invited in the children annual meeting if they do happen.

Everyone got 2 bags of food: 1 food pack for breakfast and 1 food pack at the end for lunch. Yay!