Mutual Funds Vs. Hedge Funds

Being an investor, sometimes you may want to know the simple difference between Mutual Funds and Hedge Funds. First of all, both the funds are nothing but managed portfolios. Some one (manager) will pick up the securities that might perform well in future and groups them into a single portfolio. Then investors can actually buy portions of the fund in order to bear losses/gains of that fund.

Now, what does the word hedge mean? We hear this word a lot now days. Terms like hedging, hedge funds have been already part of our vocabularies. For example: most of the big IT companies in India do hedging against the depreciating US $ to increase their profit margins. Basically, hedge means insurance against the bad times or defensive management. Now, the basic differences between mutual fund and hedge funds are:
1. Anybody can invest in mutual funds. The hedge funds are available to only accredited investors. For example: having net worth more that few millions etc. Also, they rarely have more that 500 investors each in hedge fund.
2. Hedge funds are managed more aggressively and the managers can do the short sell of stocks. On this track, mutual funds are more secure.
3. Mutual funds typically adhere to regulations like SEC(in US) and SEBI(in India) for example. The hedge funds are not regulated.
4. Mutual Funds change less fees and also as decided by the regulatory body. Where as hedge funds charge more fees like 1-2% of asset value + percentage of profit etc.
5. Traditional mutual funds generally rely on stock markets to go up but for hedge funds this is not the case. It makes no difference if market goes up or down.

Cheers,
Amol

What does it mean to be an Architect?

According to Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, this is what it means to be an Architect.

"It’s about being exposed to enough tools and techniques of the trade that over time you start to develop a toolkit of different patterns that work in different situations. This is true of software architecture and probably other types of architecture as well. Whether you build bridges or design buildings, you’re trying to apply design patterns to a given situation."

You may want to refer the Architecture Journal.

Cheers,
Amol

VS2008 & .NET 3.5: The wait is over

Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 yesterday. With more than 250 new features in VS 2008, it is going to be fun. :):)

Should you want more information on this, you can visit here.

Cheers,
Amol

Google Gears

The new buzz word in the web applications market is “Browser extensions”. You may be already aware of Silverlight technology from Microsoft.Now, there is something from Google as well. Google has introduced an open source browser extension called as Google Gears. Though it is still in preliminary stage, developers can use to build future applications.

For .NET developers, the word ‘Smart Client’ is pretty much known. Windows applications can be downloaded using the URL and then run locally using .NET CLR. Users of the application can sync with latest version of the application available on that URL. Now, if you apply this approach broadly to web based application, you will get smart web applications. Isn’t it? These smart web applications will have their own resources to cater user’s needs when offline. This concept has been extended by Google Gears so much that you can actually have web applications running locally now and contacting server on demand basis or when required only.

In order to make your applications Google Gear enabled, user will have to download and install Google Gears from the Google website. Google Gears (or GG) has used AJAX extensively such that now you can have data layer in the client side code. Isn’t it amazing? Developers have been writing web applications since so many years. Now, the time has come for these developers to revisit and re-architect architectures for such applications. Trust me; these designs can be really complex sometimes. Okay, so what is GG all about? Basically, it contains following things:
1. Local server: It caches all the resources like HTML, images, media etc. locally and serves user requests.
2. SQlite database: A data store used for caching the data locally. Then synchronization of this data with the actual server data is big thing.
3. A Worker Thread Pool: It makes application more responsive. Now, one can do so many things in the background using worker thread pool.

One may ask that what Architects have in store for them? Well, first thing is that while architecting offline applications, they need to think about modality of the applications. Then which features should be supported in offline mode and which features in online mode. They also need to think if they really need modal applications or modeless applications. Next big thing is data synchronization. Should this be automatic in the background or manual? Answers to all these questions actually depend on the application’s requirement.

Should you want more information on GG, you can visit this URL.

Cheers,
Amol

Google Android Platform for Mobile Phones

Those of you who have read my previous blog Google Mobile Operating System??

Here is the good news....

"Google on Monday announced a widely expected open-development platform for mobile devices backed by industry heavyweights like T-Mobile, HTC, Qualcomm, and Motorola that could shake the wireless market to its core by simplifying and reducing the cost of developing mobile applications.

The platform, called Android, has been developed by Google and others as part of the Open Handset Alliance, which has over 30 partners supporting it. The goal of this ambitious initiative is to spur innovation in the mobile space and accelerate improvements in how people use the Web via cell phones. "

You may refer to following link for further questions:
Android FAQ

Cheers,
Amol

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language)

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is a language for electronic communication of business and financial data. Again it is one more family of XML and hence it is open source. Typically, in most of the finance reports we treat report as a block on text. What XBRL does is that it gives unique tag/key to each individual data item. What it means is that data item like net profit may have a unique tag in XBRL. Since it is computer readable, computers can read XBRL document, analyze it, parse it and also exchange it with other applications. It increases the comfort factor or ease with which applications can handle financial or business data now.

This introduces one more product line for product based companies. One can write tools/products to transform business data to XBRL format. ;)

Should you want more information on XBRL or XBRL specification, you can visit following URL:
http://www.xbrl.org/SpecRecommendations/

While you are on that site, please do not forget to visit the sample XBRL to resolve all your doubts.
http://www.xbrl.org/Example1/

Cheers,
Amol