The safe way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket
- Frank McKinney Hubbard, American cartoonist, humourist and journalist, 1860-1930


If you really look at it, there is no failsafe way to double your money. Now, when has that ever stopped anyone from going ahead and investing in a variety of schemes, ranging from very legitimate ones like mutual funds to the slightly murkier world of lotteries? Investors have found their way to the stockmarket across the world for generations now and even today, logic has little to do with the way the index is headed in markets. People put their money into gold or real estate: but even here how much of this buying is planned investment?

You cannot control the markets, the price of oil, inflation or world peace. What you can do though is be an intelligent investor. You have worked hard to earn that money – and it’s only fair to yourself to think carefully when it’s time to invest that money to acquire assets for future appreciation. Diversified holdings, balanced portfolio, combination of low-risk steady earners with high-risk accelerated return instruments – the advice is all out there. And yet there are some obvious gaps that led us to do this cover story in an attempt to set you off on the informed path to better investing.

We offer six broad options this issue and how and why one should look at exploring these. Did you know that the insurance penetration in Oman is at two per cent and mutual funds account for less than five per cent of the money invested on MSM? That most investors have almost their entire investible funds parked in one asset class? That gold is nothing more than jewellery and art is more to adorn the home than an investment option? We look at all of this a little differently as you will find out as you read on.

In a country that has traditionally seen a lot of excitement in the stockmarket with the spectacular peaks and troughs of the late nineties, there is one quote of Mark Twain that comes to mind: “October: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.” Think it’s time to diversify?

Mohana Prabhakar
Managing editor