Stock Market Simulators

New investors who want to dabble in the stock market can take help of these simulators to pratice their stock market strategies and investing acumen.
This helps a lot because you can try to out different things without actually putting money in the market.

Here are few simulators or stock market games.

www.moneybhai.moneycontrol.com/
Moneybhai Investor is a simulated real-time Stock Market Game aimed at giving viewers and investors an easy and interactive platform

www.khelostocks.com/
Khelostocks is a social community for Indian investors which provides tutorials, virtual stock game and investment information and tools.

moneygame.rediff.com
Rediff Moneywiz Share Bazaar Game

US stimulus package passed H1B to get hit!!

US stimulus package is passed and it wont allow replacement of US employees who are laid off by H1B workers. This is applicable to firms using the bailout money.

It is now debated that it can be counterproductive because organizations will not be able to hire the best available resources.

Though this program has been beneficial to both US firms and foreign workers who have come on H1B. This has been misused multiple times. A big Visa racket has been unearthed and investigations are going on. 11 people have been arreseted in relation to this fraud.

Recession rot started seeping india IT

After being the dream job for lot of Indians, IT has began to sour. Other jobs too doesn't seem promising in the current scenarios. With hiring freeze, pay cuts, no variable pay now the axe is on the employees so that organization can sail through the crisis.

Satyam saga has left so many employees scrambling for job security. Sapient is the latest victim. After laying of 160 employees few months back it has laid 500 more employees from Bangalore, Gurgaon and Noida offices. It employees 6000 people.

This was done amid tight security and employees were not allowed to enter the premises.

Also Yahoo ( has asked 45 full time employees to put in their papers, reports Business Standard, quoting a source who says that over 100 employees may be asked to quit.

With US and Europe bracing recession, H1B and HSMP are also not a very attractive options.

Indian IT companies with large number of employees and project bidding at lower rate has kept revenue per employee at $50000 compared to $100000 of the global IT peers.

With salary rising , the edge of cheaper outsourcing is loosing soon.

Employees at these times need to be more innovative in there solution for higher value work. Smart work rather than hard work will be valued. It is imperative to learn new skills to keep oneself updated with latest technologies and job profiles. Basically in these times to remain on the top every increment needs to be supplemented with increase in productivity.

With IT in the forefront of Indian consumption boom, this is all set to slowdown and we can see lot of NPAs in banks.
Stock market should go down after initial euphoria of rail and general budget which is supposed to be friendly in the election year.

Cash will be king and it needs to be deployed at the right time at the right place for best returns.

You might be tempted with the current cheap valuations but I guess we can get the same stocks at quite cheap prices.

People say that it is bear market but stock market is way high from its lows now and many stocks have doubled from their 52 weeks low.

Some layoff trackers :-

http://www.jobeehive.com/company/layoffs

http://www.forbes.com/2008/11/17/layoff-tracker-unemployement-lead-cx_kk_1118tracker.html?partner=contextstory