Get the maximum interest rate from a bank on short term holdings
You can open Savings Bank Account with some Banks that offer better interest rate. Note there would be restriction on number of withdrawals in quarter. There are better interest rates if you lock in for 90+ days. The other option to explore is to open a Demat / Brokrage account and invest in liquid funds. Note depending on various factors it may or may not suite your requirements.
Just to offer another alternative, consider Certificates of Deposit (CDs) at an FDIC insured bank or credit union for small or short-term investments. If you don't need access to the money, as stated, and are not willing to take much risk, you could put money into a number of CDs instead of investing it in stocks, or just letting it sit in a regular savings/checking account. You are essentially lending money to the bank for a guaranteed length of time (anywhere from 3 to 60 months), and therefore they can give you a better rate of return than a savings account (which is basically lending it to them with the condition that you could ask for it all back at any time). Your rate of return in CDs is lower a typical stock investment, but carries no risk at all. CD rates typically increase with the length of the CD. For example, my credit union currently offers a 2.3% APY on a 5-year CD, but only 0.75% for 12 month CDs, and a mere 0.1% APY on regular savings/checking accounts. Putting your full $10K deposit into one or more CDs would yield $230 a year instead of a mere $10 in their savings account. If you go this route with some or all of your principal, note that withdrawing the money from a CD before the end of the deposit term will mean forfeiting the interest earned. Some banks may let you withdraw just a portion of a CD, but typically not. Work around this by splitting your funds into multiple CDs, and possibly different term lengths as well, to give you more flexibility in accessing the funds. Personally, I have a rolling emergency fund (~6 months living expenses, separate from all investments and day-to-day income/expenses) split evenly among 5 CDs, each with a 5-year deposit term (for the highest rate) with evenly staggered maturity dates. In any given year, I could close one of these CDs to cover an emergency and lose only a few months of interest on just 20% of my emergency fund, instead of several years interest on all of it. If I needed more funds, I could withdraw more of the CDs as needed, in order of youngest deposit age to minimize the interest loss - although that loss would probably be the least of my worries by then, if I'm dipping deeply into these funds I'll be needing them pretty badly.  Initially I created the CDs with a very small amount and differing term lengths (1 year increments from 1-5 years) and then as each matured, I rolled it back into a 5 year CD. Now every year when one matures, I add a little more principal (to account for increased living expenses), and roll everything back in for another 5 years. Minimal thought and effort, no risk, much higher return than savings, fairly liquid (accessible) in an emergency, and great peace of mind. Plus it ensures I don't blow the money on something else, and that I have something to fall back on if all my other investments completely tanked, or I had massive medical bills, or lost my job, etc. Given that you are starting with a relatively small amount, you want a decent interest rate, and you want flexibility, I would consider fixed deposit laddering strategy. Let's say you have ₹15,000 to start with. Split this in to three components: Purchase all of the above at the same time. 30 days later, you will have the first FD mature. If you need this money, you use it. If you don't need it, purchase another 90-day fixed deposit. If you keep going this way, you will have a deposit mature every 30 days and can choose to use it or renew the fixed deposit. This strategy has some disadvantages to consider: As for interest rates, the length of the fixed deposit in positively related to the interest rate. If you want higher interest rates, elect for longer fixed deposit cycles.For instance, when you become more confident about your financial situation, replace the 30, 60, 90 day cycle with a 6, 12, 18 month cycle The cost of maintaining the short term deposit renewals and new purchases. If your bank does not allow such transactions through on line banking, you might spend more time than you like at a bank or on the phone with the bank You want a monthly dividend but this might not be the case with fixed deposits. It depends on your bank but I believe most Indian banks pay interest every three months It depends a lot on your investment period and the quality of the bonds that you want to invest. For example, if you want to invest until the maturity of the bonds, and the bonds are very safe (i.e. they are not expected to default), it does not matter that the interest rate rise. That is because at the maturity of the bond it will converge to its maturity value which will be independent of the change of the interest rates (although on the middle of the life the price of the bond will go down, but the coupon should remain constant -unless is a floating coupon bond-). An option could be to invest in an ETF with short term bonds (e.g. 1 year) with AAA credit rating (high quality, so very low default rate). It won't yield much, but is more than 0% if you hold it until maturity. "I am assuming you mean derivatives such as speeders, sprinters, turbo's or factors when you say ""derivatives"". These derivatives are rather popular in European markets. In such derivatives, a bank borrows the leverage to you, and depending on the leverage factor you may own between 50% to +-3% of the underlying value. The main catch with such derivatives from stocks as opposed to owning the stock itself are: Counterpart risk: The bank could go bankrupt in which case the derivatives will lose all their value even if the underlying stock is sound. Or the bank could decide to phase out the certificate forcing you to sell in an undesirable situation. Spread costs: The bank will sell and buy the certificate at a spread price to ensure it always makes a profit. The spread can be 1, 5, or even 10 pips, which can translate to a the bank taking up to 10% of your profits on the spread.  Price complexity: The bank buys and sells the (long) certificate at a price that is proportional to the price of the underlying value, but it usually does so in a rather complex way. If the share rises by €1, the (long) certificate will also rise, but not by €1, often not even by leverage * €1.  The factors that go into determining the price are  are normally documented in the prospectus of the certificate but that may be hard to find on the internet. Furthermore the bank often makes the calculation complex on purpose to dissimulate commissions or other kickbacks to itself in it's certificate prices.  Double Commissions: You will have to pay your broker the commission costs for buying the certificate. However, the bank that issues the derivative certificate normally makes you pay the commission costs they incur by hiding them in the price of the certificate by reducing your effective leverage. In effect you pay commissions twice, once directly for buying the derivative, and once to the bank to allow it to buy the stock.  So as Havoc P says, there is no free lunch. The bank makes you pay for the convenience of providing you the leverage in several ways. As an alternative, futures can also give you leverage, but they have different downsides such as margin requirements. However, even with all the all the drawbacks of such derivative certificates, I think that they have enough benefits to be useful for short term investments or speculation." If you are planning this as a tax avoidance scheme, well it is not. The gains will be taxable in your hands and not in the Banks hands. Banks simply don't cash out the stock at the same price, there will be quite a bit of both Lawyers and others ... so in the end you will end up paying more. The link indicates that one would pay back the loan via one's own earnings. So if you have a stock worth USD 100, you can pledge this to a Bank and get a max loan of USD 50 [there are regulations that govern the max you can get against 100]. You want to buy something worth USD 50. Option1: Sell half the stock, get USD 50, pay the captial gains tax on USD 50. Option2: Pledge the USD 100 stock to bank, get a loan of USD 50. As you have not sold anything, there is no tax. Over a period pay the USD 50 loan via your own earnings. A high valued customer may be able to get away with a very low rate of intrest and very long repayment period.   The tax implication to your legal hier would be from the time the stock come to his/her hands to the time she sold. So if the price increase to 150 by the time Mark dies, and its sold at 160 later, the gain is only of USD 10. So rather than paying 30% or whatever the applicable tax rate, it would be wise to pay an interest of few percentages. Your calc is spot on, the output is small because it's just 5 days worth of interest, and at today's low rates that's practically 0. Also the rate you would want to use is money market rates as that's typically where companies will park cash to earn interest since its a highly liquid market. "I really does depend on the bank. Here is a fairly typical page on interest calculations. The key phrase is: Interest is calculated on each day's final balance and paid monthly.  So at the end of each day the amount of interest is calculated for that day, based on how much is in the account. At the end of the month the amount of interest for each day is totalled, and added to the account balance. That calculation is extremely similar to duffbeer703's ""compound monthly using the average balance for the month"", provided the account doesn't have tiered interest rates and the balance doesn't go negative. The software that banks use is easily sophisticated enough to handle that kind of calculation. Your bank should be able to give you a statement of exactly how the interest is calculated." "You are correct that it could refer to any of the types of interest rates that you've mentioned. In general, though, phrases such as ""rising interest rates"" and ""falling interest rates"" refer to the Federal Funds Rate or LIBOR. These are the interest rates at which banks in the U.S. and U.K., respectively, are lending money to each other." Perhaps there is no single formula that accounts for all the time intervals, but there is a method to get formulas for each compound interest period. You deposit money monthly but there is interest applied weekly. Let's assume the month has 4 weeks.  So you added x in the end of the first month, when the new month starts, you have x money in your account. After one week, you have x + bx money. After the second week, you have x + b(x + bx) and so on. Always taking the previous ammount of money and multiplying it by the interest (b) you have. This gives you for the end of the second month:  This looks complicated, but it's easy for computers. Call it f(0), that is: It is a function that gives you the ammount of money you would obtain by the end of the second month. Do you see that the future money inputs are given with relation to the previous ones? Then we can do the following, for n>1 (notice the x is the end of the formula, it's the deposit of money in the end of the month, I'm assuming it'll pass through the compound interest only in the first week of the next month):  And then write:  There is something in mathematics called recurrence relation in which we can use these two formulas to produce a simplified one for arbitrary b and n. Doing it by hand would be a bit complicated, but fortunately CASes are able to do it easily. I used Wolfram Mathematica commands: And it gave me the following formula:  All the work you actually have to do is to figure out what will be f(0) and then write the f(n) for n>0 in terms of f(n-1). Notice that I used the command FullSimplify in my code, Mathematica comes with algorithms for simplyfing formulas so if it didn't find something simpler, you probably won't find it by yourself! If the code looks ugly, it's because of Mathematica clipboard formatting, in the software, it looks like this:  Notice that I wrote the entire formula for f(0), but as it's also a recurrence relation, it can be written as:  That is: f(0)=g(4). This should give you much simpler formulas to apply in this method. To short a stock you actually borrow shares and sell them. The shorter gets the money from selling immediately, and pays interest for the share he borrows until he covers the short. The amount of interest varies depending on the stock. It's typically under 1% a year for large cap stocks, but can be 20% or more for small, illiquid, or heavily shorted stocks. In this scam only a few people own the shares that are lent to shorters, so they essentially have a monopoly and can set really high borrow costs. The shorter probably assumes that a pump-and-dump will crash quickly, so wouldn't mind paying a high borrow cost. "How should I allocate short-term assets in a rising-interest rate   environment? Assuming that the last part is correct, there could be bear bond funds that short bonds that could work well as a way to invest. However, bear in that the the ""rising-interest rate environment"" is part of the basis that may or may not be true in the end as I'm not sure I've seen anything to tell me why rates couldn't stay where they are for another couple of years or more. Long-Term Capital Management would be a cautionary tale before about bonds that had assumptions that backfired when something that wasn't supposed to happen, happened. Thus, while you can say there is ""rising-interest rate environment"" what else are you prepared to assume and how certain are you of that happening? An alternate theory here would be that ""junk bonds"" may do well because the economy has to be heating up for rates to rise and thus the bonds that are priced down so much because of default risk may turn out to not go bust and thus could do well. Course this would carry the ""Your mileage may vary"" and without a working time machine I couldn't say which funds will be good and which would suck. As for what I would do if I was dealing with my own money: Money market funds and CDs would likely be my suggestion for the short-term where I want to prevent principal risk. This is likely what I would do if I believed the rising rate environment is here." In the short-term, a savings account with an online bank can net you ~1% interest, while many banks/credit unions with local branches are 0.05%. Most of the online savings accounts allow 6 withdrawals per month (they'll let you do more, but charge a fee), if you pair it with a checking account, you can transfer your expected monthly need in one or two planned transfers to your checking account. Any other options that may result in a higher yield will either tie up your money for a set length of time, or expose you to risk of losing money. I wouldn't recommend gambling on short-term stock gains if you need the money during the off-season. Generally, if you watch for the detail in the fine print, and stay away from non-FDIC insured investments, there is little difference, so yes, pick the highest you can get. The offered interest rate is influenced by what the banks are trying to accomplish, and how their current and desired customer base thinks. Some banks have customer bases with very conservative behavior, which will stick with them because they trust them no matter what, so a low interest rate is good enough. The disadvantage for the bank is that such customers prefer brick-and-mortar contact, which is expensive for the bank. Or maybe the bank has already more cash than they need, and has no good way to invest it. Other banks might need more cash flow to be able to get stronger in the mortgage market, and their way of getting that is to offer higher interest rates, so new customers come and invest new money (which the bank in turn can then mortgage out). They also may offer higher rates for online handling only. Overall, there are many different ways to make money as a bank, and they diversify into different niches with other focuses, and that comes with offering quite different interest rates. "Banks make less profit when ""long"" rates are low compared to ""short"" rates. Banks lend for long term purposes like five year business loans or 30 year mortgages. They get their funds from (mostly) ""short term"" deposits, which can be emptied in days. Banks make money on the difference between 5 and 30 year rates, and short term rates. It is the difference, and not the absolute level of rates, that determines their profitability. A bank that pays 1% on CDs, and lends at 3% will make money. During the 1970s, short rates kept rising,and banks were stuck with 30 year loans at 7% from the early part of the decade, when short rates rose to double digits around 1980, and they lost money." There is no single 'market interest rate'; there are myriad interest rates that vary by risk profile & term. Corporate bonds are (typically) riskier than bank deposits, and therefore pay a higher effective rate when the market for that bond is in equilibrium than a bank account does. If you are willing to accept a higher risk in order gain a higher return, you might choose bonds over bank deposits. If you want an even higher return and can accept even higher risk, you might turn to stocks over bonds. If you want still higher return and can bear the still higher risk, derivatives may be more appealing than stocks.