Quick edit: The valuations of most companies have cracked. In every bear market, the last phase is when the usually invincible ones start to show vulnerability. There are adequate signs of that happening. Investor sentiment tends to hit an all time low around the same time when the best companies…
Quick edit: Hope and fear seem to alternate on the global investor’s minds. Europe is plagued by a crisis for which the solutions may well be long, painful and drawn out. The investor expectation is largely centered around a bail out of some kind. Investors seem to build hope around…
The Indian stock markets are clearly racing towards a bottom. The negative symptoms are quite overwhelming. Index heavy weights keep regularly hitting new lows. Money shifts from cyclicals to defensives. Retail money moves out of stocks into debt instruments. Stock broking houses are practically empty and activity is at a…
Quick edit: Inflation is a wild thing. Stoking it is a nightmare for central bankers. The only tool in their hand is the interest rate. They have little option but to raise it periodically and see how prices behave. They also must keep praying that supply of goods and production…
Quick edit: We find it strange that everyone around us is using the short term Index trends to make long term investment decisions. At current valuations, people seem to be clearly missing the big picture. Clearly, near- term interest rates will hurt earnings. Indian companies have not built a strong…
Quick edit: When Investors choose safety over risk, they buy capital protection products, gold, insurance and other options they believe will achieve capital protection. Investors need to evaluate the premium paid for buying safety. Gold Prices trades near its all time highs and most capital protection products have costly exit…
Quick Edit: Forecasting market sentiment is far worse than forecasting the weather. Weather forecasting has advanced technology at work to help predict it. But, matters of the mind can’t be predicted by advanced technology. When people will overcome fear and make investment decisions is not easy to forecast. The markets…
Quick edit: The stock markets seem to be racing to the bottom. Nobody knows where the bottom is. The race is fueled by global trends, investor fears, the outflow of funds, and data flows. These factors create a snowball effect on indices when they spiral downward. We can’t really predict…
Quick Edit: Confidence seems to be a scarce commodity these days. Markets are fueled constantly by confidence and its ebbing level is clearly hurting sentiment. The return of confidence is also unlikely to happen anytime soon. Events tend to trigger sharp loss of confidence like the US downgrade did last…
Investing is about making a profit. We invest money in something hoping to make money out of it. While we do make money out of many decisions, some decisions could go horribly wrong. For a variety of reasons, we could end up with an outcome that is hardly what we…
Big bazaar has captured the imagination of the hungry consuming class. If you are one of those who wants to buy large quantities of everything @ rock bottom rates , then the place to buy it is the Big Bazaar sale. The merits of buying there are cheaper unit…
The years of easy money may finally be coming to an end. Banks were lending freely and at lower rates for a long while. Now, they will have to tighten their purse strings. Why should they be doing so now ? Inflation has rendered it impossible to keep interest…