Quick Edit: ‘The beast isn’t tamed yet’. The RBI governor said this in his own, long, pedantic style. The beast clearly is inflation. The markets didn’t get what it wanted. Rates wouldn’t go down too fast, too soon. Hardly surprising, isn’t it? The central bank makes decisions based on empirical evidence.…
2008 made most of us risk-averse. So, we thought the best way to steer clear from high risk was to stay off Equity. The investment options were limited to debt, gold, and realty. Most investors went for a mix of the three. The strategy worked very well till gold came…
Quick edit: The newspapers of yore and the newspapers of the present offer readers a very different experience. The typical reader would recall reading the headlines , moving onto the local news or other interesting pages in sports , business or entertainment. Today’s newspaper starts with the full page realty ads, followed…
Quick edit: Watching people shop for gold reminds one of how diabetics think at the sweet counter. They know that the buyer may turn bad but can do little about their urges. Between the lure of the metal and shopaholism, they hardly can differentiate what drives them. The knowledge that…
Free fall Friday it was. And, how? A day when safe havens crumbled like they never really were safe. Infosys, gold and silver as a threesome make for odd company. But, they send out a message which investors can ill afford to ignore. Safe havens are safe only at a…
Quick edit: A new high or a new low are not mere benchmarks. They are milestones around which investors reinvent their expectations. A new high catalyses over exuberance and breeds optimists by the dozens. A new low triggers more converts to the pessimists’ camp. Gold hit a 10 month low this week and…
Quick edit: Short on guts, long on fear. This seems to be the mood of the markets. Delving deeper into the investor mood tells us that the major worries are elections and poor macro fundamentals. When the mood is despondent, the market response can only reflect the mood. This explains the capitulation…
Quick edit: An equity portfolio is like a garden. There always will be times like spring when it will shed most of what it has. That doesn’t stop it from reaching full bloom a short while later. Experiences tell you that the strain of shedding always leads to a search…
Quick edit: Is India really a poor country? If so, how do we explain just one temple having gold and precious stones worth 250000 crores in its cellar? How do we explain Indian imports of gold worth 5 lakh crores plus in three years between 2010 and 2012 when the…
Quick Edit: If there was a virus that is hurting the Indian equity investor, we could probably call it Macroanalitis. Terms like fiscal deficit and current account deficit have become so commonplace that one wonders why people never thought about these numbers earlier. The big picture is so scary that…