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.…
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: The budget day is indeed time for some quixotic stuff. The economists think like the citizen and the citizens think like an economist. That reminds one of the apocryphal tales on the most beautiful actress of his time proposing to George Bernard Shaw. Budgets are actually meant for…
Are budgets really relevant anymore? The picture painted by the budget is never bright. Deficits are here to stay. They always seem to get worse than estimates year after year. Taxes have more or less reached their best possible state. If any, they can only start hurting those who earn a…
Are you still wondering if it is a good time to invest in Indian equities? Or, are you waiting for the best time? Well, the answer to the wait lies in finding ways of ending it. But, ending the wait should be done responsibly. Most investors who end long years…
Companies that take on too much leverage, stretch their market capitalization, and sell a perennially rosy picture to investors actually believe that they can pull off the impossible. These companies pull out all the stops to perpetuate position and propagate their ‘story’ in the stock market. They tirelessly campaign hoping…
The results season has begun very well in January, 2013. Outperformance of expectations is absolutely necessary to bring confidence back. The fact that all three IT majors and ITC beat the street estimates bodes well for sentiment. This essentially means that the markets will be better placed to handle negativity. The sentiment will slowly…
Infosys proved why it has been a bellwether stock for close to two decades. It silenced its aggressive critics with a characteristic outperformance. One knew all along that critics of the company were going over the top and unduly panning it for slippages which were usually low single digit drops…
Quick edit: Presumption is dangerous when we try to predict the markets. When everyone presumes the same thing, the actual outcome often turns out to be the contrary. Most analysts believe the markets will rise to new highs in the first half of 2013. One finds very few contrarians on…
At the beginning of 2012, we were of the view that equities were very attractively priced. The bad news was mostly factored in. The good news wasn’t. This was a classic buy signal and we said so. The markets have performed very decently throughout 2012. Sadly, domestic investors refused to…
The markets always pray for a prophet to guide them. ‘If only we had this seminal mind that takes us through everything!’ is the most basic hope of lay investors. This explains the rationale of having market gurus. Never mind, there is no market prophet. We still have a Buffett…
The government got its act together on FDI in retail, PSU Disinvestment, land bill and Spectrum price corrections within just a fortnight. That it could pull together so much in quick fire mode is a sign of things to come. Reforms are now a dire necessity. Everybody who matters politically…