The Indian stock market participants can be broadly categorized into two categories. Indians who preempt FII’s and Indians who follow FII’s. Historically, every Bull Run has seen the followers lose big money. Those who show investment conviction even preempting FII’s are the most successful investors. This breed seems to be a shrinking group. The proliferation of media and the business of opinion making has made contrarian thinking an object of ridicule. Even contrarians wonder why they should stick their neck out and get culled by the opinionated media scrutiny. The saner voices have gone quietly back to investing aggressively. So, the mob that thrives guessing short term trends has almost complete intellectual capture of public opinion. A newer category of opinion makers have not helped matters either. They are the political journalists now capturing economic media. Between these two groups, investors seem to be missing the whole recovery plot. The painstaking recovery will become even more painful for investors who actually end up completely missing it. So, don’t give it a pass. Instead find ways to by-pass politically opinionated judgements and buy into sound long-term, economic reasoning.
“Once you adopt a value-investment strategy, any other investment behavior starts to seem like gambling.” – Seth Klarman