The week marked remarkable change in domestic investor sentiment. The Indian market story has long ceased to be a secular one.
We are a heterogeneous market and have ample breadth of business performance within our economy. We have churned our indices to remove companies going through difficult times. This counters the wide disparity in business performance and restricts its damage on markets. We have tried instead to focus on winning themes and concentrate our capital flows within a narrow band of companies. The problem is such narrow approaches don’t end well.
When we take a narrow approach to investing, we raise our risks by over paying for investment buys. This reaches a point where the narrow approach becomes detrimental to our investments. Often, this leads to loss of capital. We are at a point where we need to end this narrow approach and identify longer-term trends that will drive our investment buying.
Time to leave the herd and think beyond the immediate.
“Most people are driven by greed, fear, envy and other emotions that render objectivity impossible and open the door for significant mistakes”. – Howard Marks