The Tortoise Speaks… – Page 9 – A blog which periodically revisits evergreen investment principles!

The art of Bad-vising

On September 30, 2013

“We’ve done a lot of stupid things but we’ve avoided a small subset of stupidity and that subset is important. It’s about avoiding the dumb things” – Warren Buffet

There have been a considerable number of arguments and an equal number of blogs and posts written about the plight of a retail investor. One of the prime subjects have been the many grounds where a typical investor conks out to make returns in the market. “Market makes returns, but the investor doesn’t” has become the slogan of the Aam Investor (on the lines of aam aadmi). And there have been umpteen reasons attached to the same. Some of them being getting carried away by greed and fear, investing after the bull run, redeeming during the bears, chasing fancies, investing without understanding, etc. While it is easy to blame the investor on the lines of an aam aadmi who pay taxes but abstains from voting, there is a compelling need to question the role of your advisor and his ability to avoid deviating from the fundamentals.

Why Nifty and Sensex may not be the right barometers to look at!

By Raj Mehta

On September 10, 2013

In Equity, Investing

By Raj Mehta, [email protected]

Last week, I met one of my friends who asked me an interesting question, “Why is it that Nifty and Sensex were up 25% in the year 2012 but I have lost money in my portfolio?”. Many times I hear people say Nifty is up 13% year to date or Sensex is up 12% but what does it mean to your portfolio?

CNX Nifty or Nifty 50 is an index of 50 stocks whereas S&P BSE Sensex is an index of only 30 stocks. The criteria for the constitution of this index is set in such a way that only companies with a large market capitalisation can enter these indices. Other factors which are more important like business sustainability, profitability, growth, management have not been considered. So this would include a possibility that “Hot sector companies” might find the place in the index whereas a well managed, dividend paying company might not be included. The criteria of selecting the index constituents shifts the bias towards large market capitalisation companies and the index is not well represented. For eg. ITC has a weightage of 10.68% in BSE Sensex currently but you might not have it in your portfolio considering the valuations that it is trading at. If today ITC moves up by 5%, then the index would move up just by its weightage in ITC but your portfolio return could actually be negative.

Can we really use FMCG techniques to market MF products?

By Jayant Pai

On September 3, 2013

In Equity, Investing, Mutual Funds

Jayant Pai , [email protected]

At a recent mutual fund seminar, there was the usual lament about how funds are failing to gain traction among ‘small investors’. While several causes were cited, they mostly boiled down to mutual funds failing to resonate or ‘connect’ with investors.

It was then posited that mutual funds should take a leaf out of FMCG product marketing strategies. The underlying belief behind this was that small investors are no different from small consumers. As long as you attractively package the idea to them and educate them about the utility of the product, they will bite.

How permanent are the “temporary” measures?

By Raj Mehta

On August 8, 2013

In Macroeconomics, Uncategorized

By Raj Mehta, [email protected]

In the past 2 months, RBI has tried to take many steps to stem the flow in the fall of rupee against the dollar. If you have a glance at the exchange rate history over the past month,it doesn’t seem as if those measures have had any effect on the rupee. But if you think the other way round, if RBI had not taken those steps then the rupee could have depreciated even further. The RBI has taken steps towards tightening the liquidity in the system while the government has tried everything to curb the gold imports from increasing the import duty on gold to limitation on borrowing against gold. The measures include RBI cutting the amount of funds it lends to individual banks under the liquidity adjustment facility (LAF) to 0.5% of the deposits of a bank. This compares with 1%, or Rs 75,000 crore, available for the entire financial system.RBI raised lending rates to commercial banks 2 per cent to 10.25 per cent making the loans costlier.The other measure was to suck out liquidity from the system. The RBI asked banks to maintain a higher average CRR (cash reserve ratio) of 99 per cent of the requirement on a daily basis as against the 70 per cent required earlier. Also, the RBI made it mandatory for the FIIs to obtain the consent of holders of participatory notes and derivative instruments. While announcing these measures, RBI has always said in their statement that these measures are “temporary” and they will be rolled back as soon as the currency settles a bit and the economy improves. How long will the “temporary” measures last is the question stock market is asking.

While we are sleeping

By PPFAS Mutual Fund

On July 31, 2013

In Investing

By Ankur Mahajan, [email protected]

“Thoda market ko stable hone do, phir invest karenge” , exclaims a potential investor being chased by every salesperson of a financial intermediary in these dampened markets. In hindsight, the salesperson is offering the sanest advice to invest especially when the markets are battered and bruised. However, the person who was thinking to invest has never run out of reasons for his preference towards real estate and gold over equities. His primary reason of abstaining from equities is waiting for the Indian markets to resuscitate. While equity Investor continue to sleep and invested heavily in gold and real estate, the markets are offering them umpteen hints to resume investing.