“We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.”

These words from the famous American writer, poet, and cartoonist Dr. Seuss rings a bell in my mind every time I hear someone complaining about how the stock market is like a casino that has robbed him of his wealth.

“Stock market is a weird place to be in. I’m better betting on race horses,” said my neighbour as I asked the reason for his sadness during our early morning walk.

“Seemingly he has lost some money as Indian markets have crashed this week,” I thought to myself.

What I thought was right, as he said, “You know what? The Sensex was down 700 points on Thursday and another 200 on Friday! Isn’t this madness?”

I am a good neighbour, so I wanted him to pour out his heart before I could have spoken anything in defense of the market.
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The Sensex was down 700 points yesterday. It’s down 250 points as I write this today.

Whenever we get days like this — like when the Sensex is down 500 points or more — my phone begins ringing with inquiries from friends and relatives.

They always ask the same question: “What should I be doing now?”

Even my wife has this question every time she sees the markets fall like this.

“What are you doing now?” she asks me.

You see, this is ‘not’ the right question to ask in such times.
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My eyes were caught by a headline in a business paper yesterday. It said, “Steady rise in shady deals, price rigging”.

At first I thought this was an article on the real estate sector in India. But then as I read it further, things really started to look ‘shady’.

The article talked about how data from the stock market regulator SEBI suggests that the cases of market manipulation and price rigging in stock markets have steadily increased over the past few years.

In fact, such cases now account for almost 50% of the cases taken up for investigation by the SEBI.

What this data simply means is that a growing number of people in the Indian stock markets are following the mantra ‘Greed is Good’ as was said by the character of Gordon Gekko in the Hollywood classic Wall Street.
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First, a quick question. Take the last three digits of your telephone number, and add 400 to it.

So if your telephone number ends in 146, adding 400 to it will give you the answer 546.

Now answer this question – In which year did Alexander invade India?

Think…think!

Even though your telephone number has nothing to do with ancient India’s battles, you will note that your answer to the above question would most likely revolve around the first number i.e., 546 in the above example.

Whatever number you come up with for the sum of the last three digits of your telephone number and 400, your guess for the year of Alexander’s invasion will be close to your sum.
[Read more…] about In Investing, Catch the Right Anchor to Avoid Sinking

Markets are up, again. The BSE-Sensex is up almost 1,100 points over the past three weeks. Even other global markets have staged a comeback.

In short, the bad news seems to be past us, at least for the time being.
[Read more…] about The Greatest Market Timer in This World is…

“The hardest virus to kill is an idea,” said the character of Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie Inception. This idea – of the difficulty of killing an idea – is widely prevalent.

We see this in businesses where once a management gets an idea that sounds wonderful, it is very difficult to ask it to change its plans even if the idea is destined to fail.

Things aren’t any different in stock market investing.

Investors seldom expect to be wrong, and thus hold on to bad ideas – bad stocks – even when it seems clear that their original idea was faulty.

But this is a typical behavioral attribute and you can’t blame anyone who shows this kind of a tendency – of not accepting that his idea is bad, and therefore must be killed.

In this post, we look at the relevance of killing bad ideas in stock market investing, and how you as an investor can do that.
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