Category Archives: Market Psychology

Learning to Fly

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Pilots train in simulators.

No point putting many lives at risk by flying a real aircraft without proper training.

A simulator is next to the real thing. Actually, one up, they make these things worse than the real thing.

No such luck in the markets.

However much one simulates the markets, the real lessons learnt come from actual monetary involvement in the markets.

Books, theories, paper-trading, degrees, etc. don’t have it in them. They prepare you for something else, but not for the markets.

The silver-lining here is, that if we don’t want to, there are no real lives at stake here. We can keep it small in the beginning years, you know what I mean?

Small but real losses, leading to big life-time lessons. This would be the ideal result of one’s first few years in the markets.

Yes, it’s actually harmful to deadly for a newbie trader to make hot-shot profits in the beginning without having learnt the proper lessons.

Let’s see you figure out the why for this. No spoon-feeding here, right?

What Money-on-the-Line does for You

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Your system has a bio-chemistry.

This bio-chemistry is intricately coupled to the mind and the nervous system.

When your money is on the line, your mind and your nervous system start reacting.

Money-on-the-line means automatic emotional involvement. Period.

Many of those who talk about investing / trading do not have their own money on the line.

Thus, they are not qualified to talk about investing / trading. Do not listen to them.

Instead, listen to your own bio-chemistry. It will teach you.

That’s what money-on-the-line does for you.

A Level-Headed Approach to the Markets

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There’s lots to choose from in the market-place.

Many seek a profession in the markets. If you belong to this category, first spend as much time as possible trying out as much as you can from the vast choice this multi-faceted international trading fraternity has to offer. Develop a feel for things. Your first goal is to identify a niche-segment for yourself. It will take as long as it takes. Have patience. Are you more comfortable with equity rather than commodities, which are even more volatile? Are you just happy doing arbitrage? Or, do you prefer options? It’s questions like these you are trying to answer at this stage.

Remember, the markets don’t require an MBA or any other recognized degree qualification for one to be successful. Honestly speaking, degrees are a hindrance, since the teaching is done by professors who are mostly theoretically active.  One out of a hundred market-teachers actually plays the market with his or her own money. Thus most or all one learns about the markets in college is not really relevant.

Wanna learn to be successful at the markets? Then play them. With your own money. Day in, day out. Feel the pain of loss. Feel the pleasure of profit. Make all the mistakes you can at this stage while things are still small. Let’s see you taking small losses and letting profits run, the easiest thing in the world to say but the hardest thing in the world to do. Let’s see you starting to get the basics right at least and then building up from there.

Thus, slowly but surely, identify your A-game, i.e. your niche-segment. This is the area you are most comfortable moving in. And that’s why, when developed properly, this area will give you a regular income very soon. Since you are comfortable in the area you move in now, that’s your next goal: A Regular Income.

More on that some other day…

System Addict & Mr. Cool

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Mr. Cool starts his day.

He wants to know what other people are doing. To be more exact, what they are trading. He listens to tips. Actually, “listens” is an understatement. He’s hungry for tips. He shorts strong stocks, and goes long those that have corrected. He wants to be Mr. Johny-on-the spot where the action is.

Mr. Cool gets up late. Of course no preparation for the trading day is on the agenda. In fact, he has no agenda other than the format stated above. The day starts off with a call to the broker. What’s moving? What are the news projections? Any hot tips? What’s this analyst saying?

Mr. Cool doesn’t live long in the markets. His “strategy” of trading long into correcting stocks and shorting strong ones pays off 80% of the time, but when it goes wrong, it goes wrong big, in fact so big, that Mr. Cool doesn’t feel so cool anymore. He holds on to his losses. He’s scared of taking the hit. He hopes that prices will reverse to his entry price and then he wants to exit. This time around, it doesn’t happen, and his cheap options expire worthless, leaving him broke. By now the markets have scared him so much, that he nevers trades again.

Mr. System Addict is everything Mr. Cool is not. He has a system, and he sticks to it. No tips, no news, no rumours, no non-sense. If the system indicates a buy, he goes long. If it indicates a sell, he goes short. If an exit, he exits. No looking here and there. Belief in the system. Trade to trade system development and enhancement. Solid pre-market preparation and after-market analysis. The works.

Mr. System addict has been around in the markets and he’s going to stay. He’s doing well. Initially, he used to be Mr. Cool, but then he went bust. The only difference was, that he had the strength to lift himself up and become Mr. System Addict.

Holy Grail, Anyone?

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What’s the big secret, anyways?

Secret to what?

You know, making big bucks and all…!

Why are you asking me?

You look like you know things, and you talk the talk, so I presumed you walk the walk too.

Well, now don’t be surprised, but there’s no secret.

What?

You wanna make big bucks?

Yes, yes, of course I do.

Ok, then first define your risk profile. Know how much loss you can stomach.

Oh.

Then trade.

That’s it?

When you trade, your money goes on the line. And that’s a game-changer.

Why?

Coz when your money’s on the line, your emotional framework switches on.

So?

That’s when you get to know yourself. That’s when you can define your risk-profile.

And then?

Just manage your trades properly, according to the rules of your trading system.

That’s it?

Yup, just stick to your system. Cut losses when they are small. Let profits run.

I’ve heard that one.

Then have you also heard that it’s very easy to say, and most dificult to follow?

Why’s that?

Because when your money’s on the line, it is most difficult to take any loss.

Right!

And when you show a small profit, you badly want to book it.

True!

Our natural instincts go against what we need to do to succeed as a trader.

I see now.

That’s why most traders are unsuccessful, and they eventually go bust, or quit.

Hmmm, dunno if I want to be a trader.

You could try your hand at investing, though. There, one proceeds in an opposite manner.

Hey, why don’t you tell me about it, like right now?

Maybe some other day. First digest all of this, ok?

And Now for the Most Useless Question

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For the trader, the most useless question regarding the markets is … …

“The Why of the Markets.”

Why is there a spike or a crash?

Frankly, who cares?

Just forget about it. The “Why” of the markets is baggage, it’s a load, and exactly this particular load needs to be abandoned.

When a trade is on, one’s got enough emotional overload to deal with anyways. Let the pundits bother themselves with this “Why”. It’s their bread and butter. Your bread and butter is the trade. Focus on the trade. Focus on entry. Focus on trade management. Focus on exit. Don’t focus on anything else. Blank the whole world out while you trade.

Then, when you reach home, focus on your family.

The Most Bugging Questions

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Where is this market going?

Should one buy xyz?

What kind of volume do you trade?

What are your predictons?

Frankly, wrong questions.

One doesn’t exactly go to watch Formula 1 to then ask how many runs someone needs to make to win, right? Similarly, all the above questions are irrelevant to a trader’s success in the markets.

It doesn’t really matter where the market is going. A successful trade can still be found.

It doesn’t matter what one buys. If one manages the trade well, ultimately and overall, one will make money.

It doesn’t matter what volume you trade, as long as you have a system and stick to it.

And, a successful trader doesn’t predict the market. To succeed in the market, one needs to ask the market where it wants to go, and then one needs to go along with it.

The critically important part about trading is to put one’s money on the line, and to feel the emotional stress in one’s system that goes along with this. One needs to do this again, and again, and again, and that’s how one learns trade management. No books can really teach this. One really needs to go out there and do it.

A Time for Things

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You don’t normally have dinner at breakfast time, do you?

Of course not.

Similarly, you don’t buy into a State Bank of India with a 5 year horizon when 6 years of earnings growth has already been factored into the price.

There’s a time for things.

You do buy into the same State Bank of India with a 2 week horizon when it’s shooting off the table and giving clear-cut up-moves as it makes its way into no-resistance territory.

And that’s about it. You’re in it for the short-term because that’s how the environment has defined itself. It’s a trading environment, not really meant for investors, whether conservative or unconservative. Thus, you have a stop-loss mechanism in place, in case there’s a down-swing, because up-moves can go hand in hand with down-moves. Where there’s a big money to be made, there’s chances of making a big loss too.

Oh, are you asking why you can’t enter into such stocks at this time with a long-term perspective? I see. Do you fly first class? No? Why not? Because it’s expensive, right? Similarly, such stocks are expensive just now. That’s not to say they won’t rise further. What you need to understand is that when you wake up five years from now, such a stock will have peaked and could possibly be heading for its trough. So your net returns over the long-term could even be negative.

Really wanna be a successful investor? Then you need to learn to buy cheap, with a margin of safety. You need to be patient enough to wait for lucrative entry levels.

Not getting your margins of safety anywhere in the markets just now?

Ok, just trade till you get them. Then you can stop trading, and start investing. Fine?

The Thing with Gold

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Equity has a human face behind it. Gold does not.

The human face with its human mind is capable of the best and the worst, the highest and the lowest.

The intelligent investor selects Equity with benevolent and diligent human faces and minds behind it to garner multibagger returns.

Gold is a metal. Period. It doesn’t have a brain. It is not able to find a way around inflation. Its prices fluctuate as per demand and supply. In times of uncertainty, it goes up and up. In times of economic and financial stability, it goes down and down. The net result of Gold’s price fluctuations over the past 100 years has been a 1% annually compounded return, adjusted for inflation.

What you should not expect from Gold is more than a 2- or 3-bagger return over the medium term. If things go really sour for world economy, you might get a 5- or even a 10 bagger return (looking at a kind of a doomsday scenario). If you are hoping for anything more from Gold, dream on.

2-, 3-, 5- and even 10-bagger returns are quite common in Equity over the medium term, and over the long-term, there’s no limit. Wipro’s been a 300,000-bagger over 25 years. There are hundreds of examples of 1000-baggers, and thousands of examples of 20+-baggers in Equity. Meanwhile, over the long-term, Gold goes back to the median.

Why Equity behaves like this is because of the human capital behind Equity. We’ll go into the details of this some other time.

Bottomline remains that, realistically speaking, Gold functions best as a hedge. In case 80% of our portfolio goes for a toss, that 20% which is in Gold for example can save the portfolio with its 5-bagger return.

If we enter Gold with the desire to make a killing, we either have unrealistic expectations, or we need to play Gold futures or Gold Equity. These have their own nuances, about which, again, we’ll talk another day.

Investing is not about building a Consensus

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We are what we eat, as an ancient proverb goes.

Another one says that we reap what we sow.

And from what little I’ve seen, eventually, we fall in line and invest as per the wiring of our mental framework. Till we don’t do this, we are following someone. Eventually there’s a clash of personalities. This is a clash between the one leading us and our own beliefs. We now have to make a choice to either go it alone, or to keep following the leader.

Each day after this clash has taken place, the rift deepens. More of our beliefs are being violated. That’s because the leader is investing according to his or her own beliefs. Investment is a projection of one’s personality. Such an evnironment full of conflict leads us to wrong decisions, which result in losses.

Investment isn’t about building a consensus. It’s really not about x number of people coming together, agreeing upon an opinion, putting money on the line and making a killing. That’s an approach that may be part of a trading strategy, but it is far removed from comfortable and healthy investing.

Investing 1.0.1 is about understanding one’s own personality, because this is going to interfere with every decision and thought process one will make in this line. The identification of any investment target needs to be in line with one’s personality, otherwise the acquired target will continue to disturb one’s thought process and everyday life. Who’s best suited to bring about an alignment between investment targets and personality? You are, not a third party. An outsider can only second guess how your mental framework functions. You know yourself much better than anybody else.

Once a basic alignment between personality and investment strategy has been achieved, things start to fall in place, with investments yielding satisfaction and profits.

One doesn’t need to form a consensus with anyone to identify a successful investment and make money in it.

A Beautiful Concept called Margin of Safety

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The most beautiful, genius things in life are simple.

And therefore, they are difficult to implement.

We like complications. Sophistication. When something appears simple, our first impulse is that of rejection.

We get our families insured, our car insured, house, properties etc. etc. all insured, in fact, we are busy buying protection everywhere. During winter we wear protective clothing. Our children swim with protective gear. Our cars have seat-belts and airbags. The list of how mankind protects itself is endless.

Then why is it that when it comes to putting one’s hard-earned money on the line, all thoughts of protection go out the window, and one becomes malleable enough to jump into the next hot story at even seventy or eighty times earnings?

Why is it that here we are not clinging on to protection? Basic question – are there any protective measures prevalent in the world of investing? The answer is yes, and many. In this article, I’ll name two and address one.

There’s the protective stop-loss (to be differentiated from the trigger-stop). Let’s talk about this one some other day. Right now, let’s focus on the other major avenue for protection, called margin of safety.

Basically, what margin of safety says is “Buy Cheap”. Period. What it’s not saying is that one should buy any odd-ball, cheap stock. It’s referring to quality stocks and telling us to buy them as cheaply as we can. The result will be a buffer price-band, which in case of a major market-crash will still limit our losses and save us from the urge to abandon our investment at rock-bottom prices. So, this concept asks us to have patience and wait for opportunity, and not to be impulsive and plunge blindly.

Margin of safety is applicable while trading also. One can buy into market leaders upon dips. The dip gives one a short-term margin of safety.

The primary advocate of margin of safety is none other than Warren Buffett himself, from an investment point of view.

So, to implement this simple and beautiful concept, one requires the virtues of patience and discipline.

Wishing for you safe and lucrative investing!

Cheers!

Asset Management is as important as ABC, or Multiplication, or Calculus for that matter…

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Imagine having lunch with a legendary investor like Warren Buffett. The first think he’ll talk to you about is the power of compounding. And when you say “Huh, what’s that?”, he’ll ask “Did nobody teach you about money management?”

And that’s the whole conundrum. Nobody teaches us how to manage money in school. Nor is this subject taught in college. We are left high and dry to face the big bad world without having the faintest clue about how to make our assets grow into something substantial.

Now why is this so? Is it that parents, teachers and professors worldwide have decided that no, we are, under no circumstances, going to teach our children how to manage their assets. No, that’s not the case. What is far truer is the fact that most parents, teachers and professors don’t know how to manage their own assets in the first place, so there’s no scope of teaching this art to others.

And do you know why that’s sad? Because youth is a prime time to sow seeds of investment that will grow into mountains later. When one is young, time is on one’s side. Salting away pennies at this stage puts into motion the power of compounding, a prime accelerator of growth. The time factor gives one tremendous leverage to deal with meltdowns, crises, calamities, catastrophes, recessions, depressions and what have you. As one grows up, one’s intelligently invested money has a very high chance of coming away unscathed and compounded into a substantial amount.

Don’t take my word for it. Just look around you. If you’ve been invested in the indices in India since 1980, your assets have grown 180 times in 30 years. That’s so huge that one is lost for words. This is despite all issues Indian and world markets have faced in these 30 years. All political crises, all wars, all scams, all corruption, everything. And, these returns are being generated by a simple index strategy. More advanced mid- and small-cap investment strategies have yielded many times more than these returns over this 30 year period. So just forget about meltdowns and crises, invest for the long-term, invest for your children, do it intelligently, and involve them in your investment process. Teach your children how to invest rather than making them cram tables or rut chemical formulae. Get them to take charge of their financial futures. Make them financially independent.

God has given the human being brains, and the power to think rationally. Let’s use these assets while investing. We’re looking for quality managements. We want their human capital to be working for us while we do other things with our time. We want them to figure a way around inflation, so that our investment doesn’t get eaten into by this monster. We don’t want them to involve our money in any scams. We want them to create value for us, year upon year. We want them to pay out regular dividends. Let’s inscribe this into our heads: we are looking for QUALITY MANAGEMENTS.

We are not looking for debt. The company we are investing into needs to be as debt-free as possible. During bad times, and they will come, mountains of debt can make companies go bust. There are many, many companies available for investment with debt to equity ratios which are lesser than 1.0. These are the companies we want to invest into.

We are also looking for a lucrative entry price. Basically, we want to buy debt-free quality scrips, and we want to buy them cheap. For that, we need to possess the virtue of patience. We just can’t get into such investments at any given time, but must learn to patiently wait for them. Also, we must learn to be liquid when such investments become available. Patience and timely liquidity are virtues that more than 99% of investors do not possess.

Of Kalyuga and the Skewed Nature of Growth

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Once or twice a day, I need to remind myself that this is Kalyuga. Gone are the times when people were honest in general, and the human mind was not corruptible. In Kalyuga, one refers to the price at which a human mind is corruptible. That it is corruptible in the first place is a given.

One of the economic characteristics of Kalyuga is the fact that wherever there is growth, it is skewed in nature, and not uniform. Nations claiming uniform growth are often surprised by a black swan event which nullifies years of financial penance by the founding fathers of such nations. Few examples are the Iceland bankruptcy, the sub-prime crisis, a near default by Greece on its sovereign debt, with possible defaults brewing in Portugal, Spain and Ireland in the near financial future of world economics. Even 9/11 was an event that was triggered due to skewed growth. Of course that is no justification for such an event.

What meets the naked eye in developed nations on the surface is – development. Showers, telephones, infrastructure, emergency services – everything functions. So where are the anomalies that skew the path of uniform growth in such nations? These anomalies are found beneath the surface, in the corruptible minds of those in power. Whether it is the nexus between high-level politicians and bankers, or that between the former and the armed forces, such examples successfully dupe the low-level but honestly functioning majority of the population in developed countries. Ask the pensioner in Greece, who suddenly finds his pension reduced by half due to no fault of his. Or the 9/11 rescue worker, who then contracted complications and died a dog’s death because he wasn’t entitled to healthcare due to no health insurance, which he couldn’t afford. These are example of growth going skewed, that very growth that first seemed uniform in nature.

Emerging nations have never boasted uniform growth. The definition of an emerging market that you won’t find in the text-books speaks of high economic growth at the cost of a segment of the population or a culture. In India for example, 500 million citizens are enjoying growth at the cost of 645 million others, who a UN study has found to be devoid of the very basics in life. Here, corruption from the top has sickered through to the bottom, and the 500 million concerned are able to grow at about 9 % per annum. The crafters of this growth plan believe that the growing millions will pull up the stagnant and deteriorating millions ultimately; i.e. growth will sicker through. Of course that can only happen if it is allowed to by the corruptible minds in-charge.

In Russia, high growth is enjoyed by those who’ve joined hands with the Mafia. Those who take the plunge commit all kinds of crimes from murder to child pornography. Those who choose not to, lead endangered, poor and suffocating lives in their efforts to stay clean.

China has a labour portion of its population and an entrepreneur portion of its population that are growing economically. The former has no time to enjoy the USD 750 – 1000 salary per month because of a 12 hour working day and perhaps 2 or 3 free days a month. Mostly, man and woman both are working, and due to non-overlap in free days, they rarely see each other. Their economic growth will be enjoyed by their children perhaps. The entrepreneur portion is of course splurging. What of the farmers? They haven’t really grown economically. And the vast and spiritual Chinese culture of olden days, i.e. the Mandarin essence of China? Gone into hiding, where it cannot be prosecuted or finished off by the mad-men in-charge. And what of Tibet? Suppressed and destroyed. Some parts of it filled with nuclear waste. And what of freedom of speech and expression? Never existed, and when it started to exist, was finished off from the root in the Tiananmen Square massacre. Heights of skewed growth.

So where does one put one’s money to work? After all, there are problems everywhere. Good question, and one that needs to be sorted out by everyone on a personal level. One thing is certain though. These are times of uncertainty, and in such times, Gold gives superlative returns. So, one needs to get into Gold on dips. There’s no point leaving money in fixed deposits, because inflation will eat it up. Also, one can start identifying debt-free companies with idealistic and economically capable managements, who can boast of uniform and clean growth within their companies (yes, there are encapsulated exceptions to skewed growth on the micro-level). It’s these exceptions one needs to be invested in.

Why Bother with Fine-Tuning?

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He eats his breakfast, but has that something on his mind. Doesn’t chew well, and since the mind is not on the food, he can forget about digesting the food well.

Later at work, something’s still bothering him. What is it?

The evening is spent with the family, but on the inside he’s still trying to pinpoint the root of his worry.

The night is restless. Couple of bad dreams. Nothing soothing about it.

Guess what?

His investment style doesn’t match his personality. The two entities are totally out of whack. His personality pulls him in one direction, but the way he’s invested his money pulls him in the other direction. He’s mentally uneasy because of this, and his investments are not going to do well in the long run, irrespective of market trend, because his opposing personality will make him take wrong decisions as far as the investment style is concerned.

Why didn’t he bother to fine-tune his personality with his investment style, and bring the two in sync?

Nobody told him to, and he was too dumb to realize it himself.

So he’s got 20% of his networth in futures, but he’s conservative on the inside. Hell.

And another 20% in penny stocks.

Make that the next 20 in small-caps.

And the next 20 in mid-caps.

The last 20 being in large-caps.

Pathetic. Obviously he’s not going to be at ease, after having put 80% of his money in relatively risky ventures, which are not in tune with his conservative nature. Till there’s a common meeting grounds between personality and investment style, this or any person who invests without taking basic nature and risk appetite into account is not going to breathe easy.

When I observe him, it gets me thinking.

What are the things that I don’t want from the markets?

Sleepless nights. A nasty visit from the tax authorities. Obsession to the point of not being able to focus on family. Deterioration of eye-sight. Losses. Low long term returns. These are the basics.

Ok, so I make a few rules for myself.

Like, for example, if an investment starts giving sleepless nights, get out of it.

Keep an account of everything. Play with clean, white money. No hanky panky, no money laundering, no nonsense. Thus any visit from the tax authorities will not turn nasty.

To keep the obsession angle out, and to keep vision intact, I can’t be day-trading. Even short-term trading requires too much market involvement. So, I need to formulate a medium to long term strategy.

Losses, well who likes losses. Thus I must be thorough in my research.

And I want high returns. The only conservative investors in History who have achieved high returns have all been focus investors, not diversified investors. Thus, I need to focus on a few areas while investing, and not diversify into many sectors.

See, it’s as simple as that. Identify your basic goals and formulate your basic strategy around these goals. And then breathe easy even when you play hard!

From Crisis to Crisis : The Concept of Pain-Threshold

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Mid-flight, you hear a bang, and start going down. There’s panic everywhere, and the aircraft is starting to lurch one last time. The guy next to you is praying loudly. Before the last thud, you wake up. Bad dream. You wake up, because your pain-threshold is crossed, and your subconscious machinery notices this, thus pulling a trigger.

You are in a live poker game. Losing, of course. An hour gone, down a hundred dollars. Another hour goes by. Down three hundred. It’s starting to pinch you. Your mind is reporting to you that you are nearing your pain threshold, and is trying to make you leave the table. You ignore this report, and are down six hundred in the next few hands. Another pang. One last attempt from the mind. You ignore your pain threshold repeatedly. Now things really start to go wrong. When your opponent puts you all-in for fifteen hundred, you go with the move because you are making a set of nines, promptly ignoring the three heart cards lying on the table. Your opponent shows down the nut heart-flush to bust you completely. So, down US$ 2100, a hefty fine for ignoring your pain-threshold. Once it is crossed, you don’t feel any difference between losing US$ 600 and US$ 2100, until you lose that US$ 2100 and come to your senses. For the next seven nights you don’t sleep too well.

You work in a chemistry lab. Your absent neighbour in the overlooking cubicle is performing an experiment that springs a hydrogen sulphide gas-leak. The lab starts reeking of rotten eggs. You are at a crucial stage in your particular experiment. Can’t leave. Your mind is currently so focused on your experiment that it ignores all the warning bells being sent by your sense of smell. It forgets temporarily what it has learnt in safety class, that hydrogen sulfide lames the power to smell after a few minutes, and that of course the gas is poisonous, and because one can’t smell it after the first few minutes, one can drop unconscious, and then eventually die due to gas overdose. That’s almost exactly what happens, with the good fortune that just when you fall unconscious, your neighbour returns, and rescues you. In this example, because your sense of smell has been lamed, it cannot warn your system that your pain-threshold is soon going to be crossed.

When a market crashes, there’s pain amongst investors. Those with low thresholds bail out immediately. Those with high thresholds take time. Trending markets move fast, so almost always, they manage to cross the pain-thresholds of the majority of investors. These investors don’t feel the difference between being down 20% and being down 50% before they are actually down 50%, but by then half their equity corpus has been lost.

This is the age of crises. There’s one, and then there’s another. And so on and so forth. Having learnt from experience that markets are inefficient with the rider that the over-efficient media makes markets specifically over-efficient during a crisis, one learns that it is extremely lucrative to buy for the long-term in the aftermath of a crisis.

Needless to say, one is buying for the long-term in a market where there are good prospects for future growth. Crisis after crisis is triggered by markets where there are no prospects for future growth. Such markets take down even those markets with bright futures. During the first few crises, the dents in the market with growth prospects are big too. As crisis after crisis keeps coming, this particular market falls too, but lesser each time. Simultaneously, quarter after quarter reveals strengthening growth. Eventually, the nth crisis does not trigger a fall here, because a certain pain-threshold has been crossed amongst the investors of this growth market, who by now cannot ignore the quarter upon quarter net increase in sales and profits for the last numerous quarters as exhibited by this market, crisis or no crisis elsewhere. This particular market decouples, on the basis of its own strength, and its intrinsic and burgeoning growth. In this example, the pain is being caused by unhealthy markets, whereas the market where one is invested into is in good health. Here, crossing the pain-threshold makes the healthy market immune to the disorders that the other unhealthy markets are causing.

That Secret Ingredient called Gut-Feel

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Birds fly. And, they fly in flocks. When a flock turns, it does so in unison. There seems to be a connection between each bird in the flock. It’s as if each can feel the others in its gut. Each bird is in the “Zone”.

Heard one about a famous artist. He was asked by a rich businessman to paint a rooster for a hefty fee. A year passed. Upon no word from the artist, the businessman got fed up and went to collect the painting. Seeing the artist basking in his lawn with not a care in this world, the businessman enquired about the painting. “Oh, you’ve come to collect your rooster, is it?” asked the artist casually. He then lay out his canvas, painted the perfect rooster, and handed the painting to the businessman, who was stunned and demanded an explanation. Which is when the artist took the businessman into his huge study, the walls of which were laden with hundreds of paintings of roosters, some not so perfect, some nearing perfection, and then, some perfect. In one year’s time, the artist had ingrained the rooster to such a degree into his brush-strokes, that he could dish out the perfect rooster at will.

Remember seeing the opening ceremony of the Beijing olympics. The performing masses were one unit. Such unison was drubbed into each cell of their bodies and minds. It came from practice, practice and more practice. Mind over body.

There’s a particular order of the Samurai where one passes the Master’s final test by first being blind-folded. The Master then stands behind the disciple with a sharp dagger, which he will bring down in a swoop upon the neck of the disciple when he (the Master) pleases. The disciple has to sense his movements, whenever they happen, and has to move out of danger in time. If the disciple succeeds in doing this without injury, he or she passes this ultimate test. And, if my information is correct, all those who have been allowed to take this test by the master have passed till date.

These are a few examples of gut feel. Although logically inexplicible, there’s a mechanism common in all the examples. It is the mechanism of how gut-feel functions at levels of perfection. First, there is repeated failure, whereby there is constant practice going on. Then there is practice, and further practice. Ultimately, the process gets ingrained, and comes naturally. By intuition. That’s gut-feel.

Knowledge is mud if it is not utilized. The battle-hardened market player has been through this process. He or she has seen repeated failure. By hanging on, and learning from mistakes, ultimately, market movements start striking a chord. The overall picture emerges as a whole. After even more practice and experience of market ups and downs, the player enters into the “Zone”, where he or she feels market movements in the gut. The player in the Zone has the capacity to turn with the market.

It’s true. It happens. As surely as the above stories. I’ve seen it happening.

So, be in the market. Fail, fail, and fail again. But do so with small amounts. Then pick yourselves up. Keep hanging on, till you get the hang of things and enter the Zone. And, after you’ve entered the Zone, there’s no better time and place to up your stake.

Playing Around with the Axis of Time

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You’re seated in an exam, and the examiner just announces that the time allocated for completion has been shortened by 1 hour. Sweat sweat, your exam just became more difficult to pass. 5 minutes later, the ruthless examiner again announces that time allocated has been shortened by another hour. Now, making passing grade seems impossible to you. Instead of passing, you pass out.

Shorten the time-frame for almost anything in life, and doing that particular activity properly and well becomes more and more difficult. What if time was taken out of the equation for the above examination? Well, chances of making passing grade just got a huge fillip, because over infinite time, everyone would eventually clear the exam!

Now substitute “examination” with “investment”. Hmmmm, what do we have here? Is it easier to make money from an investment, if time were taken out of the equation?

After the great depression, those businesses that actually recovered, took 20 years or more to do so. Many never recovered. In investing, a 20 year time-frame is definitely taking time out of the equation. So here we have an example where the answer to the question asked is a most definite no. But, that was then. I mean, pre computer-age, pre internet, pre everything. What’s the world like now? Information flows at the speed of thought. Business cycles are much, much shorter. The Fed creates bubbles, and after they pop, crises happen. So, now we rephrase the question, pertaining to today’s scenario. Today, is a 20 year investment horizon going to give you better odds of making money?

One thing is clear, if your horizon is long enough, today you are going to see the underlying going through at least a few cycles. A buy low – sell high strategy has the best chances today of rewarding you very much within your lifetime.

But, what is low, and what is high? Is 1226 dollars an ounce too high a price to enter gold? Or, should one wait for Bharati Airtel to fall to Rs. 250 before making a contrarian purchase, or is the current Rs. 300 the bottom for Bharati? Nobody knows the answers to these questions.

With a long enough investment horizon where you’ve taken time out of the equation, you’ve simultaneously removed these questions from the equation too, or have you? Let’s say you go ahead with your contrarian purchase of Bharati at Rs. 300 and the scrip plunges to 150. Business cycle is short, remember? Today, realistically speaking, telecom could take maximum 5 years to hit a high in the cycle, so you could tank up on another load of Bharati at Rs. 150 and wait for the cycle to hit a high before offloading. Needless to say, before making any contrarian purchase, you should be convinced that the company won’t go bust in the current low of the business cycle. That’s one risk that looms while making contrarian purchases, but if you do your research properly, perhaps one in ten of your contrarian picks will be so unlucky, and those are perfectly acceptable odds.

What about the other end of the barrel? Gold is at an all-time high, and nobody knows where it is going from here. The whole world is confused. What if you take the plunge and enter gold at 1226 dollars an ounce? Now, two things can happen. If gold rises further you make money immediately. Let’s say gold peaks at 2000 dollars an ounce, and then the cycle in gold starts going towards the lower side. In this case, one could keep booking profit all the way up, and hopefully one could be out fully before or even at the peak. In the other scenario, gold peaks where it currently is, and starts going down. You start losing money on your investment. Let’s say it bottoms at 800 dollars an ounce in one year’s time. You’ve been sitting it out. What are the chances of you making money on your investment, and that too soon, let’s say within another year? Based on sheer gut feel, I’d say your chances are high. What’s my rationale for saying this?

Over the last 100 years, gold has given returns in spurts, only to fall back to lows again. It’s 100 year return has been pathetic, only just about in the black. It’s the time it begins to spurt that one needs to look out for. That occurs in times of uncertainty, which is now. If one allows gold leeway on the time-axis in uncertain times, one new high could be taken out after the other till stability and certainty return. So, if your entry into gold crashes on your face immediately, just keep sitting it out if uncertainty on the world currency of choice front keeps looming, and eventually, you’ll have recovered your principal and perhaps made a little money. The worst-case scenario for you here could be that the world suddenly discovers a currency of choice other than gold, gold crashes to god knows what level, and remains there for another 20 years. That would be a black swan event which looks unlikely currently, because the world is far away from finding a currency of choice, and till it does, one can keep stretching the time axis of a gold investment.

If your picks are solid, the market will reward you for patience more often than it will not. So couple patience with excellent research, and then sit back and relax!

Here’s Trying to answer a Million Dollar Question

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During the financial meltdown, my portfolio took a huge knock. It was the biggest eye-opener I had ever experienced. I contemplated quitting the markets, but survived the strong impulse. From then on, I only operate in the markets with a hedge. Early 2008, I identified gold as my hedge, and ever since, I have maintained a steady 10% of my portfolio in gold.

I am stating this here because of the one question that is going around in everybody’s minds – what to do with their gold investments???

By default, I have to answer this question for myself. If my answer benefits anyone, even better.

And my answer to the question – What to do with my gold investment? is – nothing.

Yup, I’m not touching it. It’s a hedge, man, protecting the other 90% of the portfolio, which is inversely correlated to gold more than 80% of the time.

What happens if 400 dollars an ounce get knocked off gold’s current price? Well, I’ll be partying in Vegas, because the other 90% in the portfolio will have done well in this scenario.

And what happens if gold goes on to touch 1500 dollars an ounce, or even 2000 dollars an ounce eventually. Again partying in Vegas, this time because of gold, but the other 90% will have taken a bit of a beating, so I might party at home. But the bottomline is, I’ll get to ride gold if it sky-rockets.

Now what would happen were I not using gold as a hedge, but as a sheer investment. To illustrate this, let me give you an example. My relationship manager in Singapore who’s handling my gold investment just called twenty minutes back, excited and eager and rattling on about the current level of the investment and about how we had to book gold right now. Told him the same thing. It’s a hedge for me. Let it ride to 5000 dollars an ounce, I’ll still ride it as a hedge. What becomes clear is that if one has approached gold as a sheer investment and not as a hedge, one is facing the dilemna today of whether or not to book profit.

Frankly, I don’t know the answer to that one.

I’m good either way, with a decline in gold as well as with a rise in gold. So would you be, if you hedged. Hedging is for safety, and it comes at a cost. My investment in gold is the cost of protecting my bulk investments. So, by no means am I getting rid of it, despite the lure of the price level.

Thus ends the lesson in hedging.

On Turning a ULIP into a TULIP

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In sixteen hundred and something, the world went bananas about tulips. What ensued was an enormous boom in the tulip market, with species selling for thousands of gilders, and with futures quoted for shoots which were planted or even about to be planted. Murders were commited, all for tulips. Nobody knew this at the peak of the mania, but a virus had hit the tulip plantation industry, resulting in tulip species emerging in all kinds of exotic colour combinations, which were so intriguing, that it led to the mania. Now this virus was a one time thing, it didn’t happen after that. So, as the exotic species and their shoots died, it became apparent to the market that there would be no more exotic specie supply, and a bust followed. Fortunes got wiped out. Suicides resulted. Nevertheless, a tulip remains what it is, a serene flower, adding harmony to the environment, currently fairly priced.

Now what’s a ULIP, or a Unit-Linked Insurance Policy? As the name suggests, it’s an insurance policy, which is linked to units (of equity / debt). When I entered the world of investing, my office got swamped with ULIP salesmen, and I invariably ended up buying 4 ULIPs from various companies because of the excellent sales pitch, and because I didn’t know any better. The killer and sealing remark in the sales pitch was that what form of investment could not be confiscated by any authority, were one to land in trouble or jail? The answer – an insurance policy. And what better an insurance policy than one that is linked to the markets?

Each ULIP has a lock-in, typically 3 – 4 years. So there I was, locked-in with products I knew nothing much about. Hmmmm ULIP – sounded like tulip. I thought to myself – “What if I can find a way to get maximum benefit from these ULIPs? I’m stuck with them anyways.” And my mission statement became – “I’m gonna turn these ULIPs into tulips.” Later, when I had succeeded in this, I even concocted a new name for them, i.e. TUrbo cum Leveraged Insurance Products or TULIPs.

As I set about doing research on ULIPs, all the negatives came up first. Apart from the fee structure being irritating, each premium had a huge additional deduction to go with it. One ended up investing only 80 – 85% of what one paid as premium. The rest went to the insurance authorities. After all, they would charge for an insurance cover. Then, the salespeople held all my passwords in their hands, as per the power of attorney I had signed while investing. They switched in and out of equity at all the wrong times, and my investments were taking a hammering. Then, while switching, one could only catch the end of the day NAV etc. etc. etc.

Slowly, I invited each salesperson for tea in the office. This was much before the financial meltdown, and the merchant banker / investment sales agent was still king, whereby the investor was starved for new investment products. After boosting up their egos, I pulled each login ID and password out of their clutches, and immediately went online to effect a password change. OK, I was no longer under their control.

I noticed that switching between equity and debt was free of cost. What if I switched 50 times a year, not that I was going to, but what if I did? Free 24 times, Rs. 100 per switch after that. Hmmmm. Any direct equity investment would have resulted in brokerage generation, and in ULIPs, there was no brokerage generation. The fund house put up the money for whatever brokerage was generated by ULIP clients. They were probably their own brokers, so they didn’t end up losing much anyways. So, how much was I saving on brokerage per switch. Typically, 0.75% of the total investment if I looked at a complete buy and sell transaction, i.e. switch in to equity and switch out of equity. So, how much money would I save in brokerage if I switched a corpus of Rs. 1 million 50 times over? Rs. 3,75,000/-. Hmmm, sizable. A trader with a high turnover didn’t need to trade directly, he could do it through ULIPs. And the trader would be in and out of the market with one click, there was no need to sell or buy 20 or more different scrips. Still, one would only get the end of the day NAV. The bottom-line was that the trader would save huge amounts on brokerage with this kind of turbo ULIP switching.

What further made this avenue attractive for the trader was the fact that ULIPs did not require one to pay any short-term capital gains tax because of the lock-in. Wow. This was big. So, If I made a million on a million in less than one year, I got to keep all of it, and would not have to part with 15% as short-term capital gains tax. Such tax-saving leverages the portfolio, because one invests the tax-saving back into the market, and future gains are compounded owing to a larger initial investment corpus. In fact, the brokerage saving component was adding to this leverage too in the same way.

So there I was. I had put my investment philosphy regarding ULIPs together, and had actually turned them into TUrbo cum Leveraged Insurance Products, or TULIPs. After recovering my losses and gaining some, I soon got bored, and when the lock-ins ended, I got rid of the TULIPs.

What remains with me today is that this was my first victory in the world of investing, a feeling of harmony that never fails to energize me, just as the mere thought of a field of colourful tulips would energize / harmonize the mind

From Crisis to Crisis : Who said Investing was for the faint-hearted?

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The central focus while investing is on returns. Over the last 100 years, adjusted for inflation and tax-deductions, fixed deposits have given negative returns. And, over this period of time, the asset class of equity has yielded around 6 % compounded per annum (adjusted for inflation), which is more than 5 times what gold has yielded. There’s human capital behind equity, which strives to give returns despite inflation, and goes around taxes through legal loopholes. Gold is gold, there is no brain behind gold. It cannot evade the forces of inflation and taxation. Thus, equity is a higher yielding asset class. For those who don’t realize the value of a 6% compounded return per annum over the long run after adjusting for inflation, let me give you an example which might boggle your mind. Had the Red Indians who sold Manhattan Island to the Americans in 1626 invested their 60 Gilders (= sale proceeds, with the purchasing power of USD 1000 today) @ 6 % per annum compounded after adjusting for inflation, their principle would have been many times the total value of entire Manhattan today. See? In the world of long-term investing, one needs to be clear about the fact that the power of compounding can move mountains.

At the same time, drawdowns in the asset class equity are also the largest. During the 2008 meltdown, the likes of a Rakesh Jhunjhunwala saw his portfolio shrink by 60%. He took it without blinking, by the way. Why? Because equity is not for the faint-hearted. Steadfast investors know inside out that equity has given these returns despite two world wars, one great depression and many recessions / meltdowns. Today, there’s a crisis, and then there’s another crisis. One’s portfolio gets walloped from crisis to crisis, and needs to survive all crises to get to the good times. A potential USD 184 billion debt default looming in Dubai doesn’t shake the long-term investor. Why not? What if the potential debt default becomes larger, let’s say USD 1 trillion. Still nada. What’s the deal?

When a long-term investor puts money on the line, he’s willing to risk 100% of it. Why? That’s because in such an investor’s portfolio, there’s a whole range of scrips. Some go bust, others don’t do well, some remain at par, and a few outperform. Those scrips that go bust or yield below par have a loss limit of 100% of the principal. And the long-term investor has already termed this loss as acceptable as per the dynamics of his risk-appetite. What’s the outperformance limit on those of his scrips that outperform? None. They can double, triple, multiply even a 100-fold, or a 1000-fold or more over the long-run. 2 examples come to mind, a Wipro multiplying 300,000 times in 25 years and a Cisco Systems multiplying 75,000 times in 15 years. A steadfast long-term investor will strive to pick quality scrips with an edge, and will go into the investment at an opportune moment, such that the chances of these manifold multipliers residing in his portfolio are high. And, if 20% of one’s picks multiply manifold over the long-run, one doesn’t need to bother about even a 100% loss in the other 80% of the scrips. Not that there is going to be that 100% loss in this 80%, because these scrips too have been picked intelligently and at opportune moments.

So, what’s the best opportune moment to pick up a scrip? The aftermath of a crisis, of course. Such a time-period has something for all. Those who like buying at dips can pick up almost anything they like. Those who like buying at all-time highs can pick up the scrips that have been eluding them because these too will dip during a crisis. A crisis is not a crisis for the long-term investor. It is an opportunity.