Frenzy reaches its peak

The astronomical rise of stock markets all over the world continues with gay abandon, dominated by the “Dollar Carry Trade” as the dollar continuously loses value and given the virtually zero short term rates in the US combined with the extremely low levels of dollar borrowing costs reflected by the Dollar Libor where rates have […]

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Banking – Look behind the reported numbers

The banking sector which has been one of the leaders of the current rally in the stock markets was expected to be a strong performer for the current quarter. Although the reported numbers coming out of banks have been pretty good and strong to look at, most analysts and the media has not bothered to […]

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Recoupling

After behaving in a decoupled manner from the beginning of March to the end of the first half of the current year where emerging markets outperformed and moved quite independently than that of western stock markets and outpeformed them significantly, all of a sudden a recoupling in the markets has taken place due to surprisingly […]

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Results season begins and the markets

As expected the markets sold off subsequent to the Union Budget and that to very aggressively and lost nearly 10% during the course of the last week. In the midst of this the results season has also started with first Infosys coming out with results that beat market consensus. The steady language of the management […]

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UNION BUDGET 2009 – A GLASS HALF FULL

The much awaited union budget is now out and its impact on the markets in the near term in my view should be on the negative. Subsequent to the Railways budget which came out in the last week and was extremely lacklustre in terms of either improving passenger amenities or boosting railway infrastructure by investing […]

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Railway Budget – A lost opportunity

I hope not a precursor of things to come As has been in the past the railways which employs huge amount of manpower and is an infrastructure industry that can provide a huge fillip to economic growth is not likely to add to economic growth in the next year and maybe also the following years […]

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My budget wish list

Although the budget by definition is supposed to be just a statement of the income and expenditure of the government, in India specifically it carries a greater weight age mainly due to the fact that it actually ends up being a policy statement of the government for all segments of the economy and is also […]

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The new distribution regime and the mutual fund industry

Having been in the mutual fund industry for nearly 14 years I have seen it evolve from being an industry that was virtually nothing in the year 1995 when I joined SBI Mutual Fund as a research analyst to a significant and growing part of the long term saving of the Indian individual and corporate […]

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NO CASE FOR A COMMODITY BULL MARKET FOR SOME TIME TO COME

Over the last few months we have seen lot of commodities rally in line with the stock markets and improving sentiments on economic growth prospects. The weakness of the US Dollar has also helped the cause and we have seen commodities like copper and oil led this rally. In fact oil prices have more than […]

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FADs and Fancies in investment products – PLEASE AVOID

I have observed over the years that particular class of funds and products become popular with investors at given points of time. This has been observed in the Fund industry over the last several years where products become fancied due to prevailing sentiments. One such product which is getting fancied at this point of time […]

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