Of Bulls and Bears

Bull or Bear ?

I've been investing in Stock Markets since 2007. Right. Brilliant. Middle Clas Indian , investing in the India's Growth Story. Seen two Bulls and one Bear cycle in 3 years.

One of my friends asked me , am I a Bull or Bear ? Neither I replied. I am a donkey.
At least a Donkey can bray , loud and clear , but all I can do is pray. Hope that IT midcap I picked up does well.Now PNB is a large bank a large cap , how the heck can it fail ? Now Whats wrong with DLF ? Are they sitting on land banks or on land scams ?

The stock markets are like the ancient Greek Agoras - A few wise men lording over the great teeming masses of fools. Someone said that a fool and his money are quickly seperated.How true.Investing , getting richer and going broke makes me realize that wisdom is an acquired intelligence-in-hindsight attribute.

You cant get wise without being a fool , however many men find ways to stay on the wisdom-less path and then bleat about not finding that mountain of light. That brings us to the earlier reference to donkeys since I have often walked that thorny path to nothingness littered with stop-losses.

Talking about markets , gets me thinking of these analysts and broking houses hammering away day in and day out , leading the herds from one disaster to another.These analysts remind me of a story that Jomo Kenyatta , founder of Kenya told an american journalist a while ago. Thus spake Kenyatta - When the missionaries came to Kenya , we(Kenyans) had the land and they had the bible. They told us to pray with our eyes closed.When we opened our eyes , we had the Bible and they had the land. Replace bible with buy/sell recommendations and land with cash and you can guess what I am alluding to.

Another great game is played by the chartists. This is an elite league and you have to pay a 10000 bucks per session webcast just to figure out what candlesticks , fibonacci sequences , head and shoulders patterns mean.I figured out that this is an evolved branch of science that targets the pseudo-intellectual investor who thinks that his approach to investing is based on a quantitative data analysis.Lincoln once said , some people can fool all people everytime , and on some occasions you can fool all the people , but you cannot fool all the people all the time. Well , Mr. Lincoln , you could never guess that the last condition is necessarily and sufficiently met in the stock markets.

However all said and done , investing is a fun game. Failure doesnt stop you.You have the power of will and motivation and sundry other ideas that mind-coaches came up with to give a false sense of optimism to the folks down in the dungeons.There are many more like you , life is like a wave , crests and troughs are part of the game. You win some and lose them. Every dog has its day (how about Donkeys ?).Stay invested, go the SIP and VIP route ,yeah , but make sure you have your clothes on finally.

But , dear reader , dont trust everything that I said just now about the Great Indian Capital Markets. I have made and lost my money. I am sadder and wiser. Now I am the higher end of the evolution cycle . My transition can boggle anthropologists and zoologists , going through from bull to bear to donkey to ape and finally back to Cro Magnon. The kind that now keeps his money in a nuclear bomb-resistant time vault.

Now how about that little outperforming small cap ? Hmmmm.....sounds good.What did that fund house just recommend ? Buy , Hold , Accumulate ? Whatever.





P.S - The aforementioned small cap zoomed by 200% between starting and ending this blog.Unfortunately , the author could not get his money out of his bomb-resistant vault in time. He has considered becoming a chartist since then. The kind who reads astrology charts....that is.