Madhu Soman of Reuters writes well – and is a keen watcher of equity markets and real estate (especially in Wadala and Kerala!). He had written an article for REuters – on 16th October, 2008 –  and it was subsequently carried in ET.Here are the first 2 paras where Shankar Sharma….read on!

“The world of equities seems to have opted for a bargain-basement sale. The BSE Sensex which scaled the dizzy heights of 21,000 points in January 2008 is today testing 10,000 and nobody is sure if the bottom has been found.

Nowhere in the world are we close to a bottom. Put your money in a safe bank at 9 pct and forget about the stock market for the next two years,” Shankar Sharma, Joint Managing Director of First Global, told Reuters.
If that’s the case, one wonders if the response pattern will change to the Reuters Money question – Will the BSE Sensex dip below 10,000?

Well at that stage Madhu decided to quote me too. As usual I said “I do not know”. Being the great journo that he is he said “As my good friend and former NSE member PV Subramanyam says “these so called experts on TV are only looking at a teleprompter and not a crystal ball.” Subbu’s advice: “Stay the course, there’s no point in cutting losses now and neither will you gain anything by panicking.”

Luckily for me, I keep saying largely motherhood statements like ‘start early’, ‘spend less than you earn’, ‘pay yourself before you pay for your kids’ ‘Equity investing is boring, if you are having fun, check your returns in excel”. …..these do not become stale, so ….I am fine I guess!! ‘Market timing is risky’ ….

Thank you Madhu. Thank you Reuters.

  1. Now up – now down: certainly it is safe to state “I don’t know where the market is headed but I’m on course”

  2. no. to create wealth you do not need to predict the short term direction of the markets – this is the lesson. As simple as that. Media thinks it can predict on a day to day basis

  3. Well I will tend to agree with you with the caveat that so long as the gains you make from your right calls are more than the losses you make from your wrong calls, so long as the returns you make over the bank FD justify the risk and volatility you experience, you are on to creating wealth long term. Long term can only be experienced by being around on a daily basis (& it is not about predicting the direction of markets but weighing the risk/opportunity for your money) in the short term. Else, since we all know we are going to die one day, we would have all been standing in a queue outside the nearest muncipal crematorium – irrespective of whether you are a hotshot broker or a financial planner.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes:

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>