After the entry of SEBI in 1993/4 life has become easy for investors is what many people believe. I am of the old thought. The starting of screen based trading, the continuous media hounding, the ticker news, the zillions of websites have made TRADING easy, and has made Investment very difficult. In fact consuming news without feeling over whelmed is difficult especially for people in the 50+ generation. The younger people may have found ways to ignore the noise, but I am not sure we were trained enough to ignore the noise and just take in the news. It is tough, but if you cannot do it, YOU CANNOT BE AN INVESTOR AT ALL.

Whatever has happened in the financial markets in the past decade or even more is that the time required to EXECUTE a transaction has gone down. However, even in the earlier avataar of the equity markets, execution was NEVER ever done by the investor. It was done by the broker. I would call up my broker and ask him to buy say “X no. of shares”. Yes, I had to give the order before 10am..because it had to be written down and given to the guy who went into the ring at 11am. Today at the click of a button I can do a transaction. So when I am watching a television program or a webcast…I can go and execute a transaction in real time. Great for a trader, and in fact super great for a brokerage house, but not good news for the INVESTOR. The constant supply of nonsensical “change data” is not helping you at all. After the fall of the markets last Friday (and subsequent recovery) every TV interview is to ask “now what to do”. If you are an investor you just had to stay calm and still. Even better, switch off the Idiot box, YOU IDIOT.

If 8 business channels say the same thing again and again and again…I am sure the brain thinks that the event has happened 8 times and forces you to do SOMETHING. How useful that would be is a big question mark, but yes it does demand some action.

As late at the 1990s we were not bombarded by so many news channels. We got prices at the end of the day – trading terminals had not yet reached every nook and corner of the country. The number of people trading in the markets have gone up considerably, and it is human tendency to do something JUST BECAUSE various colors flash before us. I used to sit on the terminal really long ago, and I realized that if I did not have enough client work to do…I would go for a stroll. Sitting there would tempt me to do something because if a share price had gone up…I would suddenly believe that I could predict the next move. Even now I know that I cannot predict, but the red, blue, green…lights made me over-confident. In fact my inaccuracy of predicting NEVER ever bothered my confidence level of saying what the next move of a particular share would be! Moving away was the only sensible thing that I could do!

Consuming financial news has never been easy! Its just got tougher.