I am a direct equities guy – and most people reading my blog know that. So it is natural for them to expect that I would give tips on my blog. No, I do not.

That you know by now. Also my tips are completely useless because most of my purchases are dated ‘Forever’ so concepts like ‘profit booking’ may be irrelevant for me. This may not suit most of the readers.

So the easiest thing for me to do is to make mother-hood statements, which are completely accurate and totally useless:

– do proper fundamental analysis before you buy

-invest only in blue-chips. After all good companies are not difficult to find.

– invest in a broad range of industries so that the risk is well spread

– equities are good for the long term

ALL THESE ARE correct, but useless statements 🙂

So people think they should themselves do some “equity research” before they buy some share. Correct completely correct. Only thing is doing equity research is not so simple.

Many people think that doing some arm chair research is enough to buy the shares of a company. Wrong. Completely wrong.

Research starts as an arm chair research, but then extends to:

talking to the company, talking to the employees, talking to vendors, dealers, ex-employees, ex-directors, competitors, …sometimes regulators…and then arriving at your own conclusions.

This is not easy nor inexpensive. I mean if you are investing say Rs. 100,000 in Tata Motors how much of effort can you afford to put? On the other hand if you were investing say a Million US $ – or you are in a position to influence an investment of Rs. 5 crores, you will be able to afford this effort.

Once you speak to such a large set of people, and still want to purchase – the set of companies comes to about 20-40 out of the 9k+ listed companies! You then get an analyst to go into valuation – and try to get the timing right.

Have I gone through this process for each of the shares I hold? Well almost yes. Why almost? because my broker does it for me – and I listen only to his Wealth team which HAS an increase in Networth (vis a vis the index) target. There are other parts of his organisation which has revenue targets – there I turn a blind eye (deaf ear?) to!!