Is this a good time to enter the market?

I do not know.

Which asset class (do you think) will out perform all the others over the next 10 years?

I do not know.

Should I sell some of my Fmcg and buy infra NOW?

I do not know.

Sadly the truth is all these questions are almost impossible to answer especially in a public forum. Simply because if I were a portfolio manager, I could do some mid stream correction. If you are reading my blog, there is no way how I can manage your portfolio on a remote basis (not that I want to, but just saying).

So when I heard one the good looking TV anchors say the following, here is my reaction to the same.

“This is a good time to enter the market”

What bull shit. Complete bull. Nobody, repeat nobody knows whether it is a good time to enter the market or not to enter the market.

So what do we do? We watch TV or ask our broker.

If the TV anchor says wait for 5 months, they lose a viewer for 5 months.

So we ask our broker. He lives on the velocity of our portfolio.

Both love you. They cannot hurt themselves, can they?

So they say..

‘get out of volatile stocks like commodities and get into defensives like fmcg, pharma etc’

or ‘rate sensitives will find it difficult if interest rates go up – and we are at the upper end of the interest rate cycle…so get out of rate sensitives like …’

or

‘the markets are overheated, it would make sense to sell infrastructure stocks and enter day to day consumables like fmcg’

‘Oil is likely to go to about $ 38 to a barrel – if this were to happen, RIL will hit Rs. 700 soon’. Bharti Airtel has hit a big problem in Africa, that makes it a bad buy’

Honestly I do not know how much of this is true, correct, or useful.

….was it not Warren Buffet who said if you ask a barber ‘do i need a hair cut?’ what will he say

“This way…Sir!”

So if you are a retail investor pick a nice well managed fund and do a SIP for a 30 year period. A couple of fund houses – like Hdfc and Icici allow you to AUTOMATICALLY increase the SIP amount on a regular basis. So even if you were to start with a small SIP of Rs. 5000, you can increase the amount of sip by say Rs. 1000 every year…so at the end of 10 years your sip amount is Rs. 15,000…and is growing at a good pace.

Which fund? ha, that please do your homework.

Easy for me to deal with a customer, difficult to deal with an unknown reader. Really tough.

Why do I have to remind you regularly…you know it na?’