Imagine you are a celebrity or notorious it does not matter. Let us say you are Narendra Modi or worse, you are Obama.

Can you really watch television?

Every channel wants to give ‘gyan’ or ‘knowledge’ on how to run the country.

Suppose you are Mr. Narendra Modi..and you switch on the news channel….

Every channel has experts telling you how to improve the banking system, how to stop mis-selling, jokers like Mani Shankar Iyer telling you how to run the country, Ra Ga taking credit for everything going right and blaming Na MO, Prannoy Roy doing a program on ethics and accounting….you get the drift, right?

Cricket channels telling MSD how to bat, how to change his bowlers – imagine Ajit Agarkar saying what MSD should do or not do. This guy could not get 6 balls in an over on the off stump. If he bowled 5 balls on the dot, you could rest assured that he would celebrate by bowling the 6th down the legside or bowl a no ball. He is now telling MSD what he should be doing.

Or Mr. Mallya being told how he owes Rs. 9000 crore to banks. Even to a bank which lent to him after the Civil Aviation ministry cancelled his license to fly. Amazing no?

Now cut from celebrity to being an ordinary investor. I have heard comments like “Hdfc Ltd is a good sell at 1128 it will fall to 1060 when you can cover it” – believe me..you cannot play a share for a 8% fall especially if it is a scrip like Hdfc which can go up just as fast. Suppose I have 500 Hdfc shares for delivery…I can sell it at 1128 and hope to cover it for 1060 – even if it happens over the next 3 days instead of the same day. This is called delivery based trading.

Then you hear “Fundamentally this stock is looking good…but you should ask a Technical Analyst too” – tell me how does this help a retail investor? I know not…

More that I see what is happening in the media, the more I am convinced that we need to do dramatically different things if we are serious about Investor education. Of course the education cannot be so good that people stop buying Endowment plans – about 20 million jobs depend on that…right? or is it 2 million? not sure..