You go and talk about Money – including investing of course to a bunch of 100 professionals. You tell them that they have to concentrate on earning money, train hard, earn more, spend sensibly, and save money. Then you tell them that the savings have to be converted to investments. Till they learn about investing smartly, they have to invest in dull, boring index funds that will give them about 2-3% more than a SBI fixed deposit or PPF. You tell them a little about risks that they should take and risks they need not take. You remind them that 80% of their efforts should be towards their profession and they should either invest direct or be patient enough to find a good agent who will help them with their investing.

The professionals ask you about writing a will, real estate, asset allocation…and the lecture is over.

Next comes a fellow professional (fellow of the audience) and tells them that all returns are because of the risk that he took. He tells them that they should spend one hour a day looking at CHARTS and deciding what they should do. He tells them that ‘charts cannot lie’ and once they learn to read charts it is not impossible to earn about 40% a month on a regular basis. Of course the audience gets excited and are very impressed by the ‘tips’ that he gives. One of them is Coromandel International. He says because of good monsoon and God’s gift to mankind NaMo ruling us we should see this share double in the next one year. I am amused but delighted to hear that because it will give my wife a nice chance to reduce the concentration in her portfolio. The problem is I do not believe it.

Then there are some bloggers who keep saying “I did not need it, so you do not need it”. This is like saying “nobody should write anything about divorce BECAUSE I have not had a divorce”. There are people who say “I THINK I need X amount for retirement, so you need X amount for retirement”. This is like one 70 year old telling me “All the Life insurance that I took were useless” or how his younger brother (aged 65) has given up all his medical insurance – he says “I will not have hospitalisation and medical insurance does not pay for my medicines”.

Take retirement corpus needed for a person to retire. If he has an upmarket life style and decides that even in medical care (just day to day at age 88) it can cost (todays prices) about Rs. 1.30L per month. Now extrapolate this over 15 years with inflation at 10%p.a. and your INCOME coming from a fixed non indexed annuity! You need Rs. 25 crores of annuity corpus – and you cannot touch this corpus when you are alive. Not funny at all.

So if you have not advised people, you have not handled other people’s portfolios, not seen at least 300 investors who PAID YOU FOR YOUR consulting services, what you say is not what YOU have implemented for others.

It is like telling a lion, ‘please do not eat me, I am a vegetarian’.