I attended the MIC in Mumbai 2017, and those who follow me on Twitter and FB saw my tweets. I also did 2 posts – one about what Uday Kotak said and one for the perma bull Ridham Desai.

Here is a kind of penultimate post on what the other biggies said – Prashant Jain, Naren Sanraran, Anup Maheshwari, Ramdeo Aggarwal, and wondering whether to include Sanjay Bhattacharyya here or give him a separate post. What with the Nobel going to a behavioral finance expert!

Almost all of them believe that India is going through a long bull phase (2009 till date as Ridham said) and investors should respect asset allocation (Naren) and do not try to time the market. SB said it requires to listen to Warren Buffett who said ‘be greedy when others are fearful, and be fearful when others are greedy’. That’s fine SB but am I being greedy or fearful that I may lose out (FOMO)?

CIO Prashant Jain of HDFC Mutual Fund sees equities as still not very over priced (he said he called the top in 2008) and that the returns in equities has been just normal over a 7/8 year period. He was sure that once the earnings catch up and the FII money came in we will become overpriced, but we are nowhere there (read what Ridham said too) . PJ said India is on a secular growth path, and we will see tremendous growth. He said slow, sure growth will happen and for this one needs tremendous patience. He said Equities are a powerful asset class and HAS to find a big place in your portfolio. He said the market can be imperfect ONLY in the short run, in the long run it is a slave of EPS and the PE that the market is willing to give to the company.

Anup Maheshwari said the market tests your patience more than your intelligence.

Naren classified 2002, 2008 and 2013 as bust phase for markets – investments made in this period yielded super normal returns. He called 2003, 2004, 2005, 2014, 2015 and 2016 as best phase. It was surely a good time to invest, but would not return yields like those made in the ‘bust’ period. He sees 2006 and 2017 as boom phase for equity markets and 1992, 1994, 1999 and 2007 as bubble phase. Investments made in the bubble phase could hurt for a longer period, especially if you are a pure investor. He said the worry in this period is ignoring the asset allocation. People tend to overdo the equity investments in this phase and that could be dangerous!

He said Pharma and IT are good contrarian bets. When Naren says this he normally means ‘do a sip over a 30 month period’ . Personally I prefer buying individual shares.

Raamdeo Agrawal, MD and Co-founder of Motilal Oswal Financial Services believes that India is adding next trillion dollar of the gross domestic product (GDP) in a short time. He is of course a perma bull