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How many of you remember, back in the days when we looked into the newspapers to get quotes of stocks, then pore over rows and rows of data on the newsprint, debate with friends, family and colleagues and then try and reach a consensus on which script to invest in? One fine day came CNBC, where they started broadcasting real time stock prices on their channel and the faithful went mad with joy! Slowly and steadily, as we moved into the digital age, different brokerage houses evolved over the course of time and started providing different types of real time market information - stock alerts, news flashes, etc. and their…

"Customer is the King” - This age old saying has been well executed by the 21st century unicorn companies like Airbnb, Amazon, Alibaba, Uber, etc. They have excelled at providing personalised services, support, convenience and experience to all their customers and disrupted the customer centric industries in a big manner. Banking is no exception. Let us assume that you are planning on buying a home. Even before you apply for a home loan, your bank acts as a trusted advisor and introduces you to a series of partners like insurance companies, movers, designers, lawyers, etc. - all of this over and above just providing for a loan approval tool. Now isn’t…

India's technology sector has been in the news off late for many reasons- the slowdown in the Global Economy, technology advancements and its resultant impact amongst the industry players and their stakeholders. Traditionally, players in this sector have exploited the cost arbitrage (the cost of providing the services in India as compared to developed markets) and technical talent pool availability in India, as a growth strategy with minimal or no differentiation in the services provided by the players. This growth strategy has worked very well so far. 

We undertook an interesting study on analysing whether Pairs Trading strategy, can be an effective strategy to be deployed in this sector. Our analysis…

The growth of information technology in the 80s and 90s gave rise to the knowledge economy and knowledge workers. Companies made significant investments in systems and infrastructure to support their traditional business operations. This created the IT industry to build, operate and maintain these systems. The internet began the shift of those operations to online and resulted in rapid growth of eCommerce and business process outsourcing. We are now in the midst of the third technology wave led by automation where business operations are increasingly moving into the “hands” of machines, bots and other AI technologies. According to the Institute for New Economic Thinking, “Half of all jobs will be…

Are the Indian markets headed for a bull run. What do the technical charts indicate? Let us understand the details.

Volatility in the Indian markets has seen an uptrend in the last couple of months. India VIX stands at around “16” as on 8th Nov which is 15% higher since July this year. Constant bombardment of positive and negative news from within the country and around the globe has made it very difficult to predict the direction of the market. However one of the indicators on the technical charts has shown a major signal of an upcoming bull run that may take NIFTY past the coveted 13000 mark. NIFTY has shown a…

Investing is an important life skill. As we grow and start earning, it is imperative we understand and practice saving and wealth creation to meet our financial goals and save for retirement. The earlier we start this exercise, the more beneficial it will be for us. There are many different ways in which one can approach this. We share some experiences and suggestions below to help you get moving and hope that you can start investing for long term wealth creation by adding some equity investments to your portfolio.

“Invest in what you know. Any action…

How major regulations impact business decisions of companies and their market performance

Government regulations often have a tell-tale effect on the stock market of any country. While some might impact one or two sectors in particular, some major ones (for example de-monetization, interest rate policies, etc.) can have widespread effect on the nation’s economy. There is often a fine line between over and under regulation. The government, emphatically declaring itself the lifestyle monitor for its citizens has this time come up with decisions to regulate what it considers ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for the majority, especially young and impressionable adolescents. The policy rule has resulted in the traditional tobacco and carbonated drinks…

Of late, we have been bombarded with many news articles on the growth of Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and performance of ETF vs Mutual Funds, albeit with divergent views !!!. One set of propagators claim the superiority of trading or investing in ETFs over actively managed mutual funds and another set has a divergent viewpoint. The scope of this discussion is not to prove or disprove the hypothesis on the performance of the ETFs, but in general, to provide an overview of ETFs, how they are different from actively managed mutual funds and, what should be the asset allocation strategy for ETFs in one’s portfolio.…

Shorting is something we generally don’t do in our day-to-day life. You can imagine it like this. We buy a phone, we buy a car. When we don’t need it we can sell it off. Shorting can be considered as the total opposite of it. You are selling a phone or car or even a stock today and buying it back after a few days. Yes, it's difficult to imagine so let's just try to understand it in detail with an example.

Imagine that a famous new sports-bike is  going to launch in India soon and there is a lot of demand for it. There was a registration window for buying…